Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Literary Passports

The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

Shachar M. Pinsker

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Koret Foundation and of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pinsker, Shachar.

Literary passports : the making of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe / Shachar M. Pinsker.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7064-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-7724-7 (electronic)

 1.   Hebrew fiction—Europe—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Jewish fiction—Europe—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PJ5029.P56 2011

892.4’360994—dc22

                                                 2010011548

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

For Amanda

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The European Cities of Modernist Hebrew Fiction

1.  Spatializing the Margins: Hebrew Modernism and the Urban Experience

2.  Odessa and Warsaw: A Tale of Two Centers?

3.  Homel and Lvov: The Significance of the Frontiers

4.  London: A Foggy Day in Whitechapel

5.  Vienna: This Mocking and Innocent City

6.  Berlin: Between the Scheunenviertel and the Romanisches Café

Part II: Sexuality and Gender in Modernist Hebrew Fiction

7.  The Sexual Turn in Modernist Fiction of Fin de Siècle Europe

8.  I Am So Weak and My Desire Is So Strong: The Crisis of (Jewish) Masculinity

9.  In the House and in the Gardens: Erotic Triangulations and Homosocial Desire

10.  Writing, Masculinity, and Sexual Desire

11.  Imagining the Beloved: The New (Jewish) Woman

Part III: Tradition, Modernity, and Religious Experience in Modernist Hebrew Fiction

12.  Old Wine in New Flasks: The Reinvention of Jewish Traditions

13.  In the Shadow of God: The Quest for New Religiosity in European and Hebrew Modernism

14.  Mysterium Tremendum: The Varieties of Religious Experience in Hebrew Modernism

15.  Out of the Depths: Visions and Guiding Spirits

Epilogue

Appendix: The Meaning of Hasidism and Its Echoes in Modern Hebrew Literature (1906)

Yosef Chaim Brenner

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1. A postcard of Gershon Shofman.

Figure 2. Dzika Street, Warsaw, circa 1900.

Figure 3. David Fogel’s Austrian passport, 1929.

Figure 4. City of Odessa, Eruv boundaries.

Figure 5. The sages of Odessa.

Figure 6. Cover of the journal Ha-dor, Warsaw, 1901.

Figure 7. The City of Homel , circa 1910.

Figure 8. Lvov/Lemberg, early 20th century.

Figure 9. Cover of Shalechet, Lvov, 1911.

Figure 10. Soup kitchen for Jews in Whitechapel.

Figure 11. A Jewish synagogue and cafés, Leopoldstadt, Vienna.

Figure 12. Café Herrenhof, Vienna.

Figure 13. In front of the Jewish lending library along the Grenadierstraßin Berlin, 1928.

Figure 14. Cover of Rimon, Berlin, 1922.

Figure 15. Cover of Albatros, Berlin, 1922.

Figure 16. Young woman at the Romanisches Café in Berlin, circa 1924.

Figure 17. Yosef Chaim Brenner and Gershon Shofman, Lvov, 1908.

Figure 18. A postcard of Uri Nissan Gnessin.

Figure 19. Shmuel Yosef Agnon, circa 1912.

Figure 20. A postcard of Hillel Zeitlin.

Acknowledgments

Gershon Shofman, one of the main heroes of this book, once said that writing Hebrew in Europe at the outset of the twentieth century was like an exchange of letters between a few kindred spirits scattered across the face of the earth. Writing a book on modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century while working in places like Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Tel Aviv, I felt very often like Shofman. Instead of letters, we now have e-mails, Skype, and international conferences, but what enables me to do the solitary act of writing is the support and encouragement of many kindred spirits who assisted me with this labor of love. They generously shared with me their knowledge, offered advice, believed in this project, and helped bring it to completion. I wish to express my gratitude to them.

First, thanks to Uri (Robert) Alter, Chana Kronfeld, and Naomi Seidman, my teachers and mentors at Berkeley, where I wrote the dissertation that eventually gave birth to this very different book. One could not hope for better teachers. Each one of them, committed and brilliant in his or her own way, has given me a lifetime’s worth of learning and intellectual integrity. Perhaps even more important, they have created an environment of rigorous scholarship combined with open, warm, and creative thinking, which continues to nurture me. I thank Chana for her rigorous reading of some rough drafts, and for inspiring conversations that led to the title and structure of this book. The special environment at Berkeley was equally created by a cohort of graduate students who are now respected colleagues, all supporters and attentive, critical readers of my work: Sheila Jelen, with whom I have edited a volume on Dvora Baron; Hamutal Tsamir; Yael Haver; Amir Banbaji; Todd Hasak-Lowe; Gil Hochberg; David Shneer; and Matthew Hoffman. I was inspired and learned much from their writing and scholarship.

I am extremely fortunate to teach modern Hebrew literature at the University of Michigan, where I am part of the most wonderful community of scholars, whom I am proud to call my colleagues and dear friends. Anita Norich, Julian Levinson, and Mikhail Krutikov are my heroes. They not only read my manuscript and offered the most helpful suggestions but are a constant source of learning, encouragement, and warm friendship. Todd Endelman, Deborah Dash-Moore, and Gary Beckman offered support as chairs and directors beyond their call of duty. I thank Deborah also for her wise suggestions regarding the structure of this book. I received helpful advice from Carol Bardeinstein, Scott Spector, Sara Blair, Josh Miller, Yaron Eliav, and my new colleague, Maya Barzilai. I learned just as much from my many students in Michigan, in classes in which I was able to test many of the ideas articulated in this book. I am especially indebted to my graduate students: Oren Segal, Sara Feldman, Orian Zakai, Efrat Bloom, and Alexandra Hoffman.

Numerous colleagues have shared with me their knowledge and advice, and were ready to answer any question, big or small. Alan Mintz has supported my project from the outset, offered criticism that forced me to explore new directions, and also offered extremely helpful comments on the manuscript. Dan Miron, the dean of modern Jewish literary studies from whom we all learned so much, was close at hand just at the right time. He shared with me his enormous knowledge, and I greatly benefited from his rigorous, yet extremely open mind. I was greatly assisted in writing this book by countless conversations with Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Avner Holtzman, Michael Gluzman, Glenda Abramson, Barbara Mann, Kenneth Moss, Michael Brenner, Marcus Moseley, Jeremy Dauber, Nurit Govrin, Avidov Lipsker, Pericles Lewis, Allison Schachter, Avram Novershtern, Haim Be’er, Scott Ury, and Benny Merr. Ofer Dynes was extremely generous with research assistance and with hours of discussing the ins and outs of modern Jewish literature. David Ehrlich was always ready to lend a hand and ear, and to be a good friend. I was fortunate to be a fellow in the inaugural year of the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies during the fall of 2007. The first part of this book was shaped and influenced by our many fruitful discussions, and I thank all the fellows, especially Barbara Mann, Murray Baumgarten, Sara Blair, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, and Yael Shenker.

This book would not have seen the light of day without the unfailing support of a number of people at Stanford University Press. I am especially grateful to Steven Zipperstein, the co-editor of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture, who is a formidable scholar and a real mentsh among men. Steve has been a strong supporter of my book, and has guided the project all the way toward publication with great wisdom and integrity. I would like to thank Norris Pope and Judith Hibbard at Stanford for the highly professional way in which they handled my book project at every stage. I would like to acknowledge Haim Watzman and David Lobenstine, professional writers, editors, and translators, whose hidden handprints can be detected in this book. They helped me, I hope, to create a readable, accessible piece of scholarship. I thank the staff of the Gnazim Institute in Tel Aviv, especially Dvora Stavi; the National Library in Jerusalem; and the library of the Oxford Centre for Jewish Studies for their help in locating materials and making them available to me.

This book could not have been written and published without the financial support of a number of institutions, whose generosity I am happy to acknowledge. The completion of my dissertation was supported by a fellowship from the Foundation for Jewish Culture. A Kreitman Post-Doctoral Fellowship took me to Ben-Gurion University, where I was able to embark on new research in a stimulating scholarly environment. I was able to take a research trip to Europe with financial support from the LSA College at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies for supporting my research trip to Oxford. I am delighted to acknowledge the generosity of the Koret Foundation, which awarded a Jewish Studies Publication Program grant to the manuscript.

I must acknowledge my parents and sisters in Israel who followed my academic adventures all over the world with love and encouragement from near and very far. My two precious boys, Yotam and Niv, were literally born and raised with this book around them. Their love and happiness gave me the most delightful sense that there is real life beyond the books. Finally, on the most personal and most important level, I wish to thank Amanda, my beloved wife and partner in life, for much more than I can hope to express with words. Her love makes everything I do possible. This book, then, belongs to her as much it does to me, and I dedicate it to her with love and appreciation.

SHACHAR M. PINSKER

Literary Passports

Introduction

Hebrew Fiction as a Literary Passport

In the summer of 1913, Gershon Shofman (1880–1972), a young but fairly well established Hebrew writer, embarked on a train journey from Lvov—the capital of Eastern Galicia, then part of Austro-Hungary—to Vienna, the famed capital of the empire.¹ When he arrived at the Nordbanhof railway station in the Leopoldstadt quarter—a common point of entry for many Eastern European immigrants (including many Jews)— he was stopped by Austrian officials and asked to present a passport or some other traveling document. Like many other Jewish émigrés and exiles from Eastern Europe at the time, Shofman had nothing to present.² This could have made for a dangerous situation. Shofman was not merely an immigrant, but had been a fugitive from the Russian army since 1904, when he deserted his unit in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War. Shofman had to think fast. He rummaged through his suitcase, searching for any papers or documents that might help him to establish his identity and affiliation. After a few tense moments, he found a small postcard that showed his photograph with accompanying Hebrew text.

This postcard was part of a series of portraits of Hebrew and Yiddish writers published by Avraham Chaim Robinson, the owner of a Jewish bookstore, Ha-techiya, in Stanislawow, Galicia, which also operated a small publishing house under the same name.³ Designed in the Art Nouveau style that flourished in the fin de siècle, the postcard featured the author’s name and photographic portrait, encased in a drawn gilt were a few details about the writer and his published works, printed in a scroll design.

Shofman showed the Viennese policeman this highly unlikely literary passport, explaining in German that it certified his identity as a writer and critic who writes small, miniature sketches with great artistry. To bolster this claim, he read the brief description: His style is rich and multifaceted. He has a sharp eye and distinctive vision. His short stories (‘sketches’) were published in a collection by Yosef Chaim Brenner.

To Shofman’s astonishment and great relief, the policeman accepted the postcard and allowed him to enter the city. In this case, Shofman’s identity as a Hebrew writer had literally displaced the need for an actual passport provided by a government authority; instead, a literary passport enabled entrance into Vienna, one of the most important centers of European modernism.

Shofman’s journey from Lvov to Vienna was neither the first nor last time that a Hebrew writer, traveling through the polyglot and multinational European continent, was forced to use—or to hide—his or her literary passport. Thirteen years earlier, in July 1900, the young Yosef Chaim Brenner (1881–1921), then a novice Hebrew writer, traveled from Homel, the provincial capital of the Mogilev region in southeastern Belarus, to Warsaw, the capital of Congress Poland.⁴ When Brenner arrived at the Warsaw train station, he immediately rushed to 21 Dzielna Street, a modest and cramped apartment complex in the city’s predominantly Jewish district, and the home of Brenner’s beloved friend and fellow writer Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879–1913). Gnessin had come from Homel to Warsaw earlier that year when he was invited by Nachum Sokolov, the editor of the Hebrew newspaper Ha-tzfira, to work at the paper’s editorial office.

In Warsaw, Brenner lived incognito in Gnessin’s room because, like Shofman, he did not hold a passport or any other official papers. His identity as a Hebrew writer from Russia could hardly have served him other than to arouse suspicion. Indeed, the gatekeeper of the building complex was very suspicious of the young man with the revolutionary appearance.⁵ Though he was forced to conceal his identity, Brenner would later describe the time he spent in Warsaw as a foundational experience in his career as a Hebrew-European writer, an apprenticeship at the epicenter of an emerging literary tradition:

There was a youthful inspiration, a longing for something, absorption of impressions with all the bliss and pleasure that comes along with this immersion. [We] met with Nomberg and with Reisin who had just published some literary collection in Yiddish; read some books and some critical essays. Uri Nissan [Gnessin] wrote a critical essay […] and published it in Ha-tzfira under a pseudonym. Pseudonym—even the very word had a strong appeal because of its novelty. In short, we were entering as if we were standing in the midst of Shacharit [morning prayer]. One evening [Gnessin] picked up from the street a new edition of Luach achi’asaf hot off the press […] We sat at the dinner table and started to read […] a poem by Ch. N. Bialik. And not too long after, when we finished our dinner, we already competed with one another to see who could best recite the poem by heart.⁶

The excitement in Brenner’s description and its sensual, almost erotic, tone point to the strong bonds between these youthful men, as well as to their palpable delight in being part of a new and dynamic literary community. Indeed, Warsaw in 1900 was an exciting place to be for young people who were just beginning their careers as Hebrew and Yiddish modernist writers. Apart from all the journals, newspapers, and publishing houses, writers like Gnessin, Brenner, Avrom Reisen, and Hersh Dovid Nomberg could meet in simple cafés where Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian newspapers were provided to the diverse clientele, described by the habitués as a mixture of Jewish workers, political activists, writers, and intellectuals.⁷ As the image of Warsaw in 1900 suggests, it was a space of crossroads, traffic, and changes, and indeed it played an important role in the emergence of modernist Hebrew literature and culture.

Although Brenner had neither the passport nor the documents that would enable him to enter Warsaw officially, his Hebrew writing clearly provided him with a kind of calling-card into the city’s Jewish literary community. By likening himself and his fellow writers to people entering in the midst of the morning prayer, he also underscored the religious fervor that he and some of his fellow modernist Hebrew writers attached to literature. For Brenner, all this excitement and ferment proved short-lived. A month later, he was back in Homel (which was a much smaller, but no less active city), and less than a year later Gnessin followed him there. However, the time they spent together in Warsaw was a formative period that made a strong impact on their lives and on their careers as Hebrew-European modernist writers.⁸

Yet another emblematic European journey of a Hebrew writer took place at the beginning of 1931, when the modernist poet and prose writer David Fogel (1891–1944) traveled from Berlin to Warsaw and other cities in the newly formed independent state of Poland. Unlike Brenner in 1900 and Shofman in 1913, this time Fogel did hold an official passport, though it was not by any means an uncomplicated arrangement. Fogel, born in Satanov, Podolia, was also an East European Jewish writer who endured a life of peripatetic wandering during turbulent times in cities like Vilna, Lvov/Lemberg, Vienna, Tel Aviv, and Paris.⁹

In 1929, three years after Fogel moved from Vienna to Paris, he finally managed to obtain a passport: It was granted to him by the Austrian embassy in Paris because he was an Austrian expatriate who had officially resided in Vienna since 1913. Since Austrian law required every passport to state the occupation of its holder, Fogel’s passport carried the official inscription Profession: Writer (see Figure 3). With this passport, Fogel was granted official recognition as a Hebrew writer. The arrangement was, however, based in a place where he had spent only a fraction of his life, and declaring a nationality that could not have seemed to him natural or self-evident in any way. Indeed, obtaining an Austrian passport did not reinforce his bond to his sponsoring nation, but only intensified his desire (and as important, his ability) to travel away from it. Fogel used the new passport to travel to Tel Aviv, where he stayed for a short while, and then to Berlin, where he immersed himself in the local Jewish literary community before returning to his initial points of departure—in Poland and Galicia.

Although he had more than one good reason to visit various Polish and Galician cities, Fogel’s journey had a clear goal. Tarbut (Culture)—the organization for Hebrew education that operated schools and teachers’ seminars in Eastern Europe—invited Fogel to Poland to deliver lectures on Hebrew literature to an audience of women, most likely students and teachers of Hebrew.¹⁰ In spite of the organization’s effort, few people came to hear Fogel; those who did probably could not appreciate the historical importance of his lecture. However, for readers of Fogel and for historians of Hebrew modernism in general, the lecture, entitled Lashon ve signon be sifruteinu ha-tze‘ira (Language and Style in Our Young Literature), is a priceless gem.¹¹ Along with other important insights that the lecture offers, Fogel proposed a mapping of Hebrew modernism in the period 1900–1930. He singled out the work of four writers of Hebrew fiction: Shofman, Gnessin, Brenner, and Dvora Baron, and Fogel implicitly connected his own writings with these slightly older Hebrew modernists. In Fogel’s lecture, a spatial history of Jewish modernism as an effect of the restive, dialectical movement between urban centers began to suggest itself.

These three anecdotes serve as a starting point in my exploration of the story of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe. They introduce not only some of the main characters of my story but also its time frame, roughly between 1900 and 1930, and some of the cities, locales, and the material culture (journals, publishing houses, cafés) in which it took place. Perhaps more importantly, these snapshots of what I call literary passports underscore the restless mobility of writers like Shofman, Brenner, Gnessin, and Fogel; they belong to a loosely linked group of Hebrew writers who had no state or territory to call home, and no clear national affiliation in the modern, western sense of the word. They were astonishingly mobile, wandering from one place to another across Europe (and beyond). These men and women were linked, however, by their restlessness, and by what we’ll come to see as their literary passports: de facto certifications of affiliation in a community of Hebrew writers that enabled them to travel through multiple geographical spaces as resident aliens, and to participate in multiple cultural contexts, while maintaining a sense of belonging to something approximating a coherent group.

Amidst the turbulence of the twentieth century’s opening decades, the places in which they touched down, congregated, wrote, and debated among themselves constantly changed, sometimes beyond recognition. Multinational empires became new nation-states; wars and revolutions changed the geopolitical borders that had been familiar and stable just a few years earlier; huge economic and historical shifts rewrote the cultures and daily lives of these familiar places again and again. At a time in which the only constant fact of life was change, it was participation in a community of Hebrew writers that lent their lives a semblance of stability. As I will suggest, this community made them simultaneously insiders and outsiders, both in cities like Odessa, Warsaw, Homel, Lvov, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London, and in European modernist culture in general.

Hebrew Fiction, European Modernism

The central claim of Literary Passports is that modernist Hebrew prose fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the encounter between young Jewish writers attempting to forge a sense-of-self in Hebrew and the shifting terrain of European modernity. It was a highly charged and electrifying encounter. Jews who had acquired their education and their Hebrew linguistic proficiency in the beit-midrash (the traditional house of study) came into contact with European literature and culture as it exploded in the artistic revolution that we now know as modernism. The lives of these men and women, as well as both Hebrew letters and European modernism writ large, would be irrevocably altered by the encounter.

The pivotal role played by European culture in the formation of Hebrew modernist fiction of the early twentieth century has not, to date, been fully explored. The main reason for this absence is that we are used to thinking of modern Hebrew literature in the last century as linked exclusively with the Zionist narrative, with the creation of a Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv), which later became the State of Israel. Indeed, one of the main challenges of my study is to resist the teleological impulse of seeing the past from the vantage point of the present, and instead to capture the Hebrew, Jewish, and European cultural landscape in the uniqueness and complexity of this time and place.

On the most basic level, my focus on Europe stems from the simple but crucial fact that all of the writers discussed in this book were born and raised in Eastern Europe. Although some of them migrated, at some point, to Palestine (for a few years or permanently) or even to North America, their cultural and literary horizon was and remained European.¹² My chronological focus, too, is quite simply explained: the turn of the twentieth century witnessed huge shifts in the foundations of Jewish life and culture, as we shall see, which coincided with the enormous upheavals that modernism both responded to and created. Simply put, around 1900, Hebrew fiction began to change, and fast. Over the next three decades, the writers we discuss were active mostly in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, in the period before Hebrew became fully coalesced into a vernacular, and before a literary and cultural center for Hebrew was solidified in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s.¹³ The story on which I focus moves, to some extent, along the tense but productive axis between the house of study and the kaffeehaus; between the texts and religious traditions of the Jewish past (with which these writers wrestled, but never really abandoned) and the contemporary currents of European social and cultural life.

My focus on Europe is bound to an exploration of early-twentiethcentury Hebrew fiction in the context of modernism, already a complex concept in itself. As numerous studies have stressed, modernism is an elusive term, at once a period, a style, and a trend, and also a wide variety of literary and artistic movements that developed in different locations in Europe, America, and around the world.¹⁴ Indeed, modernism is comprised of numerous and often contesting practices, which first flourished in a period that did not use the term as it has come to be understood retrospectively.¹⁵

Nevertheless, the term modernism is a powerful one, and is actually gaining more currency in the last decade or so in spite (or maybe because) of the challenges of postmodernism.¹⁶ It continues to be powerful primarily because modernism is the only possible term for portraying the multitude of literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century. It also captures how all the diverse movements under its umbrella attempted to reflect, but also to respond to, the historical and social upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the numerous and deep wounds of modernity. Richard Sheppard maintains that toward the end of the nineteenth century, European culture was experiencing the shattering of the most fundamental assumptions and conceptual models on which the liberal humanist epoch, from the Renaissance through the mid-nineteenth century, had been based. Thus, according to Sheppard, the literary and artistic works of modernism "are not just reflexes, transcriptions or symptoms of a profound cultural upheaval, but simultaneously, responses through which the authors of those works try to pictorialize their understanding and so make sense of that upheaval."¹⁷

From this important general observation, one can extract a set of concerns that in one way or another preoccupied many of the movements, trends, and writers associated with modernism. Some of the more salient are: the limits of rationality and the accompanying reconsiderations of enlightenment and progress; the crisis of literary language and the questioning of mimetic representation; the tension between tradition and the Nietzschean now; the changing conception of time and space in the encounter with the modern metropolis; and the changing modes of gender and sexuality amidst the crisis of masculinity, the rise of the New Woman, and the emergence of homosexuality in newly constructed understandings of social and cultural identity.¹⁸

It will become evident throughout this book that these were precisely the concerns and issues that preoccupied Hebrew writers in Europe as well as those who emigrated from Europe to other places (Palestine, America). Given their unique historical and social situation as Jews, however, these writers experienced the ruptures of modernity in particular ways, and they thus produced a version of modernism inflected by a set of distinctly Jewish concerns. Importantly, at the same time that European and western culture as a whole experienced this upheaval, Jewish society was undergoing a far-ranging revolution of its own, one that transformed its geography, modes of living, languages, professions, and consciousness. The confluence of the modernist revolution in art and literature and the massive transformations that Benjamin Harshav has called the modern Jewish revolution is what set Hebrew modernism in motion, and a full understanding of this new mode of Jewish self-expression requires attention to both of these developments.¹⁹

The international (or what Susan Stanford-Friedman and Andreas Huyssen have more recently called the transnational) quality of modernism has long been emphasized, and for good reason. In the context of modernist literature and culture numerous individual writers moved from one location to another, becoming émigrés, perpetual tourists, or—in one of modernism’s privileged terms—exiles (a term that was not surprisingly associated, usually metaphorically, with Jews and Jewish experience). Thus a number of modernist trends were initiated and developed more or less simultaneously in different locations across Europe and around the world. At the turn of the twentieth century, cosmopolitan and polyglot cities became the centers of modernism; the writers, artists, and intellectuals who lived—or just passed through—these cities were a mixture of locals, immigrants, and exiles from all over Europe and the rest of the world. As we have already seen, the restlessness of these writers was an essential ingredient of modernism’s ability to pollinate itself across a huge swath of countries and cultures. But modernism, as this study takes pains to remember, is also marked by the ways in which these trends were created and developed distinctively in different locations, and within different cultural and national contexts.²⁰

If we view modernism, for example, through an Anglo-American lens (which is still the dominant historical and theoretical perspective, even in the New Modernist Studies), the chronology of modernism and its very nature appear in a particular way. The focus here is usually on the years between 1910 and 1930, the time of high modernism, with such canonical figures as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.²¹ But when modernism is viewed from Berlin or Vienna—the places to which many Hebrew writers gravitated—the chronological profile, the list of main poetic movements, and the set of representative figures and texts are entirely different. We would probably locate its origins in the 1890s, focus on movements like symbolism and expressionism, and explore figures such as Nietzsche (as the main philosophical influence), Rilke, Trakl, Hofmannsthal, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Döblin, and Brecht.²²

Modernism in the Russian context—the one most familiar and relevant to many Hebrew writers—offered yet another trajectory, developing first in the symbolist and decadent trends during the period 1890–1917 (which is also recognized as the Silver Age of Russian literature). Among the writers associated with Russian early modernism are Dimitri Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Fyodor Sologug, Valery Bruisov, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Leonid Andreyev. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, and Vladimir Solovyov were seen as the notable precursors who signaled the transition from the literary traditions of the nineteenth century to the early modernism of the turn of the twentieth century. The reaction to the decadent and symbolist trends in Russia (and elsewhere) brought forward the emerging and contradictory post-symbolist movements of futurism, acmeism, imaginism, and other smaller movements that flourished in the period around and immediately following the 1917 revolution.²³

Modernist Hebrew fiction was developed in the context of these various European modernisms, and across Eastern, Central, and Western Europe. It added to this conglomeration still further distinctive features of its own, which stem from very specific linguistic, literary, historical, and cultural conditions of Jews in Europe, and more specifically of Hebrew literature and culture. The most significant factor that set Hebrew modernism apart from the major European literatures was the newness of Hebrew literature; at the beginning of a turbulent century, it simply did not have to confront a long and established tradition of realism or romanticism. This is especially true in the realm of Hebrew fiction, which is the main focus of this book.

For the sake of comparison, we must remind ourselves that Hebrew poetry has had a distinguished tradition going back to the medieval period and earlier. Moreover, Hebrew poetry was written and developed throughout the haskalah period, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment (1780–1880). At the end of the nineteenth century, Chaim Nachman Bialik had already established himself (and was firmly understood) as a national poet and as a romantic Hebrew poet. Hebrew fiction, on the other hand, was a relatively recent phenomenon: the first Hebrew novel, Avraham Mapu’s Ahavat Zion (The Love of Zion), wasn’t published until 1853. For complex reasons that have to do with language, ideology, and historical context, this novel—like most fiction of the haskalah period—was based on the poetics of romance, adventure and intrigue, a formula typical of European literature in the early modern period (1500–1800), but very different from what Europeans or Americans were writing in the 1850s.²⁴ The first Hebrew novels and stories considered to be realist were the Hebrew versions (or auto-translations) of Sholem Yankev Abramovitz’s (Mendele Moycher Sforim) fictional Yiddish texts—the same novels and stories in which Abramovitz created the nusach (a synthetic style that combined biblical, rabbinic, and other historical layers of Hebrew), which enabled mimetic representation in Hebrew fiction.²⁵ In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a new poetics of realism or naturalism was developed by writers of the so-called New Wave school like Ben Avigdor (Avraham Leib Shalkovitz) and Yishayahu Bershadsky. These were all relatively modest achievements when measured against the realist traditions that emerged in the major European literatures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Hence, Hebrew fiction writers at the beginning of the twentieth century were compelled to develop a discourse of literary realism (mainly understood as a project of mimetic representation), at the same time that they absorbed a literary and cultural revolution that thoroughly shattered the assumptions underlying this mode of literature.²⁶ The lack of a strong and lasting tradition of realist or mimetic Hebrew prose can also explain why Hebrew modernist fiction could develop early (in the opening decade of the twentieth century) and encounter relatively little resistance from the literary community and readers. The experimental forms of fiction by Gnessin, Shofman, Brenner, and others were not initially well received. Many Hebrew readers and critics complained about the fragmentation and miniaturization of their fiction, their solipsism and eroticism, and the strangeness of their language and structure. Yet, despite these many reservations, they became part of the emerging Hebrew canon.

The criticism and resistance directed at modernist Hebrew writers is indicative of the issues they had to confront. A good example of these is the question of fragmentation and the small forms that replaced the large-scale social novel of the haskalah period. Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginsberg), the influential Zionist leader, thinker, editor, and critic, wrote the following critique about Hebrew fiction of the 1900s: Seek and find out that even the best new Hebrew stories […] are nothing more than fragments in which we can only see rudimentary hints of talent that has not yet developed clearly. These fragments would hardly make any impression in other, real literatures.²⁷ This criticism was common throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and it came from the yearning of figures like Ahad Ha‘am, Bialik, Yosef Klausner, Pinchas Lachover, and others to see large-scale social and realistic novels in Hebrew. Modernist Hebrew writers did not create such novels. Instead they turned to the small forms, or wrote the kind of fragmentary novellas and short novels (not to mention Brenner’s anti-novels) that were hardly recognizable in comparison to the traditional European realist novel of the nineteenth century. The turn to these forms was closely related to two important aspects of the literary passport: the restless mobility and the inward turn, which involved a drastic change in what was represented in fiction and its modes of representation and expression.

The expectation of realism and mimetic representation (as well as for the romanticism of Hebrew poetry) was directly related to the role assigned to writers of Hebrew literature in nationalist thought. Building on the biblical trope of the prophet as the Watchman for the House of Israel (Ezek. 1:17), as well as the religiously inspired, Russian ideal of the writer as prophet, modern Hebrew critics and thinkers adopted the figure of the prophet-as-watchman to describe the writer’s role.²⁸ This is an example (one of many) of a fusion of what seemed like indigenous Jewish tradition with the Russian tradition that connected writers like Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky with the prophet figure. As in the case of Russian modernism of the early twentieth century, there was a certain tension between this designated role of the Hebrew writer and modernist poetics, but they were far from being antithetic.²⁹ In the case of writers like Gnessin, Shofman, Nomberg, Levi Aryeh Arieli, and Fogel (to name just a few), this tension was never really resolved, and it explains their unstable place in the emerging canon. In Brenner’s case, by contrast—and this is true regarding Micha Yosef Berdichevsky as well, and even Shmuel Yosef Agnon—his role as an editor, critic, and public intellectual made him seem as a kind of prophet; a prophet of skepticism and doom more than anything else, but a prophet nonetheless, and thus more readily accepted into the canon.³⁰

The unique situation of Hebrew literature at the beginning of the twentieth century can also explain why the modernist manifesto was not the common feature it had been in some other European literatures, or would become in avant-garde movements of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry of the 1920s and 1930s.³¹ We do not see in Hebrew fiction of the era anything like Ezra Pound’s famous call to Make it new! or writing along the lines of the Futurist Manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909) or Uri Zvi Greenberg or even Avraham Shlonsky’s call in 1923 for wild poetry. The absence of such brazen and beguiling declarations is simple: Hebrew writers did not feel the need to shatter a literary tradition that was quite shaky to begin with. Instead of writing programmatic manifestos, they reveal their modernist preoccupations in the texts they choose to translate from European languages and in the plethora of small (and often short-lived) magazines and journals in which they published their stories and created a new poetics.

Modernist Hebrew writers also expressed their modernist concerns in their extensive correspondence, as well as in lectures (like Fogel’s lecture in 1931), and for some, in critical essays. Among these writers, Brenner was probably the one most inclined to express modernist concerns beyond his fiction. He did so in a manner at once reluctant and vigorous. In an essay written in 1908, for example, in a journal he was editing together with Shofman in Lvov, Brenner defends against the criticism of fragmentation by quoting Ahad Ha‘am’s complaint that Hebrew fiction presents nothing but fragments (Kra‘im —torn pieces) and that there is no large-scale novel to be found. But he also defends fellow writers like Shofman, Gnessin, and Nomberg (and implicitly himself as well) against these accusations by saying that if reality itself is broken, it is no wonder that the Hebrew literature that reflects it is also miniature, torn, and broken into pieces. He continues by asking rhetorically, what can one do? […] if there is nothing else, one has to contend with looking at one’s face with a miniature and broken mirror.³²

In another essay (1911), Brenner revisited this question after a further critique of Hebrew fiction was voiced by the critic and editor Lachover. In this essay, Brenner presents his own ideas while seemingly speculating on Lachover’s opinions:

It is possible that he thinks that there is no place for novels, so long as there are no fixed forms of life, but rather floating pieces, which in no way can be made into continuous, comprehensive pieces; it is also possible that he denies the uniformity of processes of life, and thinks that in any large-scale portrait there is also an inevitable lie, and that the inner truth of reality, the lively and essential truth, can be found only in the small sketches, which are presented fragment by fragment, shred by shred.³³

It is crucial to note that in these essays Brenner makes a subtle but important conflation between the poetic and socio-historical arguments for the appearance of fragmented and miniature forms. He claims that the reason for fragmentation is both a broken historical reality (what he calls the floating pieces of Jewish life and modern life in general), and the fact that the literary text must reflect this reality— not with continuous, comprehensive pieces or with large-scale portraits, but rather with fragments and small sketches. In addition to this heightened social and historical awareness, Brenner also betrays a deep and fundamentally modernist sensibility, sure that the experience of fragmentation of (Jewish) modernity could be only expressed by a fragmented modernist text. If the processes of life themselves lack unity, then the more essential truth requires the smaller pictures that are presented shred by shred.³⁴

Foreshadowing many scholars and historians of modernism, Brenner understands fragmentation as a quintessential modernist expression—an existential attitude that offers a way to cope artistically with the stresses of contemporary life, Jewish and otherwise.³⁵ What Brenner explains is a cultural aspect of modernism, of the miniature and broken mirror, for writers not just in chosen exile but on the lam and on the run. In similar ways Brenner explained, and sometimes defended, the mixture of poetry and prose, the impressionistic and symbolist (or what he called re’aliyut simbolit—the mixture of realism and symbolism) that began to appear in his own fictional work and in the fiction of some of the writers close to him.

Brenner’s expression of his explicit poetics (as outlined in his critical essays) tells us another important thing about the development of modernist Hebrew fiction. It highlights the complex and significant links between the instability and sense of rupture in literary forms and those of life itself, an essential feature of the crisis of modernity that was especially acute because of the radical shifts and breaks in Jewish life. East European Jewish writers like Brenner and his contemporaries did not have to wait for shocks like the Great War or the Bolshevik revolution.³⁶ The experience of shock and unsettling upheaval was clearly felt at the turn of the twentieth century, and with very distinctive purchase by European Jews. This provides another explanation for the deep and rapid modernist change that erupted in Hebrew fiction in or around 1900.

Modernist Hebrew Fiction and the Challenges of Literary History

Brenner’s essays and Fogel’s 1931 lecture are good examples of the ways in which the writers who created Hebrew modernism understood what they were doing. And yet, anyone who attempts to use their words as a blueprint with which to draw a map or a timeline of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe will encounter considerable difficulties. In spite of the fact that the first three decades of the twentieth century are unequivocally within the period of European modernism in art and literature, there are surprisingly few scholarly attempts to discuss Hebrew fiction written during these years in the context of modernism.

To be sure, there are many excellent discussions of modernist aspects in individual writers. Especially important for my book are Avner Holtzman’s studies of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky;³⁷ Dan Miron’s and Hamutal Bar-Yosef’s studies of Uri Nissan Gnessin;³⁸ and Nurit Govrin’s studies of Gershon Shofman and Dvora Baron.³⁹ There is a growing body of scholarship on Yosef Chaim Brenner, to which Dov Sadan, Menachem Brinker, Yitzhak Bakon, Alan Mintz, Ariel Hirschfeld, Boaz Arpaly, and others have made major contributions.⁴⁰ There is also a continuous and ever-growing body of scholarship dedicated to the fiction of S. Y. Agnon. I refer to and seek to build upon these works throughout this book. At the same time, these studies do not attempt to discuss modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe as a broad literary and historical phenomenon.⁴¹

An emblematic example of this absence can be found in the work of Gershon Shaked, who produced the most comprehensive and authoritative historiography of Hebrew fiction in the century between 1880 and 1980.⁴² In his monumental five-volume history—an impressive summation of Hebrew literary scholarship between the 1960s and 1980s—surprisingly little is devoted to modernism of the first half of the twentieth century. It becomes a significant presence only within a section entitled The Moderna, in which Shaked discusses at some length the issue of modernism in Hebrew fiction. The notion of the Moderna is explicitly borrowed from poetry, and with it he examines some trends of Hebrew fiction that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, mainly in Palestine, but also in Europe and America.⁴³ Shaked thus divides what he calls modernist Hebrew fiction of this period into four groups of writers and trends: the universalists, the expressionists, the impressionists, and a fourth group that is comprised mostly of Hebrew writers in America. He identifies various modernist concerns in all of these groups: a preoccupation with sexuality and with the urban experience; a modernist approach to language, style, and tradition; and an affiliation with impressionistic and expressionistic trends.⁴⁴

Shaked sketches an invaluable map of modernist Hebrew fiction, particularly in the period of 1925–1948. However, I find two major problems with this widespread approach. First, modernism becomes a marginal aspect of Hebrew fiction because it includes only writers like Eliezer Shteinman and Ya‘acov Horovitz, who were never central figures when they published their works, and are even less so today, when their stories and novels are virtually forgotten. Second, and more significant, if we follow this understanding of Hebrew modernist fiction, a crucial question arises: Did these concerns and preoccupations appear only in the late 1920s and 1930s?

From the point of view of this study, it is clear that the answer is no. These preoccupations, and the poetics that come along with them, began to appear as early as 1900 in the fiction of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky. They intensified and became dominant in the writings of Gnessin, Brenner, Shofman, Nomberg, and Baron, and continued in interesting ways in the work of Ya‘acov Shteinberg, Arieli, and the young Agnon. Fogel, Eliezer Shtienman, Shimon Halkin, and other writers (who were active in the period Shaked discusses) are direct continuations of the modernist trends created in the period 1900–1930, mainly in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe.

Shaked, then, relegates modernism to a minor role in Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century. His view has been influential for subsequent students of Hebrew literature even though, as I argue throughout, it seems to me problematically ahistorical. There are several ways to explain the sources (as well as the undeniable power) of Shaked’s view. For Shaked, Hebrew literature in Europe is seen as a cul-de-sac, a dead end that cannot lead anywhere.⁴⁵ But beyond this basic (and problematic) hindsight conclusion, there are three interrelated reasons for this understanding of Hebrew fiction of the early twentieth century.

First, this period has been known as sifrut ha-techiya——the literature of revival or renaissance. Without delving into the origins and the history of this term, it is safe to say that the term sifrut ha-techiya (as used in Hebrew historiography) is predicated on a three-tiered Zionist ideal: the revival of the Jewish/Hebrew nation, the revival of the Hebrew language, and the revival of Hebrew literature and culture. This notion of revival is a historiographic construct, one of many possible models, and it tells us a very specific (and very powerful) story with a clear sense of origin and of telos. From a literary point of view, most scholars of Hebrew literature understand the poetics of the so-called revival period as a phase of romantic and realist Hebrew literature, or more often, as a combination of both, thus effectively precluding the possibility of reading it in the context of European and Jewish modernism.⁴⁶

This leads to the second issue, namely the fact that the prevalent historiography of modernist Hebrew fiction follows the common graphs and maps of modernist Hebrew poetry. These graphs and maps locate the origin of Hebrew modernism geographically in Palestine and chronologically in the post-symbolist poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. The result is that both the poetry and the fiction of the turn of the twentieth century are understood (by Shaked and others) as pre-modernist. A number of scholars (Hamutal Bar-Yosef, Chana Kronfeld, and Hannan Hever among them) have recently challenged the assumption that Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century was essentially late romantic, and that modernism appeared only with Shonsky and Greenberg in the mid-1920s.⁴⁷ At the same time, it is clear to me that— for reasons which I explore throughout the book—symbolist, impressionist, and expressionist elements surfaced in Hebrew fiction, and they became legitimate and even part of the canon before they fully emerged and achieved dominant status in poetry.

The third and directly related problem is the assumption of a time lag between the development of European and Hebrew literature. This is another commonly held view of Hebrew literature that has only recently been questioned.⁴⁸ Essentially, the (mistaken) claim is that of belatedness, the idea that at the turn of the twentieth century, Hebrew literature had just begun to engage with the romantic and realist modes of literature that had reached their heyday in Europe and America during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. But anyone who reads a novella by Gnessin, a short novel by Shofman, or an anti-novel by Brenner written in, say, 1908, must surely notice the radical break with conventions of nineteenth-century fiction—Hebrew or European. How can this be explained? I have already suggested the feeble tradition of realist and romantic fiction in Hebrew as part of the answer. Another crucial ingredient is articulated in the following observation of Benjamin Harshav:

Jewish literature attempted to catch up with the developments of European literary tradition since the Renaissance […] and to spread out over the whole range of genres, both in original works and in translation. At the same time, it endeavored to break through to the contemporary trends of modernism which were turning that very tradition upside down.⁴⁹

This extremely important point leads me to utterly abandon the entire model of time lag and influence, and instead to discuss modernist Hebrew literature and culture in terms of participation. Jewish writers working in Hebrew (and Yiddish as well, but that is part of a different, albeit closely related, story) had to overcome enormous difficulties of working with languages without long belletristic traditions, with small readerships and unstable literary and cultural infrastructures. However, paradoxically perhaps but unquestionably, these conditions actually made them more likely to embrace modernism and participate in it. As the contemporary trends of modernism dramatically altered European literary traditions, Hebrew writers could now find a place, a characteristically restless one, for themselves in Europe’s literary landscape. Hence, although these early Jewish modernists writing in Hebrew might have been reluctant to declare their modernism, they were not necessarily belated, but in fact, contemporary with—even anticipatory of—literary trends that appeared in this period in the major European languages.

In this regard, a number of developments over the last decade in the rapidly evolving field of New Modernist Studies pose a real challenge and an exciting opportunity for a renewed understanding of Hebrew modernism (and modernist Hebrew fiction in particular). More than ever, it is now becoming evident that modernism is a complex literary and cultural phenomenon, and recent scholarship in the newly invigorated field has invited us to challenge many of the assumptions about when, where, and what modernism was or is. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz have emphasized the recent temporal, spatial, and vertical expansion of the field of Modernist Studies, as well as what they have termed the transnational turn. But while most of these new discussions focus on modernism in locations far removed from Europe (Asia, the Caribbean, and so on), and in periods far removed from so-called high modernism, my study examines the Hebrew creation of modernist fiction both at the center and the margins of Europe, and right in the heart of what is now considered to be the epoch of modernism (roughly 1850–1950).⁵⁰ In so doing, I am hoping to show that the seemingly exceptional, marginal, and liminal modernist Hebrew fiction (and this is true regarding Yiddish as well, but in a different way) proves an excellent test case to examine in the context of these recent developments in New Modernist Studies.⁵¹

Any organizing historical concept tends to emphasize certain aspects of literary and cultural production and overshadow others, and I am very well aware that Hebrew fiction in this period can be—and indeed has been—described and analyzed in different ways. In examining early-twentieth-century Hebrew fiction through the bifocal lens of Jewish and European modernism, certain dichotomies tend to blur, and new questions arise and come into focus. Among the questions that stand both in the background and the foreground of this study are: How would Hebrew modernism appear if viewed through the broader horizon of modernist European literary and cultural production? How would our conception of European or transnational modernism change if we were to include authors and writers like Brenner or Agnon—who have all-too-often been seen as specifically Hebrew, Jewish, or Zionistwriters—and analyze them as writers who express modernist concerns and modernist poetics? On the other hand, how would writers such as Gnessin, Shofman, and Fogel—sometimes construed as European writers whose only vestige of Jewishness is their choice of writing in Hebrew—be seen through an approach that seeks to identify the specific Jewish and Hebrew qualities of their modernist writing?

In order to begin answering these questions, I explore Hebrew modernist fiction by taking different avenues of analysis. My attempt is not to write a comprehensive history of Hebrew fiction or to present a close reading of its monuments, but rather to introduce and to examine some of its main themes and preoccupations. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources and texts, I wish to situate early-twentieth-century Hebrew