Yiddish and West African literatures - a topic for a Comparative Literature dissertation

Meaning, not for me. For someone else. One thing I've noticed reading Yiddish literature is its similarity to Senegalese literature, to West African literature. Saving the difference, as they say.

My little insight sometime last winter was that 19th century Yiddish literature was a colonial literature. The colonized people were the Jews of the Pale of Settlement; the colonized lands are, now, Byelorussia, Ukraine, and part of Poland. The colonizer, the empire, was Russia. The rule of the imperial power was heavy (the draft, especially), inefficient, bizarre, and at times murderous.

Just as an example, the reason that Yiddish stories concentrate so much on town life is that almost no Jews were allowed to be farmers.* Tevye the Dairyman was unusual in that he worked in agriculture, but if he wanted to buy a field and grow some wheat, he would have had to apply for a special permit, for which there were strict quotas.

The cultural similarities are so striking. In Senegal and in the shtetl, boys went to religious schools and spent hours memorizing ancient passages of Arabic or Hebrew. The pious life of study and prayer was or is a male ideal. Underemployment is rampant - hence the number of middlemen, peddlers, and matchmakers. Beggars are treated with surprising respect, since charity is a pious act. Some of these similarities go back, I presume, to common roots in the Near East.

Someone has to make dinner, though. That's for the women, who have to earn a living while their husbands and sons pray in the study house. The abandoned wife is a central theme of both literatures. The social details differ - in Senegal, the mechanism is not just divorce but polygamy - but the underlying problems are so similar.

Another similarity, of central importance to readers - both literatures, at least in their earlier stages , consist almost entirely of short books, because of the constraints of publishing and the low literacy level of the population. I would hypothesize that this pattern would repeat itself in many "early" literatures. Pushkin and Gogol and Lermontov wrote short books, too, come to think of it.

So I asked ma femme, I asked her "Why hasn't anyone done this?" to which she replied "Who needs the grief?" A good point. But look, here's one Professor Marc Caplan, a Johns Hopkins professor who specializes in both Yiddish and West African literatures. What do you know? Here we see him in action, running a conference panel titled "Deterritorialization After Deleuze." Um. His own paper is “The ‘Minor’ as Methodology: Deterritorialization in Yiddish and African Narrative.” This is not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess that's the way things are done now.

* One of the Yiddish plays I read, Peretz Hirschbein's "Green Fields," was about a little cluster of Jewish farmers. It was written for people living in Lower East Side tenements who had immigrated from the shtetl, and had never set foot on a farm.