The Best Books of 1864 - This could but have happened once, / And we missed it, lost it for ever.

I begin with James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, on display at the Freer, just because I like it, and for the metaphor, and because it prevents me from using a bizarre and hideous Millais that has tempted me.  No further japonisme follows.

An English reader in 1864 was in serial novel paradise.  Dickens had begun Our Mutual Friend; Trollope had completed Small House at Allington and started Can You Forgive Her?; Elizabeth Gaskell had Wives and Daughters in motion; if he also happened to subscribe to Dublin University Magazine he was getting Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, which sure ain’t Dickens but does have a locked room mystery.

Now, if I were alive in 1864 I would have ignored all of that while hashing away at the Best Books of 1714, but a wiser reader would have had a good time with the above.  Dickens was a celebrity, Trollope and Gaskell famous enough – I don’t know about Le Fanu – so these were all good candidates for Best of the Year lists, if the Victorians had had such vulgar things.

The novels would have had to compete with John Henry Newman’s memoir Apologia Pro Vita Sua, which I read this year but never mentioned here as perhaps a bit over my head, Tennyson’s pathetic Enoch Arden, and Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae.  The latter is a masterpiece: “Caliban upon Setebos”! “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’”!  Byronism!  I took this post’s title from one of its poems, “Youth and Art,” where the context is a little different.

The great caveat, as always: in English.  My pick for best book of the year is either the Browning or the Dickens, but the winner at this point in influence and status has been Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, one of the many literary responses to Fathers and Sons and that crazy Chernyshevsky novel.  Dostoevsky would likely not have made the Russian Best of the Year list, though, since his novella was ignored at the time.  Maybe Nikolai Leskov’s No Way Out, yet another response to Turgenev and nihilism, would have made it.  Lists would not even make sense in an environment like that, where literature is a branch of political and philosophical argument and no one cares about whether or not a book is a “good read,” whatever that is.

Two almost secret firsts.  Henry James published his first short story – strangely, a noir thriller about a contract murder – in a short-lived abolitionist magazine.  No one could have guessed what was to come.  Not such an important event, since if this one had not worked out the next one would have, or the one after that.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Mendele Mocher Sforim published his story “The Little Man” in the Yiddish supplement to a Hebrew-language newspaper, thus inventing modern Yiddish literature, just like that.  What a mystery, for such an act to have such consequences.  Mendele would write better fiction, including a redone novella-length version of this story, and his disciple Sholem Aleichem would write better fiction than that.  Something new had been brought into the world.  Almost no one in the world knew about it, but enough knew, and just the right ones, so it was not missed, not lost, but preserved.

Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo - He went back upstairs to wait.

Futabatei Shimei's Ukigumo or Drifting Clouds (1887-89) is the first modern Japanese novel. Meaning the first to successfully incorporate novelistic techniques like interiority, colloquial language, and psychological realism.

It's a strange, almost inevitably disappointing, category, "first X novel." I read another example earlier this year, Mendele Mocher Sforim's "The Little Man." It was quite good - Ukigumo is quite good - but I could not help but marvel a bit that this is the source of all the fuss.

The literary ideas, the literary possibilities, that are now historically attached to Ukigumo or "The Little Man" have been completely absorbed, explored, undermined and rebuilt by other, greater, writers and books. The linguistic innovations, such as the colloquial conversations, are even worse, hard to discover in translation. So it would be strange if the "first" novel did not seem a little pale.

Futabatei's models were English and Russian. Bunzo, protagonist of Ukigumo, is a Turgenev-like Superfluous Man. We meet him just as he has been laid off from some vague government job. His plans to marry his young cousin are disrupted. Passive to begin with, he is reduced to something close to inactivity and silence. A rival bureaucrat moves in on his cousin, with the connivance of his status-seeking aunt (a first-rate character, the best thing in the book). The novel ends in stasis and irresolution. In all likelihood, Futabatei left the book unfinished, but the ending, although unsatisfying, is fitting (the last sentence is in my post's title).

If it sounds like the sort of thing one has read before, it is. The Japanese setting generates interest, though. We're in modernizing Meiji Japan. The novel begins with a description of office workers and their weird mix of Western and Japanese beards and clothes. The ethos is definitely not that of a Turgenev novel.

To my knowledge, Ukigumo is only available in English as part of Marleigh Grayer Ryan's Japan's First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei (1967), Columbia University Press. Half of that book is the translation, half is annotation and apparatus. It all seemed pretty good to me.

How I need to go fill in the paperwork to register my completion of the Japanese Literature Challenge.

Wrapping up the 19th century Yiddish literature project

I read most of the Yiddish books I meant to read, almost as many more that I found along the way, and now have an even longer list of books I want to read. A successful project, then. All right.

What am I likely to read next, when I am ready for more? I'll make a list.

1. More Mendele Mocher Sforim / S. Y. Abramovitch. The forefather of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz is, compared to them, second rate. But I just finished his 1888 version of Fishke the Lame, in which Abramovitch extended an earlier story to novel length. He adds a little bit of plot filler, which is mostly useless, and a lot of, of, of everything - two hundred pages of digressions and descriptions about bath houses and piles of garbage and confidence schemes and country inns and horses and sunsets over the woods. Life, the book is packed with so much life. I'll read more.

2. Yiddish poetry. The poets considered to be the best - Jacob Glatstein, Mani Leib, Moishe Halpern - are all a little too late for the project. Ruth Wisse's Little Love in Big Manhattan, though, about Mani Leib and Halpern, is very tempting.

3. Hebrew. My impression is that "literary" Hebrew literature is rarer than Yiddish during the 19th century. But it exists. H. Bialik is a writer whose name kept showing up. I want to try him, at least.

4. The genuine Hasidic tradition: In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, and the strange, strange oral tales of Rabbi Nahman. I. L. Peretz knew these inside and out. I've read a bit of this in anthologies. It's wild, not what I expected.

5. More names: Itzik Manger, Y. Y. Trunk, Rakhel Feygenberg, I. J. Singer, (more) I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, all too late for the project. Isaac Meier Dik and more S. Ansky, in the right period but insufficiently translated. Abraham Cahan and Isaac Babel, contemporaries who chose languages other than Yiddish for their literary works. While I'm at it, why not Cynthia Ozick, Steve Stern, Max Apple, on and on into the 20th century.

Along these lines, the National Yiddish Book Center has an annotated list of 100 great Jewish books that I recommend to anyone wanting to pursue this idea into the 20th century, or away from Yiddish (the list includes Kafka, H. Roth and P. Roth, Isaac Babel and Anne Frank). When I was doing my research, I found only their irritating non-annotated list. Why do they have both on their site? Never mind. It's a good resource. I read and read, and I've still read only twenty of those books.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, criticism, and comments. I learned so much. A sheynem dank.

Mendele Mocher Sforim - Benjamin III, Don Quixote, and the limits of satire

Don Quixote is a satire on romances. Don Quixote has his brain addled by tales of knights and heroes, but discovers that the world has changed, or was never really like that in the first place. Common sense reigns, so don't tilt at windmills.

Actually, I have never read that book. In the Don Quixote I read, Quixote may be crazy, but much of the rest of the world is completely insane. Quixote, to his benefit, travels the country, makes a new friend, and genuinely lives in the world he has imagined. I am exaggerating certain aspects of the novel to make this point, but before dismissing Our Lord Don Quixote, I ask two questions: have you read Part II, and do you want to side with the priest and the barber as they throw books out the window?

I mention this because Mendele Mocher Sforim's Yiddish Quixote has the same mixed purpose. It's a satire on the sterile ignorance that results from the religious education of his fellow Jews. But it also in some ways celebrates the foolish Benjamin and his sidekick Senderel. They're incurable ignoramuses, but they also do something original and perhaps even noble.*

In other words, Benjamin may be wrong to blindly believe the stories he absorbs, and is mistreated in various ways while he wanders from town to town. But he's happy in the innocent world he has created, and anyway, life in the real world, in Jewish Russia, is not so hot:

"The town's newly appointed Chief of Police ruled it with an iron hand: he had snatched the skullcaps off several Jews, cut an earlock from another, locked up several townsmen overnight for not having their passports with them; while from still another he had confiscated a goat merely because the animal had eaten all the straw from a neighbor's newly thatched roof." (Ch. 1, p. 19)

I mentioned yesterday that Benjamin III is unfinished. Soon after it was published in 1878, Abramovitsh / Mendele Mocher Sforim stopped writing for eight years, partly for personal and financial reasons, and partly because of worsening conditions in the Jewish Pale. After the 1881 assassination of the reformist Czar Alexander II, under whom Abramovitsh had begun his career as a writer, things grew even worse - pogroms and harsher restrictions on Jewish life. The great Jewish emigration began, mostly to America and Palestine. Abramovitsh himself eventually ended up in Switzerland.

When he returned to writing, he was no longer interested in satirizing or improving the character of his own people. They had enough problems. So he never returned to Benjamin, which is too bad.

* The wives in the story may have a different view of this. There's a separate stratum of the story, suggesting that although the men may be able to wander about with their heads in the clouds, if the women did the same, everyone would starve.

Several books without which, like a craftsman without his tools, he would have been helpless - The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III

My "Currently Reading" pile has spun out of control. It's all the fault of my Yiddish literature project. There are so many good books; they are not novels, mostly, which encourages me to dip into book after book. A Peretz fable here, a Sholem Aleichem monolgoue there, a few shtetl postcards from Yiddishland. So I end up with bookmarks in six or seven books, with a dozen more piled here and there. It's all been enjoyable.

Even the Yiddish novels are short, at least at the time I'm studying. Big bricks, like Chaim Grade's The Yeshiva (1967-68), seem to be a 20th century phenomenon. I've seen this pattern before, where new literatures from low-literacy populations results in short books. Big books come later.

S. Y. Abramovitsh's / Mendele Mocher Sforim's The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III (1878), for example, fills 116 pages.* It's a little marvel, the best thing I've read by him so far. Benjamin is a shtetl Jew who decides to explore the world, like Alexander the Great, and like two previous (actual) Jewish explorers named Benjamin. He is an educated man, but only in Jewish religious texts, with no knowledge of geography beyond his own town. He's not alone:

"Once, by pure chance, someone brought a date into Tuneyadevka. How the townfolk flocked to gape at it! On opening the Pentateuch someone discovered that dates were referred to in the Holy Writ! Think of it! Dates grew in the Land of Israel, actually!" (Ch. 1, p. 19)

Benjamin reads about the Ten Lost Tribes and the legendary Lost Jews and the Great Viper, and sets off to find them (to avoid the last one, actually). On his first trip he makes it less than two miles from home before he gets lost in the woods. For the next attempt, he recruits a companion, Senderel the Housewife, the lowest of the low, as you can tell from his nickname. They sneak off from their wives:

"Next morning, long before the cowherds had driven their cattle to pasture, our Benjamin, hugging a bundle, was standing impatiently near the windwill. That bundle contained all the items he deemed essential for such a journey, to wit: prayer shawl and phylacteries, the prayer book Path of Life, the book A Statute for Israel, the Psalms and several books without which, like a craftsman deprived of his tools, he would have been helpless." (Ch. 4, p. 46)

Any reader packing books for his vacation will sympathize, or perhaps wince. Even Don Quixote did not take a pile of books with him on his travels. Yes, this is Don Quixote - the man addled by books, the abortive first expedition, the recruitment of Sancho Panza. Some of the later adventures parallel Cervantes closely, while others are original. Most are pretty funny, but the jokes are more at the expense of Benjamin's, and others', ignorance than his delusions. Abramovitsh's satirical purpose is quite different than Cervantes'. Maybe I'll postpone that for tomorrow.

The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin III has one serious defect that some readers may see as a fatal flaw. It is unfinished; it merely stops. Presumably more adventures were in the offing, but Abramovitsh never wrote them. I have a guess as to why - that's for tomorrow, too.

* I read the 1949 translation by Moshe Spiegel. There's a more recent version in a volume titled Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, which also includes Fishke the Lame.

It's somehow thicker'n other water - Mendele Mocher Sforim's "Fishke the Lame"

"The Little Man," from 1864, is Mendele Mocher Sforim's first Yiddish story. "Fishke the Lame," from 1869, is his third. "The Little Man" may have marked the creation of modern Yiddish literature, but it obviously took a while for things to get moving. In the meantime, Mendele / Abramovitsh wrote in Hebrew, and translated an enormous variety of stuff into Yiddish and Hebrew - biology textbooks, Russian history, Jules Verne.

In "Fishke the Lame," Mendele the Book Peddler tells us about poor Fishke; later Fishke tells us his own story:

"Cross-eyed, one arm twisted back, limping heavily on one leg, Fishke was no delight to behold. He was such a freakish creature that the town didn't even want him as a cholera groom."

A what? To end an epidemic, a town would try to create luck for itself through forced marriages of its "cripples, scoundrels, and beggars." Even grotesque Fishke finally gets to marry a blind woman, and together they hit the road with a troupe of beggars. This is obviously a story about the poorest of the poor. It's vivid, funny, and sort of horrible.

Fishke had worked as a tout at a village bathhouse. In Odessa, disillusioned with his travels, he decides to return to the baths, but discovers that the big city bathhouses are not like the one at home:

"I went to other baths, but ain't none like ours - they don't even smell like our brick bathhouse in Glupsk. Now, their ritual baths are a joke. In our mikve you can darn near cut the water, 'cause it has a special odor, a different color, and it's somehow thicker'n other water. Right away you know it has a Jewish flavor, but there the mikve water is clear, plain old water, you could even drink it."

Vivid, funny, and horrible.

Both "The Little Man" and "Fishke the Lame" are in Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, 2004, edited and translated by Ken Frieden.

But I'm getting off the point - Mendele Mocher Sforim's "The Little Man"

Despite working on this week's lists, I did not really plan to immediately start reading Yiddish authors. But the lists sharpened my appetite, so I went right to the beginning, to Mendele Mocher Sforim's "The Little Man", a short story published in 1864 in the Yiddish supplement to a Hebrew newspaper. Before this story, there was no such thing as modern Yiddish literature; after, there was.

I don't think anyone would know that just by reading the story. I mean, it's pretty good. Mendele the Book Peddler tells us a little about himself, and then tells us how he was present at the reading of a strange will. The will is part autobiography, part confession, of an unpleasant rich man who raised himself from poverty.

It's a bit like the 16th century Spanish picaresque, Lazarillo de Tormes. The narrator of the will tells how he moved from one terrible job to another, each worse than the last. But where Lazarillo de Tormes has no real ending - Lazarillo presumably just moves on to another bad job - the dead man figured out the path to riches. He learned to become a "little man", a hypocrite and a flatterer. In the will, he confesses his sins and leaves most of his money to charity, so everything is all right, yes?

So there are some of good satirical touches like that. But the humor of the story mostly comes from the way it is told. Mendele's refrain is "But I'm getting off the point." He's always on the verge of a serious digression, but always pulls himself back. And he lards the story with dubious Jewish wisdom:

"It's true that the rabbi is a fine and honest man - I should only have his good name - although still, in this world, one has to deceive people. Even the angels had to follow the way of the world and put one over on Abraham, when the Torah says that they ate, although they only pretended to eat. But that's really not at all what I'm driving at."

It's this sort of voice that Sholem Aleichem is going to perfect, twenty years or so later.

"The Little Man" stands in the company of Richardson's Pamela, which launched the epistolary novel craze in the 18th century, and Scott's Waverley, which caused an avalanche of historical novels. Neither of those books are the best of their genre, or even of their authors. But they did something unusual. Mendele Mocher Sforim did not just create, or popularize, a new genre, though. He created a new literature. It's a creative act that is hard for me to comprehend, really, and the story itself, good as it is, does not help much.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 2 - Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz

Three authors are at the core of early Yiddish literature: S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim (1836-1917), Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916), and I. L. Peretz (1852-1915).

Mendele Mocher Sforim* / S. Y. Abramovitsh is the inventor of modern Yiddish literature. He wanted to write for ordinary Jews in their own language. Abramovitsh published his first Yiddish novel, The Little Man serially in late 1864 to 1865. It is narrated by Mendele Mocher Sforim, Mendele the Book Peddler. I don't think he meant it as a pen name, but Abramovitsh brought Mendele back again and again, and the name stuck.

A number of Sforim novels have made it into English at one time or another. The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1869) is a must, as well as Fishke the Lame. Other titles: The Wishing-Ring, The Nag aka The Mare, and The Parasite. My library has an anthology, Selected Works of Mendele Moykher-Sfarim, so I'll see what's in that.

Sholom Aleichem's Yiddish collected works fills 28 volumes, mostly short stories, mostly monologues, mostly about rural Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Aleichem is a sort of Yiddish culture hero, and is almost famous because of The Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the Dairyman (1894-1914) is the source for Fiddler, eight stories in which Tevye tells us about his troubles with his daughters. "Maybe you can tell me, though, why it is that whenever something goes wrong in this world, it's Tevye it goes wrong with?" That's the tone, always comical, or tragicomic, or comitragic.

The Railroad Stories (1902-1910) are also high on my list. This time, it's railroad passengers telling us their stories. After that, what? I have a little Dover collection, Happy New Year! and Other Stories, selected from the 1959 Stories and Satires. I've counted up at least ten other story collections in English, with who knows how much overlap. There's a lot out there.

Aleichem wrote a fake travel guide for the town he used in many stories, Inside Kasrilevke. Chapters include "Hotels", "Theaters", "Fires", "and "Bandits." I can't pass that up. There are at least a couple of novels to try, as well: The Nightingale, Or the Saga of Yosele Solovey the Cantor (1886), and Mottel the Cantor's Son (1916), which takes us to America, along with the author himself, who left Europe for New York City in 1914. Aleichem's funeral was attended by 150,000 mourners, and was covered on the front page of the New York Times.

Aleichem's contemporary I. L. Peretz is a little easier to deal with because of The I. L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse. Peretz mostly wrote short stories, as well, but this volume also includes some poetry, travel writing, and a memoir. I've come across at least six other collections as well. My understanding is that Peretz is more of a modernist than Aleichem or Sforim.

The anthology Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, edited by Ken Frieden, is just what it says, and is meant as an accompaniment to Frieden's study Classic Yiddish Fiction, which would be a logical place to continue my research.

Tomorrow, I'll continue my list with everyone who is not named Sforim, Aleichem, or Peretz. I encourage readers to leave any suggestions they might have.

* Or Seforim, or Sefarim.

A 19th century Yiddish reading list, pt. 1 - Why?

Before I went to Senegal last year, I put together a little reading list, a reader's bibliography, of Senegalese literature. Making the list was highly educational for me. So was reading the books, sure.

I don't have any plans to go anywhere anytime soon, so I am going to repeat the experiment with some place that can now only be visited through books: the Pale of Settlement, the shtetl, the New York City tenements. I'm going to read some Yiddish literature.

Modern Yiddish literature was created in the late 19th century, specifically 1864, in the serialized short novel The Little Man by S. Y. Abramovitsh aka Mendele Mocher Sforim. Before Abramovitsh/Sforim, there were traditional tales in Yiddish, and some religious writing, but no novels, no short stories. The elite wrote in Hebrew, which could not be read by most Jews. Sforim wanted to popularize, and to preserve.

Preservation - that's the center of the study of Yiddish now. Yiddish is a dying language, despite the wealth of its literary tradition. Harold Bloom, a native Yiddish speaker, recently wrote about this in an uncharacteristically humble essay in The New York Review of Books, highly recommended. Bloom foresees the day when Yiddish survives only in its literature. I'm not much help here - I'll be reading translations.

The three great early Yiddish writers, Sforim, Sholom Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz, all wrote, extensively, about the Jewish villages, the shtetl, in what is now Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. And so did later writers - I. B. Singer, Chaim Grade, Lamed Shapiro. This world is gone, utterly gone, destroyed by the Nazis. Irving Howe's anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories is dedicated "To the Six Million." Can a reader of Yiddish literature get out from under the shadow of the Holocaust, and read these writers on their own terms? Should he?

The strange, wonderful thing is that all three of these authors are basically comic writers - the whole tradition is basically comic, in the face of pogroms and persecution and poverty. That's one good reason to read them - they're funny. Or so I'm led to believe.

Tomorrow, I'll put together my little reader's bibliography of Sforim, Aleichem, and Peretz. Then on Wednesday, I'll move on to everyone else. I'm sticking to the 19th century, so no Singer brothers, for example. But there's plenty to read, and I don't think I ever mentioned that the Wuthering Expectations 19th century is longer than one might think, ending on November 11, 1918.

I'm going to create a sidebar for these posts as an invitation to help me fill out my list of books. What should I read? The mysterious, vanishing obooki says that 2009 is his year for Yiddish literature, too. So that's two of us.