Everyday Jews: Scenes From a Vanished Life Read online

  Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life

  Yehoshue Perle

  Edited by David G. Roskies

  Translated from Yiddish by Maier Deshell and Margaret Birstein

  Yale University Press

  New Haven and London

  The New Yiddish Library is a joint project of the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature and the National Yiddish Book Center.

  Additional support comes from The Kaplen Foundation, the Felix Posen Fund for the Translation of Modern Yiddish Literature, and Ben and Sarah Torchinsky.

  Series editor: David G. Roskies

  Contents

  Introduction by David G. Roskies

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Notes

  Introduction

  David G. Roskies

  His plan was to write a trilogy that would encompass “more than forty years of Polish Jewish life” and would do for Yiddish letters what Gorky had done for the Russian. Where other writers might have faltered along the way, he brought this hugely ambitious work to completion, even while holding down a full-time job for thirty years. And when a night of terror descended on the world, he evaded death—first under Stalin, then under Hitler—long enough to report on Polish Jewry’s last chapter, as well as to write his own requiem. What survived was a timeless masterpiece, part of a trilogy without a known ending; two ferocious chronicles from out of the whirlwind; and a life story that unfolds as a three-act drama.

  Act I sets forth the rise of a poor Jewish lad from the Polish provinces. Yehoshue Perle (pronounced PEHR-leh), known as Shiye, was born in 1888 in Radom, a typical multiethnic Polish town, then still under Russian rule, 43 percent of whose roughly nineteen thousand inhabitants were Yiddish-speaking, observant Jews. Polish Catholics, Protestant Evangelicals, and Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians completed the mosaic. Measured by the three indicia of family pedigree, rabbinic learning, and wealth, which determined one’s standing in Jewish society, the Perle family was deficient on all counts. Home was a wooden hut with an earthen floor near the New Mill, where his father, Leyzer, eked out a living selling hay. On Fridays, in preparation for the Sabbath, the floor was sprinkled with fresh sand bought at Khane-Beyle’s store on Synagogue Street, located in the old part of town.1

  Both parents had grown children from previous marriages, but Shiye, by most accounts, was the only surviving offspring of their life together. Father expected each child to fend for himself. So when Mother left for Siberia to serve as a nanny for the child of her beautiful daughter Rukhtshe, Shiye was taken out of school and sent to work as a clerk in Yosl Green’s dry goods store, where his tenure was exceedingly brief. Nor did he last very long at his next job, as a locksmith. Thus Shiye’s formal Jewish (and smattering of Russian) education came to an end when he was twelve years old, just shy of his bar mitzvah.

  However, his mother, remembering better times, had great ambitions for her young son. After returning home from Siberia, she scraped together enough money to hire a private tutor, with whose help Shiye completed the full four-year curriculum of the local Russian gymnasium in two. On the occasion of the death of the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, the sixteen-year-old extern composed his first poem, in Russian, which he declaimed before a group of bona-fide gymnasium students decked out in their military-style uniforms.

  His mother also saw to it that Shiye learn a useful profession to take him out of poverty—accounting.2 A year later, the fateful year 1905, when tsarist Russia was torn between anarchy and democracy, hope and fear, the seventeen-year-old Shiye boarded the horse-drawn omnibus bound for the metropolis of Warsaw. (Some say he left home in the wake of a romantic debacle.) There, and for the next thirty years, he would lead a double life, working from nine to five in a starched collar and speaking perfect Polish, first as an assistant bookkeeper in a bank, then as chief accountant in a large mill. As bookkeepers go, he cut an impressive figure, his dark blue eyes framed by steel-rimmed glasses and his mustache neatly trimmed. Accustomed to frugal living, he rented a modest apartment on Orlo Street. Rumor later had it that Perle had vowed not to quit his job at the mill until he reached two “fifties”: fifty years of age and fifty thousand zlotys put away in his savings account.3

  Then there was the other Perle, jovial and ebullient, salt of the Jewish earth, who spoke his broad, superidiomatic Polish Yiddish for all the world to hear at public readings presided over by the Olympian I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), or at the more intimate literary salon of the ethnographer and cultural activist Noah Prylucki (1887–1941). Peretz, at a rehearsal of the Yiddish Drama Circle, introduced Perle to the beautiful and talented Sarah, the gravedigger’s daughter, and Prylucki launched Perle’s literary career by publishing his first, neo-romantic sketch on the Sabbath, after it was turned down by the editor of the Yiddish daily Haynt for being too “literary.”4

  Sarah was the love of his life. They married, moved to more spacious quarters on Nowolipie Street, in the heart of the Jewish district, and a son, known as Lolek in Polish and Israel on his birth certificate, was born to them in 1919.5

  These were heady years both for Poland, recently freed from tsarist domination, and for its Jews, newly liberated from the shtetl. Two of Poland’s native sons, Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905 and Wladyslaw Reymont in 1924, were awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. By the end of World War I, Warsaw had also become the new center of Yiddish cultural activity; even before Armistice Day in November 1918, the Union of Yiddish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw had moved into permanent quarters on Tłomackie 13, next door to the Great Synagogue. There, Yehoshue Perle felt very much at home.6

  Politically, too, Warsaw was a congenial place for a budding Yiddish writer with leftist leanings. Warsaw was fast becoming a bastion of the Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which represented the interests of the Jewish working class within the Social Democratic movement. Despite his starched collar and steel-rimmed glasses, Perle shared with the Bund an anti-bourgeois, anti-Zionist, and pro-Yiddish eschatology. He broke ranks with the Left over its radical secularism. Throughout his life, Perle maintained a deep interest in traditional forms of Jewish behavior and remained respectful of them. As a member of the honor guard at the grave of the prominent Yiddish and Hebrew writer Hirsh-Dovid Nomberg (1876–1927), Perle, almost alone among his fellow writers, insisted on wearing a skullcap.7

  Not surprisingly, romance and lyricism were the stuff of his early writing—a martyrological “Legend,” as retold by a grandmother (1920); In the Land of the Vistula (1921), a prose poem about a Jewish beauty seduced by a Polish nobleman; contemporary tales of seduction set among the Polish-sp
eaking, rising middle class, like the novella Mirl (1921); a prose poem about the beautiful “Ruta” (1921); and the collection of short stories provocatively titled Sins (1923). Perle’s lyricism, unfortunately, marked his work as derivative. “His whole manner of writing,” complained Shmuel Niger, the preeminent Yiddish critic of the day, “is a patchwork: a piece from here, a piece from there.”8

  Niger expected writers of the postwar generation to speak in the voice of Naturalism, the writing school that laid bare all of life’s passions, mendacity, and social evils. In Polish-Yiddish letters, the particular mode was aggressively promoted by I. M. Weissenberg (1881–1937), who failed to recognize Perle’s talent, even when twenty-five Yiddish prose writers and poets made their collective voice heard in the Warsaw Almanac of 1923, with Perle prominently among them. Alongside the critical realism of I. J. Singer (1893–1944), A. M. Fuks (1890–1974), and Leyb Olitsky (1894–1973), Perle’s novella Numbers gave Yiddish readers a slice-of-life portrayal they had never before encountered: the dreary, deracinated life of Polish Jews working in a bank owned by two pfennig-pinching Jewish brothers. At a leisurely pace, Perle takes us through fifteen identical years in the life of Jakub Winkler, a Jewish Bartleby the Scrivener—the exemplar of emptiness, thwarted desire, and total isolation; the modern, marginal man, as suggested by his very name, vinkl meaning “corner.”9 Linguistically transparent, the novella might have been written in Polish and is perhaps indebted to the great Polish realist Boleslaw Prus (1847–1912). In that same year of 1923, militant Yiddishists, with Melekh Ravitch (1893–1976) at the helm, took over the Yiddish Writers’ Club, and Perle was elected to the new board.10 Economic security, true love, and literary success—by the age of thirty-eight, Perle seemed to be firmly established.

  Act II began and ended with catastrophe. One day in 1926, as Melekh Ravitch, his colleague, neighbor, and fellow accountant, would recall, the Warsaw Yiddish literati came running to Perle’s apartment and found him lying on the floor in a paroxysm of grief. In a corner hung the lifeless body of his wife, her long braids askew. Sarah had left no suicide note. For months on end, the bereaved husband would cry out to anyone who listened: “Why did she do it? Why did she do it?”11

  Following this tragedy, Perle resolved never to remarry and to dedicate his efforts to Lolek. Hoping to augment his income—he would now need a full-time housekeeper for his son—Perle turned to the fastest-growing literary commodity, the market for shund, trashy, serialized novels. Writing under the pseudonym of three asterisks, laid out just so—

  —Perle began churning out sensational serializations for the Yiddish daily Moment with such titles as: Jewish Blood, Downhill, Behind Seven Locks, Reviled and Rebuked, Gold and Bread. Each installment was avidly awaited by a new mass market of Yiddish readers potentially numbering in the millions, young and old, male and female, pious and freethinking. Perle, of course, was not alone in exploiting this lucrative sideline. Even serious writers of respectable backgrounds, like Yitskhok Bashevis (I. B. Singer; 1904–1991) and Aaron Zeitlin (1889–1973), were guilty of the practice, not to mention Israel Rabon (1900–1942), from the rough-and-tumble city of Lodz, the Manchester of Poland.12 For some reason, however, it was Perle who bore the brunt of the acrimony. The “Three Asterisks” became synonymous with the sellout of Yiddish culture to “the bourgeois yellow-sheet press.” Perle was blamed for corrupting the morals of Jewish youth. Itzik Manger even demanded that Perle (and Rabon) be hauled before a literary tribunal,13 and Perle was publicly rebuked by Kadia Molodowski at the General Assembly of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club on November 1, 1933.14 But the cruelest blow came at a special “Day of Yiddish Literature” in August 1935, observed at the World Gathering of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Over eight hundred people were in attendance at the Vilna Conservatory of Music. When Perle began reading from his work, some younger members of the audience shouted, “Get down from the stage, you pornographer!” Perle was visibly crushed, and the festive day came to an abrupt end.15

  Since 1930, Perle had been hard at work on something entirely different. “I am writing a book in three parts,” he told a reporter, “about the bygone generation … thirty years of Jewish life. I couldn’t find the form, the tone, until Gorky showed me the way with his My Universities.”16 At about the same time as Henry Roth in New York procured a copy of Joyce’s banned Ulysses and realized that “you didn’t have to move out of your environment, out of an urban slum, to get all the material you wanted—convertible into great literature,” Perle discovered the key to his own childhood and youth. “A writer has no secrets,” Gorky revealed to him. “He must expose with absolute honesty.”17 Just as Gorky began his autobiographical trilogy with a death, so too would Perle; poverty, ignorance, and cruelty rounded out the curriculum as taught by life’s universities.

  Yidn fun a gants yor: a bukh fun a fargangen lebn—Everyday Jews: Scenes from a Vanished Life—was published in the spring of 1935 to mixed reviews. The official Bundist press was scandalized by the sex scenes, a sad legacy, it claimed, of Perle’s career as a pornographer. Yitskhok Bashevis (Singer), recently arrived in America, complained that the novel was too bleak to be psychologically credible, its autobiographical hero (whom Perle had even neglected to describe) coming from a home at once “gray and impoverished” and “umheymlekh, forbidding.” Niger, too, took issue with the novel’s bleakness, while noting that Mendl, the novel’s young narrator, was a close cousin of Sholem Aleichem’s antic orphan Motl, the cantor’s son. In the last (perfunctory) analysis, however, according to Niger, Perle’s novel “lacked an idea.”18

  Rachel Auerbach (1903–1976) finally rose to Perle’s defense in the leading Yiddish literary review. She cautioned against reading Perle’s realism too naively, pointing to the novel’s analogical structure as a measure of its subtle modernist design. True to the dictates of a Bildungsroman, Everyday Jews followed a loose chronology, its individual episodes and the fate of its protagonists obeying a “spiral” pattern, a constant ebb and flow that mimicked the rhythm of its young hero’s life. So too the flow of ethnographic detail, never fetishized; the treatment of Jewish-Christian relations, which can so often deteriorate into kitsch; and the remarkable richness of the Yiddish, worthy of independent study. All told, Auerbach proclaimed, there was a truthfulness to this work, an existential honesty almost absent from the rest of contemporary Yiddish fiction.19 Gorky’s example, in other words, had been faithfully upheld.

  On the strength of Everyday Jews Perle was accepted back into the fold. Dramatic changes followed. The mill where he had been employed burned down; he gave up his career as a purveyor of shund in the pages of Moment; he joined the full-time staff of the Bundist Folkstsaytung; and he was elected to the Warsaw branch of the Yiddish P.E.N. Club, which in turn conferred upon Everyday Jews one of three I. L. Peretz Awards for the best original Yiddish works to appear in recent years. Blackballed and humiliated at the YIVO gathering in Vilna, Perle was definitively rehabilitated in Warsaw as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration of the Bund, held in the Nowości Theater on November 15, 1937. Two one-time literary awards were conferred at this occasion: the best-writer award to the thirty-six-year-old Itzik Manger, and the best-novel award to the forty-nine-year-old Perle.20

  If the Bund now claimed to be the standard-bearer of Yiddish culture and sought to enlist all Yiddish writers under its banner, some Yiddish writers resisted and voted with their feet. Melekh Ravitch was the first to leave Poland—for Melbourne and, later, for other exotic destinations—followed by Kadia Molodowski and Yitskhok Bashevis, who settled in New York. (“How sad it is without him,” Perle wrote to Ravitch, a sentiment that Bashevis never reciprocated.21)

  By this time, Polish Jewry was under siege. “We’re being slaughtered,” he reported to Ravitch. “In the small towns”—referring to the recent pogroms in Przytyk and Minsk Mazowiecki—“Jews won’t go to bed, for fear they’ll be murdered in their sleep.” As if in direct response, Perle’s literary am
bitions expanded. His projected trilogy was now to encompass “over forty years of Jewish life in Poland,” from the 1880s to the 1920s.22 Moving from the narrow, psychologically defined, autobiographical perspective of Everyday Jews, its sequel, Di gildene pave (1937)—The Golden Peacock: A Novel in Two Parts—assumed a completely unexpected form, as Perle reverted to the sensational plot devices, moral dichotomies, broad geographic-historical canvas, and sentimentality of his earlier shund production. In a note, Perle urged readers to find “traces” of Everyday Jews in the sequel.23

  The hope was in vain. Except for the theme of marital deception, a rambling plot driven by the inchoate longings of a woman, and cameo appearances by minor characters from Everyday Jews, the two works have little in common. Instead of an older Mendl, as one would have expected, occupying the center of consciousness, The Golden Peacock stars Perle’s beautiful half-sister, called by her real name, Rukhtshe, who vies with the virtuous Sheyndl (“the beautiful one”) for the affections of a man known as “the second Paganini,” the virtuoso folk fiddler Kaddish. Even though Sheyndl dies in childbirth midway through The Golden Peacock, by the end of the third work in the series, titled Gilgulim (1939)—Metamorphoses—we still don’t know whether Rukhtshe and Kaddish will ever get together again—and we may never find out. The one extant copy of the volume—the sequel to the sequel, so to speak—deposited in the National Library of Poland on the very eve of the Nazi invasion, is missing its last pages.24

  Act III of the Perle life story is nothing less than the tragic fate of Polish Jewry. There were two escape routes, and Perle attempted them both. In September 1939, he joined tens of thousands of refugees fleeing eastward to the Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union as part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Sometime in November, along with his son Lolek and new daughter-in-law Yudis, he reached Lwów/Lemberg, where the newlyweds found work as engineers. Twenty-one-year-old Lolek, a member of the (illegal) Polish Communist Party, no longer had reason to fear; not so Perle senior. The moment a Soviet Writers’ Union was established in a requisitioned palace on Copernicus Street, embracing three nationalities—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—the family of Polish-Yiddish writers turned against itself. Writers once united in the Warsaw Almanac began denouncing one another; as a prominent Bundist (and thus anathema to their traditional Communist antagonists), Perle was especially vulnerable. However, the Polish Communist poet Elżbieta Szemplińska came to Perle’s defense, and he was admitted into the Union.25 The delegations of Soviet-Yiddish writers from Moscow and Kiev, eager to reunite with their Polish brethren after a terrible decade of separation, also came to his rescue. Peretz Markish (1895–1952), who had spent his salad days in Warsaw, was especially welcoming. A 1940 group photo of the Yiddish writers’ colony in Lwów shows Perle seated second from the left, looking at Markish. This photo became one of Perle’s most cherished possessions. The Soviet regime showered Perle with all the usual rewards—public readings before factory workers; translation into Russian; a trip to Kiev as an honored guest; and lucrative book contracts, provided that he submit his work to censorship, which he willingly did.26