By Gabriella Safran
ISBN-10: 0804738300
ISBN-13: 9780804738309
For nineteenth-century writers and readers, profitable fictional characters have been "types," literary creations that either reflected and inspired the trajectories of genuine lives. tales approximately Jewish assimilators and converts frequently juxtaposed contrasting forms: the honest reformer or actual convert who has skilled a whole transformation, and the key recidivist or fake convert whose genuine loyalties won't ever swap. As Safran exhibits, writers borrowed those varieties from many assets, together with the radical of schooling produced by means of the Jewish enlightenment stream (the Haskalah), the political rhetoric of "Positivist" Polish nationalism, the Bible, Shakespeare, and Slavic people beliefs.
Rewriting the Jew casts new mild at the suggestion of sort itself and at the query of no matter if literature can transfigure readers. The vintage tale of Jewish assimilation describes readers who redecorate themselves after the version of fictional characters in secular texts. The writers studied right here, although, study makes an attempt at Jewish self-transformation whereas thinking about in regards to the reformability of character. In taking a look at their works, Safran relates the trendy japanese eu Jewish event to a basic query of aesthetics: Can artwork swap us?
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Extra resources for Rewriting the Jew : Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire
Example text
It would be misleading to gloss over the differences among literary projects in different languages. The maskilim tended to see Yiddish as a lowly vernacular, useful only as a tool to teach the ignorant masses; Hebrew as a more noble and elegant vehicle, albeit one that presented the author with enormous technical difficulties; and Russian and Polish as legitimate and fully functioning literary languages, the mastery of which represented the first step on the road toward a Western education. Regardless of their hesitation at identifying the Eastern European Haskalah with the Western one or with an uncompromising assimilationism, scholars agree that the central image of the successfully acculturated, usually male Jew recurs in the literary works of maskilim from disparate eras and locations and writing in various languages.
What could I ask you? ” “Nah,” Uler said with a scornful gesture. ” [Slova! 62 The memoirs of Russifying Jewish intellectuals attest to the possibility of this scene; they felt that they had bettered themselves precisely in accordance with the model they had found in Pisarev’s and Chernyshevsky’s writings. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, an early Zionist who helped revive Hebrew as a spoken language, agreed on Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? as a model for the new Jewish literature. 64 22 INTRODUCTION Non-Jewish writers too described the transformation of the Jew by means of literature, as exemplified by Raisa/Rebecca, the heroine of Rostislav Sementkovsky’s novella Evrei i zhidy [Jews and Yids].
24 What really damned him in the eyes of the Jewish historians of the twentieth century, though, was his story “Man’iak” [Maniac],25 in which he offers a series of ugly predictions for a Jewish state that some were already talking about establishing in Palestine. 26 The negative evaluation of Bogrov among the founders of Russian Jewish historiography, people like the men and women who produced the Evreiskaia entsiklopediia in the first decades of the twentieth century, may reflect both the force of a thirty-year-old antagonism and their urge to distinguish between their own endeavor and the more extreme assimilationism (and in this case even anti-Zionism) of their forebears, Bogrov included.
Rewriting the Jew : Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire by Gabriella Safran
by Christopher
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