My relationship with the Forverts started in adolescence, when I first heard of it from one of my teachers at the Yidishe Schule in Mexico. He was a refugee from the war and an old-fashioned intellectual with a Sisyphus complex: His fanciful, lifelong mission was to introduce Mexican Jewish youngsters to Yiddish. In class, we had been reading Israel Joshua Singer’s novel “The Family Carnovsky” in Yiddish, and I was impressed by the author’s epic view of Polish life. When I told this to my teacher, he promised to lend me other books in Yiddish, which he did, officiously, the next day: a volume of Peretz’s writings, as well as “Yoshe Kalb.” He pointedly did not give me any of the work of Singer’s younger sibling, Isaac Bashevis, whom he looked down upon (an opinion my grandmother, also a reader of literature, shared: Bashevis, she said, was a “pornographer”), but he did give me a copy of the newspaper that published him — the Forverts, a place “where both the writers and readers are of high quality.”
I took an immediate interest. Soon I began to write in Yiddish. My first literary pieces were inspired by what my teacher gave me, and by other wonderful stuff I stumbled upon in general libraries: Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In my senior year of high school, I wrote a play, again in Yiddish, inspired by the work of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
When I moved to New York in 1985, the fact that I could buy my weekly copy at newsstands felt like a huge cultural leap, since access to the paper in Mexico was restricted. (My grandmother subscribed to a local Yiddish publication of suspicious quality.) I still have a vivid memory of a Sunday-morning pilgrimage to the historic building on the Lower East Side, from which the editorial offices moved in 1974. My experience happened a few weeks after my arrival. I moved in with an Italian roommate who had communist sympathies. We shared an apartment on Broadway and 121st Street. The two of us were still novices in the art of navigating the Manhattan map, and it took us almost six hours to find the place. Since we were fans of “Call It Sleep,” the trip also had the purpose of visualizing the scenario where Henry Roth’s protagonist child undergoes his epiphanies. Exhausted yet exhilarated, I remember writing my mother a letter in Yiddish that night about the outing. I told her that, more than ever, I wanted to become a Jewish writer and that I wanted to write for the Forverts.
On May 22, 1990, less than 100 years after the Yiddish paper’s foundation, the first issue of the English-language edition, called the Forward, came out. Although it cost 75 cents, free copies were in abundance on the Upper West Side in banks, pastry shops, even pizzerias. I grabbed one right away, thrilled about the paper’s new life. To me, its existence announced that American Jews were ready to look at themselves through a different prism. English wasn’t a gentile language anymore; it was a language of the Jews, showcasing their verbal cadence, their psychological traits.
What I felt while reading it still isn’t easy to explain, and in many ways it put me at odds with members of my literary generation. I already knew by then, without a reasonable doubt, that I wanted to make a life for myself in the United States. But I was still a correspondent for newspapers and magazines in Spain, Mexico and Venezuela. Virtually all my work was done in the Spanish language. But reading the Forward made me want to become an American writer — to add a different perspective to Jewish life north of the Rio Grande. My Hispanic heritage was seldom taken into account in Jewish circles, which were defined by a Eurocentric (non-Sephardic) appreciation. There were other Diasporas worthy of attention. If in Yiddish, the Forverts had helped Jewish immigrants become Americans, the English version could make them be less parochial, more cosmopolitan, a feat achievable only by adding another perspective, by helping them look at themselves through other lenses.
Of course, in doing so, I myself became an American Jew. I found a copy of Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers.” I reread Isaac Bashevis Singer, now away from the tutelage of teachers and grandmothers. And I become convinced of the social side of literature: To write isn’t exclusively an aesthetic effort, but a historical one, too. I realized that the writer’s only responsibility is to make full use of his talent as witness and participant of the time into which he was accidentally placed, to discern the major issues that define it, to use the imagination as a mirror to better understand our place in history.
My debut in the Forward occurred in 1994. It was one paragraph, accompanying an excerpt from “Camacho’s Wedding Feast,” from Alberto Gerchunoff’s “The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas.” I had selected the story for my anthology “Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers,” the first book I ever sold to a New York publisher. Since then, I’ve been blessed with a string of superb editors, with whom I’ve developed a strong friendship: Jonathan Rosen, Robin Cembalest, Blake Eskin and Alana Newhouse. They’ve taught me how to be more succinct, less flamboyant with my style. Over the years I’ve had sustained discussions with them (over lunch, on the phone, at panels, in trips oversees) about the function of criticism in the age of the Internet.
It’s no euphemism to say that with their help, I learned how to write in English, how to appraise and reflect on culture in the broadest sense of the term: local and global, private and public. Other writers of my age seem allergic to the ethnic press, perceiving it as at once parochial and passé. Mine is the opposite view. The readers of El Diario/La Prensa, where I’ve had a weekly column, are neither sophisticated nor affluent, but they have the pulse of America, a nation mapped across racial lines, where Latinos are already a country within a country.
The syncopated pages of the Forward — whose influence in political, social and cultural terms has only grown in almost two decades — represent, in my view, a return to ethnicity by American Jews. They serve as a digest of a community reawakening to the excesses of assimilation — a register of the dreams, emotions and ideas we have, about ourselves and the world at large. What I enjoy in them is precisely what I can’t find elsewhere: the feeling that I belong to a small group, and that the group has a purpose, a raison d’être. In many ways, this feeling is a reversal of the mission of the Enlightenment, when European Jews were invited to be equals in the banquet of Western Civilization. Their acceptance was about erasing difference, about giving up a “primitive” religion, while becoming citizens, with all the rights and privileges thereof. Today, Jews are indeed equals — perhaps a little too much. Our role in shaping worldwide secular culture since the French Revolution is unquestionable, and in the United States it is perhaps even more central. But there’s nostalgia for what was lost along the way, and perhaps even the awareness of a betrayal that took place. With equality, Jews might have lost a cherished quality: uniqueness. Is there a way to recover it?
Ironically, almost every time I file a piece to the editorial offices of the Forward, the image comes to mind of Edmund Wilson, dean of American literary critics in the 20th century. His oeuvre represents the most distilled example of calibrated wisdom and accessible, aesthetically pleasing style. As Wilson attempted to reflect, in one lucid essay after another, the value of novels by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos and William Faulkner, he also became infatuated with his country’s past, and on the Iroquois Indians in particular. The tension between the particular and the universal defines his thought, and it is this tension that intrigues me, too. As Jews, the more we erase our differences, the more we emphasize them.
My Yiddish teacher in Mexico died years ago. Sometimes I wish we could sit together again and shmooze about his gift to me.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His next book, “Love and Language” (Yake University Press), will be released in October.
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No, English is not a language of the Jews (see the 4th paragraph of the above article). It is, obviously, a language of the gentiles. One cannot appreciate Yiddish literature if one is totally unfamiliar with the Jewish narrative and the traditions of antiquity. This is not the case for the English speaking Jews of America whose native language is not an indication of obvious Jewishness. Perhaps it is difficult to admit that the process of Americanization has not been an entirely positive experience. Perhaps it is difficult to say that most adult American Jews are quite illiterate in the abc's of the Jewish world. Yet, it is a disservice to the Forward's reading public to pretend that being a speaker of American English is simply the same Jewish cultural experience as being a speaker of Yiddish or Hebrew. It's not.
This week's Forward has reported that the grandson of Hertzl had visited "Palestine" when serving in the British armed forces. Obviously, if the American English of the Forward were not "a gentile language anymore", as Ilan Stavans claims, the report would have told us that Hertzl's grandson had been in "the Land of Israel". All languages have a cultural point of reference, reflecting the roots and perspectives of its speakers. In all Jewish languages, one simply says "eretz yisrael" which comes from the very heart of the Jewish tradition and memory - and so it always was also in the pre-1948 Yiddish Forward. Saying "Palestine" indicates that the perspective of the non-Jewish culture has replaced the Jewish point of reference. Hence, as Yehuda has pointed out, the English language of the Forward is not an indication of Jewishness. The adopting of English is a reflection of adopting another people's point of view.
It's really quite self-evident that living in (let's say) a Hebrew-speaking society and living in (let's say) a Spanish-speaking society are not the same Jewish experience. It's true that one can be a committed Jew anywhere in the world and in any language; however, it's simply nonsense to claim that English is a Jewish language. Language is a chief component of group-identity and self-identity, and so living in Hebrew is a Jewish experience with Jewish content. A child going to "kitta alef" in Israel is having a different experience than the Jewish child going to "first grade" in an English speaking community. The claim of Ilan Stavans that the Forward in English is now just the same as the Forward in Yiddish is simply a pretense that all the forces of assimilation have been mere trivialities that haven't change the essence of Jewish life. However, the Yiddish speakers had a primary Jewish identity. Their English speaking great-grandchildren generally have an American primary identity, because their adopted language is a carrier of another culture and another point of view.
My name is Abe Nosnik. I'm writing from Mexico City. I find fascinating both Ilan Stavan's article and the comments around it. I also attended the "Yiddishe Shule in Mexico". If I am nor mistaken, I am older than Ilan for a couple of years. I wonder who the teacher of his story was? Anyhow, the point is if languages other than Yiddish (or Ladino, in the Sephardic tradition) reflect or not the Jewish soul? Stavans mentioned the "Mishpoje Karnowski", the book written by I.B. Singer's brother. I confess that after I read it in Spanish I was ready to enjoy it in Yiddish and since we were not fluent enough in Yiddish, in class our teacher read the book for us. The former paragraph poses an interesting question: Which language is the Jewish language? Many languages through history have expressed what the Jewish soul wanted to communicate. At least, that is my point of view. Interesting contradictions arise while search for the answer: According to my teachers at school, Scholem Aleichem wrote first in the Russian language because he wanted to be universal but it was not until he began to write in Yiddish that he became universal indeed. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to admit that there are instances in our history that we expressed our soul in languages other than those considered Jewish languages. Isn't Yiddish a Jewish German and Ladino a Hebrew-style 14th Century Spanish? I don't have a clear answer to the above questions. But I only want to say that the Jewish identity and soul contains all the contradictions of the human identity and soul. What we don't need is to be dogmatic about what is the Jewish language and the Jewish soul "par excellance", because I think, in the final analysis, it does not exist. I finish with an anecdote. Years ago I was in Israel, in Eretz Israel. I was watching an Asian looking woman cleaning up a table. She said to me: Why are you starring at me? I apologized and she insisted: Why are you so watching me like that? I responded: Because I wonder if you are Jewish? She said: Of course I am Jewish, why do you wonder? I said: Because you don't look Jewish to me! She replied: From where I come from YOU don't look Jewish! Who looks Jewish! In what language does the Jewish language expresses itself the best? I still ask myself that question and I'm sure there are as many answers as rich and varied as the Jewish experience!
Peretz - you are certainly right in saying that "any language can be the language of the Jew" - yet, that doesn't mean that his language is a Jewish language. A language is a creation of a society, and it reflects the experience of that society. When one speaks Hebrew, there will always be a reference to the Jewish experience. If someone has a brainstorm to solve some serious problem, for example, he might make his suggestion and then say: "u-va le-tziyyon goel" (which is taken from the expectation of the ideal messianic era). Yiddish is likewise rich in references to the collective Jewish identity, as you surely know. English expresses a different (non-Jewish) experience, even if the speaker is a Jew for whom English is his first language.
I was born in America to a family that is observant, kosher and mindful of our ways of life. I also speak English as my primary language and I am still a Jew and know my ABC's of Judaism. I also speak Yiddish and Spanish fluently. I was amazed at the thought of hearing Yiddish in Mexico. I guess it never occurred to me (American ethnocentrism I suppose - :-) ). Any language can be the language of the Jew. Literature should one that can transport you to any culture or era. Any culture should be able to 'get' the feeling and mood and pathos of a different culture through literature regardless of where they are. Yiddish is just one extremely beautiful way to do it. I am so grateful that I can speak it, unfortunately, since my grandmother passing away years ago and my mother being awfully hard-of-hearing, I don't hear it anymore. I live through the internet and the Forvetz. Yippee!