Two Yiddish Writers in Texas

Texas, where I have lived for more than a quarter of a century, does not figure on the map of Yiddish literature, but as we shall see, it could lay claim to a place there on two counts. Among the states of the American heartland, it is rather Kentucky that held some resonance for the Yiddish readership, thanks to a long epic poem set there, written in 1925 by Y. Y. Schwartz. This work, titled precisely Kentucky, sings of the fortunes and misfortunes of a family of Jewish merchants from Lithuania who settled there. A geographer of Yiddish letters could not ignore Colorado either, for the great poet H. Leivick transposed elements of his snowy Siberian landscapes there during the stay he made in a Denver sanatorium to treat his tuberculosis.

Contrary to what one might imagine, the Yiddish literature of Texas does not stage cowboys, Jewish or otherwise. It is rather North Dakota that hosts them, in the novel titled Der Yidisher Cowboy, published by Isaac Raboy in 1942. Texas, for its part, is represented in the Yiddish pantheon by two writers who lived there: Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz (or Hurvits) and Chaya Rochel Andres.

Gurwitz’s work earned him an entry¹ in The Biographical Dictionary of Modern Yiddish Literature, published in New York between 1956 and 1981. Our author was born in 1859 in Minsk and received a traditional training as a rabbi and shoykhet [ritual slaughterer]. In 1910, he emigrated to the United States, by way of the port of Galveston on the Gulf of Mexico. Notables of the American Jewish community had begun to channel new arrivals toward it; there was a fear of stoking antisemitism by encouraging the expansion of the already very large Jewish population of New York. This initiative received the name “Galveston Movement” or “Galveston Plan,”² after this Texas port city, chosen as a destination on account of its medium size. Since the scarcity of the professional openings it offered would not allow a very large Jewish community to establish itself there, one could foresee a “better” distribution of the Jewish population across the region.

Rabbi Gurwitz, for his part, settled in San Antonio, where he died in 1947. There he taught Hebrew to hundreds of young Texans, required to learn the rudiments of the sacred tongue in view of their bar mitzvah. A painful task for this scholar who would have liked to display his vast knowledge of Hebrew in a more illustrious setting. He made bold to send his translations of Talmudic sayings into Yiddish rhyme to a figure as little known as Hayyim Nahman Bialik; and the latter did not fail to reply to him from Tel Aviv on July 3, 1933, with a devastating formula… of the most diplomatic kind: “What the previous generation might have appreciated will not necessarily please today’s.”³

Bialik was not at all mistaken; Gurwitz’s Yiddish poetry is a heap of doggerel verse. A rather amusing example is his version of part of the tenth saying that figures in the first chapter of the Sayings of the Fathers: Ehov et ha-m’lachah u-s’na et ha-rabbanut. “Cherish work and hate power,” that is to say “refuse to dominate others”; such, at least, is the traditional meaning accorded here to rabbanut, which nowadays would rather be understood as “rabbinate.” Now consider the rhymed translation that Gurwitz proposes of it: Arbet zolstu glaykhn / Fun rabones zolstu vaykhn,⁴ in which one understands exclusively: “You shall love work and avoid the rabbinate.” No surprise, when the latter amounts to drumming into the heads of surly little Texans the Hebrew characters they could not care less about! The immense difference in linguistic register between the chiseled Hebrew of the “Fathers” and Gurwitz’s popular Yiddish can be appreciated in the choice he makes of the word glaykhn to translate “to love.” An Americanism if ever there was one, resulting from the entirely unjustified extension (except by an imperfect homonymy) of the Yiddish word meaning “to compare” — glaykhn, cf. “to liken” in English — to the semantic field covered by “to like.” This dubious Yiddish turn of phrase spreads even to other continents; one finds it, for example, in one of the Parisian stories of Wolf Wieviorka (he is the grandfather of the family of scholars), who uses it apparently without irony.⁵ It is true that the great lexicographer Uriel Weinreich considers glaykhn used in the sense of “to be fond of” as suitable to a less careful level of style, and not as a solecism to be banished at all costs.⁶

Fortunately for Rabbi Gurwitz, the popular Yiddish that suits so ill the grave content he wishes to give his verse passes marvelously in his autobiographical prose. His memoirs,⁷ whose two volumes were published (very probably at the author’s own expense) in 1935, are written in a fluid and savory language. He does not even flinch before the worst excesses of “potato-Yiddish,” going well beyond moderately acceptable anglicisms like the glaykhn already cited. He writes, for example, that Bialik had sent him a “letter” rather than a briv⁸ — a choice explicable only by the greater prestige attached to everything American. Yet this is far from being Gurwitz’s general bent.

The account he gives of his life provides rich insights into lesser-known aspects of Jewish life in the Russian Empire, detailing, for example, the thankless existence of a rabbi in the Jewish agricultural colonies established by Tsar Nicholas I. But it is his impressions of Texas that hold our interest above all. Gurwitz harshly censures his American coreligionists who no longer grant their prestige to the most learned: in the new country, he says, the most ignorant of men can climb the highest rungs of the community ladder — and rise to the presidency of a synagogue — provided he has amassed the necessary fortune. What is more, the fate of a rabbi of the old school would be similar to that of a Jewish wife of the past. If she could be repudiated at the slightest fit of temper on her husband’s part, the officiant of worship in America can, for his part, be dismissed from his functions according to the caprices of the most influential of the faithful. Though better paid than a rabbi in Eastern Europe, he is not protected by the khazoke (tenure, right of possession) that one enjoyed back there.⁹ Gurwitz recounts having been fired following his use of Yiddish, rather than English, as the language of instruction — before being hired again as soon as the American style teacher proved not to deliver the expected results.

These ironies of fate prove particularly striking when Gurwitz makes use of the figure of the chiasmus:

In the old days, the bridegroom had to give a Talmudic lesson but did not always receive the expected gifts; nowadays, he obtains presents without having to display any knowledge. Once, a rabbi was rich in learning and poor in salary; now it is the reverse. Formerly, religious schools dispensed the Torah without pedagogy; now one no longer lacks pedagogy but one is short of Torah. When was it best: then or now? Let each decide according to his own view of things!¹⁰

Gurwitz in no way spares the Jewish elite of German origin, long established in Texas, who somewhat despise the immigrants from the Russian Empire or from Galicia. The misery of the Mexicans of San Antonio and the train compartments reserved for Blacks lead him to wonder whether life is really better in America. Toward the end of his memoirs he notes with sadness that if he has “lived through” (opgelebt) seventy years, he could not say with certainty that he has “lived” (gelebt).¹¹

Our second Yiddish writer in Texas, Chaya Rochel Andres, is of an altogether different generation from Rabbi Gurwitz. She was born forty years after him, in 1899, in Suwałki, in Poland, near Białystok; she emigrated to Dallas in 1921 and died there, nearly a centenarian, in 1996. A part-time poet, it was after the war that Andres began to publish her output in various Yiddish periodicals, such as Vokhnblat of Toronto; Zamlungen of New York; and Di Yiddishe Tsaytung of Tel Aviv. She gathered her favorite pieces into four bilingual Yiddish-Hebrew or Yiddish-English collections, the first of which appeared in Tel Aviv in 1968, and the others in Brooklyn in 1979, 1981 and 1990 — the last at the age of 90.¹²

The best creations of Chaya Rochel Andres, even if one cannot see in them masterpieces of originality, are of pretty rhythm and fine meter, without yielding to kitsch. For example, one of her poems on the Shoah, titled Pesekh – zman kheyruseynu (“Passover: the season of our freedom”), inscribes itself worthily in the tradition attested by Jacob Glatstein and Aaron Zeitlin, who recast the traditional liturgy by charging it with new questions:

Dayne kinder baym seyder veln fregn Kashes farvundert, Kler zey uf! – – A « naye hagode » mir farmogn.

Haynt vos iz tsum redn, tsum zogn ? A takhles – vi pulver tsefloygn. – – – Tserunen di blutn, af gasn, af rogn, Toyte, ofene, mentshishe oygn.

Fregn bay vemen; – – Vi kumt es? Vi geshikt zikh? – – – Aza groyl! – – – aza khurbm! – – Far gorer velt – – yidisher korbm?¹³

Your children at the seder will ask Questions, astonished. Enlighten them. We possess a “new Haggadah”! Now what is there to speak of, what to say? The meaning — scattered like gunpowder. Blood has flowed at the street corners. Eyes dead, open, human.

Of whom to ask? How does it come that…? How did it happen? Such horror! Such a khurbm [catastrophe, destruction]! A Jewish offering, for the whole world?

Chaya Rochel Andres recounts her life in a long preface to her third collection. Like her poetry, her prose is written in a purer language than Gurwitz’s. She almost never has recourse to English, unless one may legitimately despair of finding a Yiddish term to designate a typically American reality (such as “high school,”¹⁴ which is not exactly a gimnazye). In her autobiographical pages, we discover that Andres came to join uncles and aunts already established in Dallas; she had left her shtetl in haste, in order to avoid a marriage that was, if not forced, at least strongly encouraged by her parents. Her father had to apologize to the rejected fiancé in these terms: “You ought, Moyshl, to thank God for having rid you of her. God will send you the one He has predestined for you (dayn basherte).” In response to the very precise revenge the spurned suitor had imagined, the father added: “And one should not wish her to marry a negro.”¹⁵

To be sure, it was rather with a Jewish boy from a good family that Andres tied the knot soon after her arrival in Texas, once she had overcome her initial astonishment that she should be allowed to go out alone with someone of the opposite sex. But in an American South still largely infected with the virus of racism, she would take pride in living in “a neighborhood where all classes mingle, Whites, Blacks and other Mexicans”;¹⁶ and in 1947 would her house not be placed under police protection, when she and her husband hosted at their home, with a few Black guests, Henry Wallace, the former vice-president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, sidelined on account of his policy combining spiritualism and pro-Sovietism? Andres did, however, shun the extremes: despite the small number of periodicals existing in Yiddish at the end of her life, it happened to her more than once that she had to expressly cancel her subscription to the Tsukunft of New York, clearly marked on the left, whose office continued to send her issues even though she had stopped paying her subscription.

Andres’s third collection reproduces family photos. In it we see the archetypal Ashkenazi bobe (grandmother), with a round, loving, smiling face. Andres readily plays on this sentimental string that one designates in English, somewhat improperly, by the Yiddish word schmaltz (literally “fat,” in French guimauve [marshmallow, mush]). The dedication to her grandchildren that she publishes is signed in Yiddish, including in its English version, with these two words: “The Bubbeh.”¹⁷ A homonymy that would be surprising for the (rare) unforewarned Texan reader: bubba (the same pronunciation, or nearly), a distortion of “brother,” designates the hick of the American South. For example, those who reproached Bill Clinton for his populism called him a “bubba.” It is not out of the question that some robust descendant of our Yiddish poetess “bubbeh” might display a few characteristics of the “southern bubba”: after George W. Bush, was the governorship of Texas not sought by Kinky Friedman, leader of the country-western band “The Texas Jewboys”? A provocative candidacy, zany in the manner of Coluche’s campaign, “Jewboys” in one word being scarcely better than “little kikes.” But unlike the French comedian, Kinky Friedman really did run, and his iconoclastic positions — at once libertarian, centrist, and populist — won him more than 12% of the votes cast in 2006.

But let us return to our surprising figure, Chaya Rochel Andres. One may wonder why a Judeo-American grandmother — so typical in many respects! — held so firmly to literary Yiddish. Rabbi Gurwitz, for his part, had arrived in Texas at a far more advanced age than Andres, and at an earlier period too. He was therefore surrounded, for a longer time, by a great number of contemporaries deeply if not exclusively Yiddish-speaking. By his profession, he remained confined to a Jewish universe; and when he set about publishing in the 1930s, the world of Yiddish publishing was flourishing. Were he to write books, it would inevitably be in Yiddish, or in a Hebrew half-Talmudic, half-maskilic.

But Chaya Rochel Andres? She arrived much younger, toward the end of the great wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, and her coreligionists of the same age group, especially far from the great centers of Jewish population, had already, in their immense majority, opted for total linguistic assimilation; among them Yiddish served above all as an affective or lexical stopgap. Moreover, Andres, despite her involvement in the local Jewish institutions, helped her husband in a business that put her in contact with all the surrounding populations; she had enough of an Anglophone identity to give herself an Americanized first name, “Ray.”¹⁸ To be sure, in the 1920s she had managed for some time to keep alive in Dallas a school of the Yiddish fraternal society Der Arbeter-Ring, but the initiative succumbed to the economic crisis of the following decade. And it was only much later, in 1968, when the inexorable decline of literary Yiddish was already well underway, that she published her first poetry collection.

Around the same period, however, she organized a Yiddish conversation circle with other Jewish ladies of Dallas, and even managed to get readings, in Yiddish, of her own poetry broadcast on the radio, as well as monologues by Sholem Aleichem! Apart from her untimely declarations of love for the Yiddish language, one does not see Andres questioning her own singularity. We shall therefore venture the following hypothesis: apart from some poetic vocation whose cause would by definition be unfathomable, our writer’s rather solitary commitment would owe to the fact that she was, of her large immediate family (except for her father, who died before), the only one to have been spared by the Shoah. An unusual situation in this demographic stratum, if I judge from my own family and so many others like it in Brooklyn, whose numerous forebears immigrated to the United States in the years 1910–1920. It was rather rare if not unheard of for one to arrive without some of one’s closest relatives — mother, father, brother, sister, spouse or child — or not to bring them over soon afterward. By contrast, of her family of origin, Andres was surrounded in America only by somewhat more distant relatives: uncles and aunts. Welcoming though they were, she must nonetheless have been a free electron.

She is not forgotten for all that. If one sets out in search of the traces left in people’s consciousness by Rabbi Gurwitz, one must turn to the rare amateurs (and professionals¹⁹) of local Jewish history, or to the Jewish families most anciently established in San Antonio. To be sure, Chaya Rochel Andres comes from a later generation, but it is notable that she enjoys a cybernetic posterity in the form of a few pages linked to the website of the Dallas community; on one of these, she is even called “the Glückel of Dallas,” after Glückel (or Glikl) of Hameln, the seventeenth-century Jewish memoirist, one of the most remarkable figures of Yiddish literature.²⁰ On this same website, one can consult quite a number of English versions — uneven ones — published in two of Andres’s collections, as well as a few of the poems in their original Yiddish.

The personal collection of Yiddish books owned by Chaya Rochel Andres was bequeathed by her heirs to the library of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the most important research centers in the country. The considerable Judaica holdings found there have been greatly enriched by works in Yiddish offered, among others, by the Bibliothèque Medem of Paris. So that the links between the Yiddish writers in Texas and the readers of the review Plurielles are perhaps less tenuous than they would seem at first sight…

Notes