The appearance of the first volume of a two-volume anthology of Yiddish literature is significant on more than one count. This literature still suffers from a genuine lack of recognition owing to its particular status, explored in the ample introduction by Rachel Ertel, who directs the publication. Entitled “La littérature yiddish, une littérature sans frontières” (“Yiddish Literature, a Literature Without Borders”), this prefatory text retraces a literary history that is ancient and pluricentric, underscoring the forms of life, of culture, of literature bound up with the radiance of Ashkenazi civilization over roughly a millennium. Hence the title of the collection, which cites — while subverting it — the title of Lamed Shapiro’s collection of short stories devoted to the theme of the pogrom, Le Royaume juif (The Jewish Kingdom): a phrase itself inserted into ironic play and cultural reappropriation, since it is originally a common antisemitic cliché in Tsarist Russia, designating a fantasized Jewish power, in the lineage of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These plural, evolving “Jewish kingdoms,” declining into multiple and singular literary genres, indeed deserve to be gathered into a representative whole, all the more so since some of these texts, out of print, were now to be found only rarely in bookshops and libraries. The very dense volume thus also constitutes a precious working tool for the researchers and teachers who today attempt to make this literature of tragic destiny known — a literature whose impact is measured even better now that history confers upon it a function of testimony to the life and creativity of a murdered people.
The introduction, very broad in scope, retraces the birth of Yiddish literature as a specific form, bound up with the needs of the Ashkenazi group in contact with the surrounding cultures (first Germany, then the Slavic lands, and finally the multiple places of emigration), yet always set apart by its bond with Judaism and a certain form of cultural autonomy, so long as there is no dissolution into the majority culture. It is in Eastern Europe, beginning with the period of the Enlightenment — somewhat later there, in fact — that there emerges, in all its diversity, a literature covering the whole of these needs: at once a form of life, of resistance, of identity, of aesthetic inventiveness, of ethical gravity, throughout a history that unfolds in diasporic time and space, transcending borders yet absorbing the surrounding influences, without ever renouncing its Jewish heritage and rootedness. These borderless contacts result from a form of transnational collective existence, cemented by the Yiddish language, which constantly evolves and diversifies without ever losing its power of unification and of communication from one territory to another.
Hence the panorama, at once spatial and temporal, that the anthology constitutes: from the nineteenth-century “classics,” which open the collection, to the modernists, who will be more amply represented in the second volume, but who from the outset occupy an important place in this first volume with the works of two of the most impressive Soviet Yiddish authors of the twentieth century, Der Nister and Dovid Bergelson, both murdered during the Stalinist period. Starting from a relatively circumscribed territory — that of the Russian “Pale of Settlement,” where the Jewish shtetls are concentrated, with their specific forms of life, midway between imposed constraint and preserved autonomy — the literary itinerary unfolds its richness and its geographical diversity (Russia, Ukraine, Poland), its historical diversity (Jewish life in Tsarist Russia, but also the memory of the past, echoing the present, as in Sholem Asch’s historical novel La Sanctification du Nom (Kiddush ha-Shem, The Sanctification of the Name), which, at the very moment of the ravages of the civil war in Ukraine, evokes the tragic events of 1648 and the Cossack revolt against Poland), and its generic diversity (the popular novel, like Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s Fishke der krumer (Fishke the Lame), “popular” or symbolist tales, always filtered through the artist’s fancy and irony, as in Peretz or Der Nister; the heroic-comic chronicle of shtetl life, with those Gens de Kasrilevke (The People of Kasrilevke) by Sholem-Aleykhem, a treasure of linguistic inventiveness and of humor at once tender and acerbic; up to the modernist writing of a Bergelson, who, like Chekhov, begins with the depiction of the boredom and emptiness of a world in transition)… Beyond these historical space-times, it is the permanence of forms of thought and of narrativity that the reader is invited to discover, a world made of worlds, of nested spaces that put us in communication with the past, with ourselves, with literature, in its unique and universal gesture. We await the second volume…