"The Jewish Regime" by Lamed Shapiro (1919, translated by Heather Valencia)

Yesterday the Chief Rabbi in the city of Kiev in the Ukraine advised the Jewish residents of the area to be prepared to have to leave their homes and flee the area to avoid directed mob violence against them.   Acts of Atrocity have been reported by the BBC and CNN.   I think somewhere Lamed Shapiro said "never again".

Lately I have been read short stories by Lamed Shapiro some of which center on the pogroms against Jews carried out in the area of Kiev, Shapiro's home until he emigrated to the USA. Short stories like "The Cross" and "The Kiss" take us inside pogroms and let us see the terrible violence against Jews.  In one sustained pogrom, over 200,000 people were killed.  The Cossacks were the arm of the government, the conservatives. 

"The Jewish Regime", sometimes translated as "The Jewish Government"  is a story that almost is a prophecy of what might happen again in the Kiev area.  As the story opens more and more violence by Gentiles is wrought on Jews.  Many Gentiles use it as an excuse to steal, some take delight in killing.  Then the Cossacks arrive and the Jews of Kiev are ordered to leave the city. Many are packed in railroad cars, thousands take to the road carrying what they can. Cossacks whip or use their sabers on stragglers.  It is unclear, of course, who gave the direct order to the Cossacks, that way the Tsarist authorities can always deny involvement.  

"The Jewish Regime" is very vivid description of the horrors of anti-Semitic violence in the Ukraine in the opening decades of the last century.

Let us hope no one ever needs to right a similar story about Kiev in this century.  

Mel u

"The Chair" by Lamed Shapiro (1934, translated by Rueben Barcovithch)

Nicola Sacco (April 22, 1891 – August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti(June 11, 1888 – August 23, 1927) were Italian-born anarchists who were convicted of murdering two men during the robbery of a shoe factory in Massachusetts,  United States in 1920.  They were electrocuted.  There was and still is a lot of controversy surrounding their executions.  They became iconic figures to those on the left wing of American politics who felt they were falsely convicted due to their political beliefs.  Joan Baez recorded a song about them.  

"The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti" by Joan Baez

Father, yes, I am a prisoner

Fear not to relay my crime

The crime is loving the forsaken

Only silence is shame

And now I'll tell you what's against us

An art that's lived for centuries

Go through the years and you will find

What's blackened all of history

Against us is the law

With its immensity of strength and power

Against us is the law

Police know how to make a man

A guilty or an innocent

Against us is the power of police

The shameless lies that men have told

Will ever more be paid in gold

Against us is the power of the gold

Against us is racial hatred

And the simple fact that we are poor

My father dear, I am a prisoner

Don't be ashamed to tell my crime

The crime of love and brotherhood

And only silence is shame

With me I have my love, my innocence

The workers and the poor

For all of this I'm safe and strong

And hope is mine

Rebellion, revolution don't need dollars

They need this instead

Imagination, suffering, light and love

And care for every human being

You never steal, you never kill

You are a part of hope and life

The revolution goes from man to man

And heart to heart

And I sense when I look at the stars

That we are children of life, death is small

"The Flight" takes place right after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.  It begins in a cafeteria in Boston, a place where all sorts of strongly left oriented men of all sorts spent their time.  Many identified themselves as communists or socialists.  As Yiddish socialists and communists began to feel at home in America, they became involved with left wing zealots from many different countries.  We see this in the cast of characters in the cafeteria.  One of the more interesting characters is Jake, an African American.  His dream that he is being executed in the electric chair by the governor of Massachusetts was disturbingly real.  Shapiro made me feel I was there in the cafeteria.   

I am finding strong similarities in the work of Saadat Hasan Manto and Lamed Shapiro.  I will try to talk about this more as I read on in their short stories.

Mel u

"White Challah" by Lamed Shapiro (1919, translated by Norbert Guterman)

The short stories of Lamed Shapiro (see my prior posts on his work for background information) are among the most powerful I have ever read.  They provide a vivid, at times horrifying look at the hatred and mindless cruelty with which Jewish people were treated in the Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century.  Horrible vicious pathological anti-Jewish tendencies in the European psyche hardly originated with the Nazis.  Shapiro's stories about the pogroms of Russia are terribly violent, deeply felt works.   If I taught a course on the short story I would assign his most famous story "The Cross" as part of the required readings.  I urge all those who dismiss the short story as "trivial" to read his stories.  

"The White Challah", named for a traditional served on religious holidays bread of Eastern European Jews, is told from the point of a young man drafted to fight in an army in Russia.  Maybe it was the army of the Czar, maybe the communists.  He does not seem to really know.  To him all of the troubles of Russia, the only world he knows, are caused by the Jews.  He repeats over and over that the Jews deserve any cruelty done to them because they sold Christ.   He repeats this over and over.

Conditions in the army are terrible.  He endures trench warfare, sadistic officers, dehumanizing violence, near starvation and through it out he and almost all his fellow soldiers blame the Jews.

Shapiro does as good a job of showing the horrors of war from the point of view of the foot soldier as any author I have read.  Anyone who sees glory in wars needs to read this story.  There is so much in this story.  In one incredible scene, the starving soldier breaks into the house of a Yiddish family.  He demands food, but he cannot speak their language.  He sees a loaf of white challah and he marvels at its wonderful taste.  The encounter ends in an act of unspeakable cruelty in which we see how the war had transformed a young country boy into a vicious animal.  Under the surface, we see how the rulers of the culture use Jews as a way to hide their own greed and failures and focus the hatred of their citizens away from them. 

"The Man and His Servant" by Lamed Shapiro (1910, ten pages, translated by Heather Valencia)

Lamed Shapiro (there is background information on him in my prior posts) is one of the great short story writers of the early 20th century.  He is a superb chronicler of Yiddish culture, both in the Ukraine 

and in New York City.  He was born in the Ukraine and died in Los Angeles, California.  There is great pain in his stories, a hatred of senseless ignorant violence.  "The Cross", about a pogrom in the Ukraine, is his most famous story.  His "The Kiss" is a terrible, harsh story, stark in its violence and hatred.  You won't easily forget these stories.

"The Man and his Servant" is set, I believe based on details, in the Central Park area of New York City. It is more of a "modern" story than the two I mentioned.  No one speaks, there is little plotting, and we are left with a difficult question when we try to understand the ending.  A man is being rolled through the park by his servant, the man is very old, his servant is a young blond man.  They almost never talk, the man just gives a barely perceptible nod in the direction he wants to go.  The park is full of lovers, cavorting in the bushes in various combinations (Lamed was pretty explicit about sex for 1910).  A young woman sees him and says he a disgusting old wreck of a man.  They approach a canon, from it seems The American Revolution.  The old man begins to think, maybe of a different canon in another place.

  

Please share your favorite Yiddish works with us.

Mel u

"The Kiss" by Lamed Shapiro (1907)

Lamed Shapiro (born 1878 in the Ukraine, died 1948 in Los Angeles, California) is best now know for his short stories dealing with the violence and cruelty of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine.  I have previously posted on the most famous of Shapiro's pogrom stories, "The Cross" and on two other of his short stories, "At Sea" and "New Yorkish".  This morning I read another of his pogrom stories, "The Kiss" (translated by Jeremy Dauber).

As this story opens Reb Shakhne has just left his store, not even locking it up, to run home to check on his family as a pogrom had just begun.  His wife and children are not there, he prays they have found a safe place to hide. 

A group of young toughs charges into his house and begin to smash up everything they don't want to steal.  Among them is the son of one of his old employees.  Shakhne pleads for mercy but the son initiates terrible violence on him.  The thug tells him if he will remove his shoes and kiss his feet he will call off the attack.  Shakhne instead savagely bites the man's foot.  The resulting violence is horrific and graphically described.

They depart smashing every thing in the house they don't want to take with them.

"The Kiss" is a harsh, vivid account of the terrible cruelty toward Jewish people in the Ukraine in the first decade of the 20th century.  

I offer my thanks to Yale University Press for a very generous gift of books.  Yiddish literature is a world class literary treasure of the highest level.  

There is some background information on Shapiro and Yiddish literature in my prior posts on his work.

Please share your experience with Yiddish literature with us.

Mel u

 

"Pour Out Thy Wrath" by Lamed Shapiro 1908 - The Reading Life Yiddish Literature Project

"I pity the poor immigrant

Who wishes he would’ve stayed home" by Bob Dylan

Like Irish Short Stories, one of my literary passions, many Yiddish short stories are about immigration and the forces that drive people from their homeland.

"Pour Out Thy Wrath" is the third story by Lamed Shapiro I have read.  Yiddish literature is a largely new reading life area for me.  My only real prior exposure was in a collection of stories by Isaac Babel. 

Many Yiddish speakers, mostly from Eastern Europe, many from the Austro-Hungarian Empire or European Russia immigrated to America. Most left to escape terrible anti-semitism, culminating in the Holocaust.  After the long ocean voyage, normally in steerage, almost all immigrants landed on Staten Island.  Many never left New York City.  "Pour Out Thy Wrath" begins with a harrowing account of the voyage to America.  The son, who narrates the story, tells of a horrible night where his father was beaten and his mother may have been raped that was the final event that drove them to leave. It is on this day he learns the word "Goyem" and knows he must fear them.

Just as true today, the children of the family are the first too learn the language and adjust.  The family lives in a tenement in New York City.  The building seems about half Italian, half Jewish immigrants, .  The son loves the streets of New York City, he has pretty much forgotten their old town in the Ukraine and their old ways.  The action peaks on a high holy Jewish holiday.  The mother is having the hardest time adjusting, having illness and depressions.   She begins to cheer up a bit as she fixes a traditional holiday meal, not like at home but still it is something. Then something strange happens.  I admit I did not feel I understood the close of the story as it draws on Yiddish culture and myths but does not say enough to allow me to unravel it with Google.  A strange figure, a man, appears at the door.  The mother begins to scream in total fear.  The husband is deeply terrified also.  The Italian neighbors do not understand at all as they see no mysterious sinister figure.  I am assuming this is a reference to memories of Pogroms, nights of terror which the family thought they had left behind in Europe. 

There is background information on Lamed Shapiro in my prior posts on his stories.  There are fourteen stories in The Cross and Other Stories, for sure I will read all of them and I suspect I will post on many of them.  

I wish to thank Yale University Press for a very generous gift that has opened up a new reading life world to me.

Please share your experience with Yiddish literature with us.

"Night" by Lamed Shapiro 1920 -The Reading Life Yale Yiddish Collection Project

"Night" is a beautiful deeply moving, lyrical account of being on the deck on a steam ship from Europe to America in 1918 or so.  (This is my third post, hopefully of many more to come on Lamed, there is background information on him and Yiddish literature and culture in my prior posts and there is a wealth of material online.  My thinking as a blogger is that many of my highly literate readers were educated in south Asian academies with little instruction on Yiddish literature so I have and will continue to make what I hope are well chosen citations to inform them and myself.)

The passage from the old world where you understood the rules, especially if you are from a small town where you knew everyone, to America where you might arrive not knowing anyone, without speaking English and in clothes that marked you out as an immigrant,  was one of great emotional power.  You were on a ship of Babel where many languages you did not know were spoken. The sea seemed endless, it power a reflection of the power of God it is unfathomable depth.  Lamed brings this out beautifully in "Night".  It is not really a traditionally structured story so much as a prose poem.  It made be think of Whitman.  You can sense the tremendous excitement and the trepidation of the narrator.   The passage was also a time to think deeply, there was not a lot to do on these ships.

I offer my thanks to Yale University Press for their very generous gift of books that makes my project possible. 

"New Yorkish" by Lamed Shapiro -1931 The Reading Life Yale Yiddish Literature Project. -What is Yiddish?

In order to help myself and anyone else understand Yiddish literture to any degree we need to know certain simple things.  One is what is the history of the language.  For one example about 250,000 Americans can speak,it, most are in New York City.  Here is a good summery I found online-

The Yiddish Language 

Yiddish was at one time the international language of Ashkenazic Jews (the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe and their descendants). A hybrid of Hebrew and medieval German, Yiddish takes about three-quarters of its vocabulary from German, but borrows words liberally from Hebrew and many other languages from the many lands where Ashkenazic Jews have lived. It has a grammatical structure all its own, and is written in an alphabet based onHebrew characters. Scholars and universities classify Yiddish as a Germanic language, though some have questioned that classification.

At its height less than a century ago, Yiddish was understood by an estimated 11 million of the world's 18 million Jews, and many of them spoke Yiddish as their primary language. Yiddish has fallen on hard times, a victim of both assimilation and murder. Today, less than a quarter of a million people in the United States speak Yiddish, about half of them in New York. Most Jews know only a smattering of Yiddish words, and most of those words are unsuitable for polite company. But in recent years, Yiddish has experienced a resurgence and is now being taught at many universities. There are even Yiddish Studies departments at Columbia and Oxford, among others, and many Jewish communities provide classes to learn Yiddish. Many Jews today want to regain touch with their heritage through this nearly-lost language.

Yiddish is referred to as "mame loshn" ("loshn" rhymes with "caution"), which means "mother tongue," although it is not entirely clear whether this is a term of affection or derision. Mame loshn was the language of women and children, to be contrasted with loshn koydesh, the holy tongue of Hebrew that was studied only by men. (And before the feminists start grinding their axes, let me point out that most gentile women and many gentile men in that time and place could not read or write at all, while most Jewish women could at least read and write Yiddish).

The word "Yiddish" is the Yiddish word for "Jewish," so it is technically correct to refer to the Yiddish language as "Jewish" (though it is never correct to refer to Hebrew as "Jewish"). At the turn of the century, American Jews routinely referred to the Yiddish language as "Jewish," and one of my elderly aunts continues to do so. However, that usage has become unfashionable in recent years and people are likely to think you are either ignorant or bigoted if you refer to any language as "Jewish." Likewise, the Yiddish word "Yid" simply means "Jew" and is not offensive if used while speaking Yiddish or in a conversation liberally sprinkled with Yiddish terms, but I wouldn't recommend using the word in English because it has been used as an offensive term for far too long.

From the web page Judism 101

I hope to advance my understanding of this culture as I read the wonderful works in The Yale Digital Yiddish Library.  

In her editing of the collection The Cross and Other Jewish Stories of Lamed Shapiro Leah Garrett divides the stories into three groups, one of the sections is devoted to stories set in America.  Lamed Shapiro was very much a "stranger in a strange land" as he tried to figure out a way to live in America.  Many speakers of Yiddish ("Yiddish" means "Jewish" in the Yiddish language) settled in New York City upon immigration.  "New Yorkish" does a marvelous job of letting us see how it might have felt for Shapiro, an unmarried man, to walk the streets of NYC.  There is an old line from a song by Jim Morrison,  "Women are wicked when you are alone".   We see how the truth of this shapes the narrator's perceptions as he meets, goes out with, and sleeps with a waitress in a diner, all in one day. As he enters the diner, the narrator wonders about the ethnic and cultural background of all the customers and his waitress.  He does not understand the many nuances of his new home.  Of course like any single male immigrant, he wants to meet local women.  He begins to chat with the waitress, this conversation is just brilliant.  He cannot decide if she is Spanish or a daughter of the American confederacy, which to him means a fallen aristocrat.  He tries to find boxes in which to put people, things from his old home.  As the woman gets ready to leave in the morning, we never really learn how she saw the man, he gives her money.  She refuses but she takes when he insists.  Seemingly he needs or wants to see her as a prostitute.  In this he degrades the woman and himself.  

I am adding Yiddish literature as one of my core interests.  I ask advice from those learned in the field.