How did a non-territorial Germanic language like Yiddish “migrate” into German letters at the start of the 20th century? The status of Yiddish, known somewhat derisively as “Jargon” for most of the 19th century, was seen as a second-class language both within the learned Jewish community and among the German speaking world at large (both Jewish and non-Jewish). Perhaps most damningly, in the 20th century, Yiddish was the vernacular of the Jewish ghetto and a reminder of the indignities of that life. Could a language that traced its history along a path of itinerant wandering and forced migration survive in the era of the European “springtime of nations,” without a claim to land or to a uniform ethnicity? More importantly, what would happen if Yiddish encountered German, the language of its most important European interlocutor?
To answer these questions, I would like to look at the German novel, Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten (1904), by the popular Viennese Jewish author, travel writer and journalist, Karl Emil Franzos, and the story he crafts in the novel from the life of an East European Jewish community.
In Der Pojaz, the main characters are a wanderer named Mendele and his son Sender, the latter who longs to be an actor in the German theater. Both are characters derived from the writing of the Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, who at times went by the pen names Senderl and Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the Bookseller) when he wrote in Yiddish and created his eponymous characters in numerous stories and novels. When Sender and Mendele appear in Franzos’s novel (in German) they not only represent Yiddish speaking characters in a shtetl, they also embody the vibrant and unapologetic “New Yiddish Literature” itself, along with its new, masterful “national poet” Abramovitsh.
Though Franzos was a proponent of German language and literature, when Yiddish stories and Yiddish characters appear in Der Pojaz, they are not subsumed or educated by German language or culture, but diminished by it. Indeed, Franzos and the characters in his novel shine an unflattering light on German as a language with an increasingly limited and merely ethnic appeal whose provinciality is a far cry from the ambitions of universal brotherhood in the Aufklärung and the cultural promises of Bildung. The more Sender strives to learn German and study the masters of German literature (secretly, since German is forbidden in his shtetl because of its danger as a language of corrupt administrative control in Austro-Hungary and its association with assimilation-hungry Jews), the more physically ill he becomes. In contrast, the more Sender invests himself in his Yiddish life in the shtetl, with all the attending health and good fortune he receives for doing it, the more irrelevant and laughable the world of German literature becomes for him. At best, all Sender can do is mimic “Germanness” on the stage – though he withers as he does so, and he never experiences the theater as the setting of self-actualization, as Lessing once characterized the stage.
In Der Pojaz, Yiddish as the popularized literary and learned language of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh has (quite paradoxically) all the qualities of a language freer than German and more fit for modernity: widespread appeal, varied influences, communicability, transportability, and access to both an ancient and venerated tradition (Hebrew) and the élan and humor of Jewish community life. In contrast, in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German is a dusty library, an inscrutable tax form, the language of a culture made small by its delimited territory and long-forgotten enlightenment principles that had become anachronistic in the age of irredentism and nationalized traditions. This unusual characterization of the status of Yiddish vis-à-vis German, especially from the plume of a Jewish Reformer and German literature enthusiast such as Franzos, deserves some reflection. Does the mirror Franzos puts in front of German literature in the form of an emergent Yiddish literary tradition force the former to become more artful and modern? Or does Franzos’s novel itself mark a nexus point in a trans-literature of Yiddish and German: two languages so maddeningly close and yet forever separated by their mutual untranslatability?