Kaiser Ephraim Yossel

Ephraim Yossel

I was stuck on this name when I tried translating a poem by Yehuda Leyb Teler, called Hitlers araynmarsh in Vin [Hitler’s Invasion of Vienna] from 1940.

Young Yehuda, the boy born in Tarnopol, Ukraine (part of Galician Austria), fled to New York with his mother after the destruction of WWI and became the well-known author and historian, Judd L. Teller, a journalist for Commentary, New Republic and the Nation, among many other publications. Teller is a great name for a writer in English, is it not?

Oh, and he was a modernist poet in Yiddish.

The line containing the name “Ephraim Yossel” talked of Yehuda Teler/Teller’s Galician uncles in Vienna after WWI, and how they adored the “dream city”:

The uncles attend to stroking their glass of tea

with intelligent hands

and telling tales of King (May His Radiance Be Elevated)

Ephraim Yossel, may your Jews intercede on your behalf.

Even at that time the little dogs would raise a leg and piss

on your monuments in Vienna.

It took me three months to find the name again in Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s novel, A Guest for the Night, which is about a man from Galicia (like Agnon himself) who returns to his home after WWI to the destruction of his hometown. Agnon’s Ephraim Yossel is the name of the deceased husband of a woman named Freida whom the townspeople in her small village in Galicia called Kaiserin because she and her husband were destitute but arrogant. The comedy in Agnon’s prose is that a photo of Freida’s husband looks identical to Kaiser Franz Josef.  Indeed, Ephraim Yossel was the pet name for Kaiser Franz Josef by Galician Jews.

I found more evidence of this pet name by reading Yizkor Books (memorial books) for a number of small Galician villages.  Ephraim Yossel came to our village, Ephraim Yossel gave the rabbi a cigar and wanted to smoke it with him, Ephraim Yossel came in disguise and wanted to sleep at the Jewish inn in the village, just to get some rest among “his” people, his supporters. When his marriage was a sham and his power was on the wane. And always, his name came with a prayer: may he be our spokesman in heaven, may his memory be for a blessing, may his radiance be elevated.

Probably the reason for the love of Franz Josef by Jews during his 70-year reign was simply matter of comparison.  Those Jews living on the border of Franz Josef’s empire buttressing the Czar’s Russia found the Catholic Habsburg to be a righteous gentile when it came to “the Jews”.  Of course, this was just another example of an imagined community with Vienna and the Habsburgs. The only true belonging between Galicia and Vienna happened in dreams.

But with a pet name, a shorthand for his name, the great Kaiser could be ours, like when we name the “great rabbis” the Gedolim with shorthand names. Gadol is an honorific for important rabbis and other prominent Jews, and the orthodox and Hassidic tradition is to keep a picture of them in the house. Just like Shmuel Agnon’s Freide, who has a picture of her husband, the Great Man in her house, who looks very much like the Kaiser. It’s a fantasy marriage of course, but maybe Kaiser Franz Josef thought about “his” Galician Jews sometimes when he sat down, alone, to eat his Tafelspitz each night. With a little horseradish/Meerrettich on the side. Maybe he even called it “khren” like his yidn.