A Yiddish Romance with Powerlessness

Abstract

Jewish Powerlessness was proclaimed as an explicit heritage by the nascent liberal-secularist Yiddishist movement in Eastern Europe when it came into its own in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Y. L. Peretz (1852–1915), a native of Zámoshtsh (Zamość), Poland, was both a pioneering master of the Yiddish short story and a theoretician of the evolving Yiddishist (pro-Yiddish language) movement. He launched his Yídishe biblyoték (‘Yiddish Library’) in Warsaw in 1891, the first of a series of literary anthologies in the tradition of smaller East European peoples seeking to raise their vernaculars to European literary status. He prefaced the volume with a programmatic plan for the still-novel movement that transcended by far the scope of ‘just literature’.

And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.

— Albert Einstein (from a 3 January 1954 letter to Eric Gutkind)