Jewish Writing and Gender between the National and the Transnational (original) (raw)

Abstract

Hebrew and Yiddish literary relations pose an interesting cases tudyf or discussions of national and nonnational literaryc ultures.T hese modernl iteratures arose in the declining Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman empires in the nineteenth century and amidst the newlye merging nationalist movements of the same periods. In the nineteenth and earlyt wentieth centuries neither Hebrew nor Yiddish could claim anationalhome or asingle center,divided by crumbling empires and newlyforming nation-states.Their representativesstrovefor various forms of national identitiesa nd international legitimacy. In Eastern Europe and among the literary diaspora, both Hebrew and Yiddish literatures shared overlappinga uthors, centers,a nd literary institutions. However,b yt he middle of the twentieth century both came to be identified with very different histories, intellectual traditions,a nd literaryc ultures. The story of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures' connection with International PEN captures the evolving historicalr elations of these diasporic literatures to ac hangingi nternational political landscape. PEN International was founded in 1921 as an international organization of writers along nationallines, a "League of Nations for Men and Women of Letters." When Jewish-languagewriters sought to establish ab ilingual JewishP EN club in Warsawi n1 927, they posed ac hallengetothis post-World WarInational model. Their petition prompted great confusion by PEN International London, whose representativesp osed questions such as what country did well-known Jewishw riters, like Sholem Asch, represent?T he writers respondedw ith af ifteen-page history of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature defined in extraterritorial and diasporic terms. Thisd iasporic multilingual model of Jewish literature rapidlyfrayed. Hebrew writers later petitioned from Palestinefor aHebrew PEN club. Afew years later separate Hebrew and Yiddish centers would be formed.¹ At the 1936 PEN conference in Buenos Aries, H. Leyvik, the pre-eminent,R ussian-born, New York Yiddish poet articulated the complex place of Yiddish in the worldinhis speech to fellow PEN delegates, proclaiming: "The essential problem of our literature in the present century consists in finding away to synthesize nationaland universal values (vi azoy gefinen asintez fun nationaln and universaln). The Jewand the Universe: here lies the main drama of our life and our literature." (Leyvik 1963, 124) In the 1920s  See my discussiono ft his history in Schachter 2012, 3-5. OpenAccess. ©2 020A llison Schachter, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeC ommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

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