Staff of Der Moment, Warsaw, 1920s. (Left to Right, 2nd Row, Four): Mordkhe Spektor, A. Almi, Bentsiyon Chilinowicz, Moyshe Bunem Yustman. (Standing, Two): Tsevi Pryłucki, Yisroel Khayim Zagorodski. (Front Row, Four): D. Druk, Yoysef Tunkel, Sh. Janowski, Hillel Zeitlin (sitting to the very right).
I have been looking at this picture, thinking about our conversations. In the photo is the staff of the Warsaw based Yiddish newspaper Der Moment. Who are they? If you read each and every biography it would start pretty much the same – “born into a chassidik family, etc”. But that “moment” would never repeat itself. Yes they sold twenty-five thousand newspapers daily, just in the Warsaw’s minority market, but it was also a real culture. Everyone came to Warsaw from elsewhere and in the midst of it Hillel Zeitlin’s home was a salon. I don’t mean the Hungarian Chulent where people come to consume pot and pop, I mean a place of intellectual intensity. If you just read the Wikipedia-like description of Hillel Zeitlin, you read about a person who had an inspiring, from Zarathustra to Zohar, awesome range. Hillel Zeitlin, and everyone in that group, was obsessed with the Jewish political identity. They all took that political question very seriously (the last proprietor of the Der Moment was Zeev Zhabotinsky himslef). That great generation of the Jewish intellectuals should broadly include Chaim Grade, Zalman Schneour, Der Nister, Simon Dubnov, earlier Mikhah Yosef Berdyczewski, even Jacob Glatstein and many, many others. Let’s imagine you find yourself in Warsaw on a Thursday afternoon sometime in the 1930-ish. You have several, multiple choices. You can go listen to the Rayatz, if you are in the mood for some heimisher bobe mayses or you can go see the Gerer Rebbe, if you are in the mood for some holy mumblings or you can go listen to the fiery range of Hillel Zeitlin. Where would you be? I think I know the answer for myself. You can see Hillel Zeitlin’s vigorous intensity in that photo, his trademark lion-like jewfro, his penetrating stare.
On the right is Zalman Zalkind, pen name Zalman Shneour (Alter Rebbe's einikle), wrote a novel for Der Moment's weekend edition. On the left playwright Perets Hirshbeyn. Vilna 1905
And what happened when the push came to shove. The Gerer and the Rayatz, the Satmarer berated Zionism or any political solution to the “Jewish question” but promptly abandoned their soldiers on the field when the dire predictions, they foolishly discarded, materialized. Hillel Zeitlin on the other hand was a martyr (btw, I believe in the details of Hillel Zeitlin’s martyrdom as much as I belive the details of Rabbi Akiva’s martyrdom, but who cares). The point being is that the Rayatz, the Gerer and the Satmarer have the followers now, their mumblings carefully re-mumbled, while the painfully profound and meaningful national treasures remain unknown (an aside: there are peole who have been reading this blog(s) for a long time but never read Der Nister, Chaim Grade or the fast froward James Kugel, I find it hard to understand).
A culture has a texture, a culture is not an online forum, a blog or a literary magazine, a culture is where people think, eat, dream, talk, work and exchange bodily fluids together.For a while I was hoping I would find this culture today. I thought I would meet people who inhabit that Der Moment between the tradition and the civilization. Instead I found the holy mumblings, the cheap and selfish nostalgia, the longing and the attachments to the spiritual molesters of the past. Statically there is the attrition but intellectually the indoctrination is much more punishing today than circa 1900. Post-holocaust they learned the “final solution” – how to mass produce and then numb the Jewish souls for good.
Someone said that I am upset because I never had a chance to drink the afternoon tea with Mendel Schneerson. Why would I want to drink tea with Mendel Schneerson? He can keep his ascetic lekech. For sure not a person to “hang out” with, a stubborn introvert who by choice surrounded himself with the autistic, meek and mean rank. I would rather hang out with any person in these photos, to me they are more interesting. We would resonate.
Yiddish writers in a Café in Poland, c. 1930s. (Left to right) Yoysef Tunkel (from Der Moment), Israel Joshua Singer (in profile), unknown, Borekh-Vladek Tsharni, and others unknown. YIVO
More I read about this, more I frame in my mind that precise moment in history. The versed tradition left behind and reimagined, the living language, the craft, the rigor and the boundless dreams.
Further reading:
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Most Polish and Litvishe Yidden were too busy trying to make a living to think about anything too deeply. Few had the luxury to drink tea and sit and discuss Kant and the Ramchal. There were also hundreds of other thinkers in greater Poland long forgotten who never wrote or wrote stuff not redeemed. But the vast majority of authentic jews of all stripes were busy working and doing the hustle to make ends meet or machen shabbes. Grade was an unknown then. Even in the Charedi world the Rayaatz and the Imre Emes were not considered thinkers men like the Levertover, Piasetzner, Reb Shimmele Zelichover were the mashpiim. There were also character rebbes like Rav Aaron of Kosenitz who were unusual.
The world of East Europe was rich in spirit, today the world of American jewry is rich in money and materialism. I guess there is tamud study here and I guess as you say people are able to “maale gerah” words, but original thinking? The frum world also had its writers and thinkers long forgotten as Talmud study has eclipsed any other creative activity. In the early 1960′s the american Aguda issued a thick book about them with their works, then learning was not everything.
Lets not forget Hilel’s son Dr. Aron Zeitlin and his unforgetable poetry. As he wrote about his father ” My father could understand the Ostrovzer rebbe, but the rebbe did not understand my father”. Sadly to paraphrase that Biblical sage they all came to the same end… Zecher zaddikim livrocho.
Zalman, to continue the theme of this post, our attention is occupied by the secondary and tertiary minds, while the bright talents and souls remains in the shade of history. And I learn the new names every day, even from your comment today.
I don’t buy “too busy trying to make a living to think”. In the idealogical compote that was Poland back in the day there were no shortage of people who undertook the frightening responsibly of telling others what and how to think.
You write ” I thought I would meet people who inhabit that Der Moment between the tradition and the civilization.” But alas you go on to say I found holy mumblings etc, and you are now off to the races bashing everyone in site. I share with you a deep nostalgia and sentementality for Yiddish culture in its different variants. Being far less highbrow than you I even miss the half trashy culture of the Yiddish theater in America. And I dream of such a culture being resurrected where charedim and secular can share a common language and in some way some minimal commonality of culture.
Where I differ besides having an interest and fondness for holy mumblings is that I recognize limitations of the culture the first and foremost being the sheer amateurism in many of their literary efforts. Consider your Hillel Zeitlin. He wrote books on Spinoza and Nietzsche. Terrific maybe for shtetl educated East European partially acculturated Jews. Gornisht, zip by todays standards and even by the standards of Europe circa 1930. I daresay you are not really interested in Spinoza, because you can find high quality philosophy to last you a lifetime, you’re excited by the idea of a book by a 1930′s Yiddish intellectual on the great philosopher.
Yes that moment and place was culturally very productive and produced great literature. More than Paris in the ’30
ej, first a disclaimer, I haven’t read one sentence from Hillel Zeitlin (looking forward to it). Someone introduced him to me by saying that he died holding on a Zohar, etc. When I hear such stories I know them to be untrue and a myth created specially to promote some idealogical end. This is not to detract in any way from the man’s greatness.
But the point of this post is recognized in your last paragraph. It is all about a “culture”, a group of like minded people pushing in a similar direction. This is my central lament. And the mumblings stay in the way of this goal by design.
sorry…continued…More than Paris in the 30′s, maybe not, and certainly less influential.
And their politics, all of them, left something to be desired. The Bundists and the Communists, the Folkists and the Yiddishists, the Nietzscheans and the chassidim, the Agudah and the Mizrachi…the whole lot saw the world in unrealistic ways, sentimental to the core, dreaming of that which could and would never exist. The poier, the simple Jew who said this whole world is stupid, walked away and became a druggist in Dayton, Ohio, he is the uncelebrated hero of that era.
ej, re Dayton, Ohio.
I noticed that you know everyone and everything and yet when the arguments or the answers get to complex you turn the chess board upside down retreat into the family womb, the familiar structure. My guess is your father came to Dayton from Poland perhaps. I think there is something charming about this. There is a different heroism for sure, it takes a hero just to get through the day, especially if you are in Dayton, Ohio ;-)
PS Please stop the ‘high brow’ baloney.
begin the quarterly. why can’t one be at both places?
what a nerve. you hardly know us or met us and we are post so so many wars. movements. political fiascoes, technological breakthroughs. chulent is no more a venue. spend three months in nyc. and instead of complaining be the catapult yourself. no more posts. begin the quarterly now.
I already know the name for the salon – “the house of ill repute.” Darn, the name is taken, what now?
I never heard the story that Zeitlin died holding the Zohar, but he died al kiddush hashem.
The druggist in Dayton the real hero, yea selling comic books and bubble gum while the 6 million were killed and he was moser nefesh to cover his windows in bombing drills. And he is not uncelebrated, he and his kids are the heros of Phillip Roth novels, a richtike hero! Todays real heros are those in the stock market and real estate. Heros, there were all sorts of heros, Communists who fought for equality, Bundists who did the same , old time frume Yidden who davened and studied lo al mnas lekabel pras not for fancy shidduchim, or condos in Lakewood, Zionists who actually built the sate of Israel and a host of others.
i read years ago that he walked into the burning shul with his tallis and tefillin. i guess an entire mythos was built.
ben, any possible info of hz attending the rayatz’ farbrengens in warsaw? ben, i’m quite serious about a magazine/literary review. you are the perfect person for this. and you have more than enough writers who are willing to participate. perhaps once it’s successful you can move to nyc and open your apartment as a salon….
Zalman, each of these writers had a close kin driven into the unimaginable suffering or straight into the death of Gulag on the other side of the old Poland.
of course nobody cares about our modern-day jewish joan of arc’s new jamsian novel, reviewed in the website where nadler’s glatstein article appeared, http://www.jidaily.com/seJ6/e .
ozick wrote “envy; or, yiddish in america” based on i.b. singer and glatstein. the story is forgotten. ozick is not read or discussed. and yet she is alive, and writing, and a veritable genius.
radloh, thank you for the pointer, I did notice that article. There are so many writers we are yet to meet. And hopefully to share.
Zaman Alpert…I agree that the types you mentioned are all proper figures for idealization. Of the many who write on the internet I am one of the few who has had good things to say about Jews from one end of the spectrum to the other. I still say all these types were naive in their identification with these ideologies, and would have done far better for themselves and their families if their idealism was tempered by a pragmatic willingness to change as the world changed. There is no need to walk through the history of the Mensheviks or the rebbes who warned their chassidim of leaving their courts for the fleshpots of America.
As to my druggist. Of all the groups we mentioned with the exception of the Jewish Stalinist Communists none fought against Hitler. OTOH my druggist enlisted or was drafted, fought and died in the war against fascism. Nothing to be ashamed about, even if he did sell bubble gum. You mention his offspring Philip Roth. In the 60’s Roth was denounced in the pages of Commentary, rabbi after rabbi going on how he was a menuvel and how dare he, etc. I though Roth’s response was quite good, but few changed their opinions. During his middle Zuckerman period he remained sex obsessed, somewhat similar to Larry David in our time. But as he aged, especially in the last 10-15 years he has become a great novelist, a man of depth and wisdom. Too many of the Yiddish writers were caught in rebelling while using their past as material, going back and forth between condescension and nostalgia. Add in the blinders of ideology and many suffered the same fate as the maskilim a century before.
ej, this is a touching and even enlightening comment. But America wasn’t completely open, certainly not to absorb the entire Jewish population of Europe. And people like Hillel Zeitilin actively spoke about the need to get out (there were others who wanted to stay and build the Communist paradise or the selfish Rebbes, etc. but not the crowd we are talking about here). Zeitlin was willing to sacrifice the biggest idol-fetish Jews ever had and was ready to move to Uganda! (that’s a few exists down after Dayton). I think it could have worked.