Pioneers

S. A. An-Sky, Michael R. Katz

Description

Russian Jewish youth between tradition and modernity

S. A. An-sky's novel dramatizes the dilemmas of Jewish young people in late Tsarist Russia as they strive to throw off their traditional religious upbringing to adopt a secular and modern identity. The action unfolds in the town of M. in the Pale of Settlement, where an engaging cast of characters wrestles with cultural and social issues. Their exploits culminate in helping a young Jewish woman evade an arranged marriage and a young Russian woman leave home so she can pursue her studies at a European university. This startling novel reveals the tensions and triumphs of coming of age in a revolutionary time.

Introduction

Note on Translation

List of Principal Characters

Pioneers

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Sujets

• Jewish
• Jews
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253012142
• Langue: English

Extrait

PIONEERS
JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Series Editor , Alvin H. Rosenfeld
PIONEERS
A Tale of Russian-Jewish Life in the 1880s
S. A. An-sky
TRANSLATED BY
M ICHAEL R. K ATZ
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu Telephone [phone] Fax [phone]
2014 by Michael R. Katz
Translated from Pionery in S. A. An-sky, Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1909).
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
An-Ski, S., 1863-1920, author.
[Pionery. English]
Pioneers : a tale of Russian-Jewish life in the 1880s / S.A. An-sky ; translated by Michael R. Katz.
pages ; cm. - (Jewish literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-253-01209-8 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01212-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01214-2 (e-book) 1. Jews-Russia-Social life and customs-19th century-Fiction. 2. Shtetls-Russia-Fiction. I. Katz, Michael R., translator. II. An-Ski, S., 1863-1920. Pionery. Translation of: III. Title. IV. Series: Jewish literature and culture.
PG3470.R3P5613 2014
891.73 42-dc23
2013042006
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
Contents
Introduction: On the Border between Two Worlds
Note on Translation
List of Principal Characters
Pioneers
Glossary
Selected Bibliography of Works in English
Introduction: On the Border between Two Worlds
Twenty-five years ago when I first began writing, my striving was to work on behalf of the oppressed, the laboring masses, and it seemed to me then-and that was my error-that I would not find them among Jews. I thought it was impossible to hold oneself aloof from politics and, again, I did not find any political currents among Jews. Bearing within me an eternal yearning toward Jewry, I nevertheless turned in all directions and went to labor on behalf of another people. My life was broken, severed, ruptured. Many years of my life passed on this frontier, on the border between two worlds.
-S. A. An-sky, Address on the occasion of his twenty-fifth literary anniversary, 1910 1
S HLOYME-ZANVL RAPPOPORT (Semyon Akimovich An-sky; 1863-1920) was a Russian-Jewish scholar, dramatist, ethnographer, and social activist. A prolific author, he wrote in two languages, Russian and Yiddish, in every imaginable genre: popular articles, scholarly books, stories, plays, revolutionary songs, and novels. He was a much sought-after public speaker, lecturing to enthusiastic audiences. 2
An-sky was born in the ancient city of Vitebsk, on the border between Russia and Latvia 3 in the Pale of Settlement, the restricted area where Jews could legally reside, during the last stages of the Haskalah, 4 at the beginning of a wave of anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. He is best known in literary circles for his play The Dybbuk (1914), which immortalizes the legendary figure of a dead soul that takes possession of a living body to right an injustice suffered during its lifetime.
Vitebsk was the historical center of Habad Hasidism, as well as the location of an excellent yeshiva, thus representing the two streams of East European Orthodox Judaism, traditional observance and rigorous scholarship. At the age of fifteen, An-sky met Chaim Zhitlovsky, descended from a wealthy family; together they studied the Russian language, read broadly both in Russian and European literatures, and gradually moved away from traditional Judaism. An-sky began ten years of wandering through the European part of the Russian Empire, working as a private tutor of Russian and secular subjects to Jewish children or as a manual laborer. When the leaders of one community discovered that he was disseminating dangerous ideas, he was forced to leave town. His own political views continued to move increasingly to the left. He worked for some time in salt pits and coal mines and organized public readings for peasants and miners. His own studies, left-wing politics, and social activism defined him as a populist ( narodnik ), a radical who believed in the importance of Russia s peasantry.
Ironically An-sky perfected his knowledge of Russian from working with Zhitlovsky, a man who was later to become a prominent Jewish socialist, philosopher , and ideologist of Yiddish language and culture . Soon he discovered the works of Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Hebrew writer, critic, and journalist, and one of the leaders of the Haskalah. His masterful memoir Hattot Ne urim ( The Sins of Youth ) (Vienna, 1876), one of the most popular books of its time, documented the dramatic conflict between Jewish Orthodoxy and European rationalism. From there An-sky went on to study the writings of Dmitry Pisarev, a Russian journalist, critic, and nihilist par excellence of the 1860s, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a journalist, political thinker, and revolutionary, whose radical novel Chto delat ? ( What Is to Be Done? ) (1863), was arguably the most provocative and influential book in nineteenth-century Russian culture. 5
An-sky s extraordinary personal history became the basis for his novel in two parts, entitled Pervaya bresh ( The First Breach ) and Pionery ( Pioneers ). The work was first published in Petersburg in the series Knizhki voskhoda ( Booklets of Dawn ) in 1904 and 1905. A Yiddish translation of the novel appeared later in a Petersburg newspaper Der fraynd ( The Friend ) under the title Pionern ( Pioneers ).
It has been said that An-sky was the most Russian of all Yiddish writers and that his novel Pioneers shows the author at his most Russian. 6 In an address he gave on the occasion of his twenty-fifth literary anniversary, he stated, Many years of my life passed on this frontier, on the border between two worlds. An-sky himself acknowledged, as paradoxical as it might seem, that it was in the Russian language that he would discover the beauty of the poetry that lies buried in the old historical foundations and traditions of Judaism. 7 The liminal space between the two worlds he inhabited is nowhere better depicted than in his novel Pioneers .
The titles of the two parts of An-sky s novel, The First Breach and Pioneers , suggest an invasion by a band of warriors. The first volume describes an early advance made into enemy territory; the second, the first party of settlers who establish a stronghold. In both parts, the soldiers are maskilim , Jewish enlighteners, fighting to achieve facility in languages other than Yiddish (Russian, in particular), to acquire secular learning, and subsequently to spread that knowledge to their fellow Jews and thus contribute to the general enlightenment of their people. 8
The First Breach relates the story of a young man (Zalman Itsikovich) who arrives in the shtetl of Miloslavka: he had been forced to leave home because he and a group of other yeshiva students were engaged in freethinking, that is, reading and discussing secular literature. He sets himself up as a language tutor but in fact soon begins spreading the seeds of enlightenment. When a local rabbi discovers his subterfuge, his intentions are frustrated; the impressionable Zalman picks up a New Testament and almost immediately decides to convert to Russian Orthodox Christianity.
But all is not lost: in the second and more engaging part of An-sky s novel, Pioneers , another young student (Elye Eizerman), to whom Zalman had lent his copy of Lilienblum s forbidden memoir, arrives in the town of M. He joins a group of enlightened Jews and begins studying Russian. Very soon Eizerman becomes involved in their intellectual debates and complicated schemes; at the end of the novel, his friend and mentor, Mirkin, decides to journey to Eizerman s shtetl, determined to continue the difficult work of enlightenment that Zalman Itsikovich had begun.
An-sky s Pioneers presents a vivid dramatization of a moment in the intellectual history of Jews living in the Pale of Settlement. The author himself had characterized that era as one of a deep and irrevocable breach in the fortified walls of the old religious and cultural foundations, 9 the result of the efforts of those young intellectuals seeking the light of knowledge and of secular learning.
The novel introduces a collection of engaging characters, praised even by the likes of Maxim Gorky, the official founder of socialist realism. He argued that An-sky s characters were not types at all, but rather individuals filled with vigor, courage, and self-confidence. Gorky wrote, In this book I like the astounding tension of the will to live. 10 Ultimately, Mirkin decides to go to Miloslavka to continue the work of enlightening the Jewish masses, thus passing the definitive test of manhood for the maskilim . As for the other young men, including Uler, Kapluner, and Eizerman, each has a story to tell as he struggles against the rigid orthodoxies of family and environs.
Although the students are all young men, three women play significant roles in An-sky s novel: Geverman s mother, who demonstrates the formidable power of her matern