A Yiddish Bard in Berlin

Rachel Seelig: A Yiddish Bard in Berlin: Moyshe Kulbak and the Flourishing of Yiddish Poetry in Exile

2012, Jewish Quarterly Review

AI Abstract

Rachel Seelig argues that the poet's lyrics in Berlin were a means of escape from the city. She says the poet lived and worked in Berlin between 1920 and 1923. She argues the poet was a 'stranger' in Berlin and struggled to fit in. Pascale Casanova’s conception of the ‘‘world republic of letters’’ challenges the ecumenical conception of world literature as inhabiting a metaphorical universe to which all nations and languages have access by drawing attention to the concrete ways in which certain languages and aesthetic orders gain dominance while others are relegated to ‘‘non-literary’’ status. Against the ‘‘ahistorical fiction’’ of a world of ‘‘peaceful internationalism, a world of free and equal access in which literary recognition is available to all writers,’’ Casanova portrays a world of letters defined by unequal power structures, where ‘‘small’’ languages and literatures on the periphery are subject to the violence of their dominant counterparts at the center. Yiddish literature, which has always had exile and extraterritoriality as normative conditions, stands to gain from this reformed paradigm of literary history. Using Kulbak’s example as the model of a diasporic literary identity, we may begin to reshape our approach to Jewish literature—and to literary history at large—according to more porous boundaries.

Zitate

His brief time in Berlin between 1920 and 1923 was the loneliest of his life—but also one of the most prolific.

If Kulbak was invisible in Berlin, it is noteworthy that Berlin likewise makes no appearance in the poems he penned there.

The mock-epic poem Disner tshayld herold (Childe Harold of Disno, 1928–31), set in Berlin’s swinging 1920s, engages the avant-garde techniques and motifs typical of German poetry of the day. Its identification with the political recalcitrance typical of German expressionism constitutes an expression of contempt for bourgeois culture and sympathy for socialist values, which the author’s settlement in the Soviet Union would appear to corroborate. However, its sardonic style distinguishes it from the propagandistic, poster-like literature of the Soviet Union, where socialist realism was becoming the dominant style.

The immediate postwar period witnessed the proliferation of Yiddish poetry, marking a turning point for a relatively young literature. New styles and movements were influenced by the avant-garde trends and extreme individualism that distinguished European poetry of the interwar period.

Berlin was therefore the ideal space within which to conceive an imagined ‘‘Yiddishland.’’