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The Radical Isaac I L Peretz and the Rise of Jewish
Socialism SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish
Literature and Culture 1st Edition Mahalel Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Mahalel, Adi
ISBN(s): 9781438492339, 1438492332
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 8.93 MB
Year: 2023
Language: english
The Radical Isaac
SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture
EZRA CAPPELL, editor

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Adi Mahalel, The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism
 The Radical Isaac
I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism

ADI MAHALEL
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2023 State University of New York Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
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without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY

www.sunypress.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mahalel, Adi, author
Title: The radical Isaac : I. L. Peretz and the rise of
Jewish socialism
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2023]
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature
and Culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438492339 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781438492346 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my mother, Nava (Sheyndel) Mahalel, a devoted social worker
To Dovid Shneer z”l, scholar and mentor
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Intellectual and Historical Backdrop of Peretz’s

Early Work, Outline, and Methodology xiii

Chapter 1 Education, Professions, and Literary Proclamations:

Peretz between Warsaw Positivism and Proto-Socialism 1

Chapter 2 A Radical Shift: Becoming a Social-Protest Writer 35

Chapter 3 “To Be a Fighter with Both Fists!”: Peretz the

Radical Hebrew Writer 69

Chapter 4 On Love and Class War: Peretz’s 1890s Hebrew and

Yiddish Poetry 117

Chapter 5 Between Liberal Satire and Socialist Roots: Peretz’s

Hasidic Creations of the 1890s 161

Conclusion 207

Appendixes 213

Notes 217

Bibliography 267

Index 287
 Illustrations

I.1 Peretz on the cover of a Cuban edition of his works entitled

The Legend of Peretz xiv
I.2 Peretz in the late 1880s xv
I.3 Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, ca. 1912 xvi
I.4 Peretz card with his minibiography in Yiddish xxx
1.1 Postcard featuring I. L. Peretz 33
2.1 Jack Gilford plays Peretz’s character Bontshe Shvayg on US
television, 1959 38
2.2 Cover of the Yiddish version of the 1881 brochure
“Kto z czego żyje?” (By what do we live?) by the prominent
Polish socialist Szymon Dickstein 42
2.3 Illustration from the Soviet edition of “Weaver-Love”
(Moscow, 1947) 45
2.4 Cover of the Yontef bletlekh, second edition, 1913 57
2.5 Dovid Pinski (1872–1959), Peretz’s main partner in creating
the Yontef bletlekh 59
3.1 Peretz’s Hebrew journal Ha-chetz (The arrow; 1894) 73
3.2 Peretz’s prose debut, the Hebrew short story “The Kaddish”
(1886) 99
4.1 Cover page of the Hanukah volume of the Yontef bletlekh 135
4.2 Cover of an issue of the groundbreaking journal Yontef
bletlekh, featuring an original poem by Peretz 144
5.1 Bundist demonstration in 1905 179
5.2 Peretz’s mugshot, 1899 193
x | Illustrations

5.3 “If Not Even Higher” became one of the most famous
Yiddish stories of all time 197
6.1 Collection of photographs from the opening of Peretz
Square in New York, 1952 210
6.2 Illustration from the Yiddish daily Forverts: “Today Mayor
Impellitteri Opens the Peretz Square near Second Avenue” 211
6.3 Peretz Square Park in lower Manhattan 212
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my advisors at Columbia University, Jeremy Dauber

and Dan Miron, who turned me on to I. L. Peretz early. I would like
to thank my colleagues at the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at
the University of Maryland for their support in completing the man-
uscript, notably: Charles Manekin, Rachel Manekin, Hayim Lapin,
Maxine Grossman, Bernard Cooperman, Paul Scham, Yoram Peri,
and Marsha Rozenblit. I am grateful to the people at SUNY Press for
helping me realize this project, Rafael Chaiken, James Peltz, and Jenn
Bennett-Genthner. I would also like to express gratitude to the Joseph and
Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies, as well as the
Littauer Judaica Publication Fund for their generous support.
I thank anyone whom I talked to about the subject over the
years who commented or gave me feedback, notably: Sheila E. Jelen,
David Roskies, Nancy Sinkoff, Hannan Hever, Bruce Robbins, Mikhail
Krutikov, Dovid Fishman, Rachel Rojanski, Uri Cohen, Yitzhaks Lewis,
Ken Frieden, Jan Schwarz, Ofer Dynes, Saul Zaritt, Dovid Shneer, Alyssa
Quint, Shoshana Ronen, Alina Molisak, Nick Underwood, Jessica Kirzane,
Madeleine Cohen, Sunny Yudkoff, Gideon Kouts, Sharon Bar Kochva,
David Mazower, Marion Aptroot, Daniel Mahla, Yoav Peled, and to any-
body else I am forgetting here, thank you.
I would especially like to thank my family: my wife, Laura, who was
an ardent reviewer, and my children, Ahuva and Melech, for their patience
and tolerance throughout the long process of working on the “P-man.”
 Introduction
Intellectual and Historical Backdrop of
Peretz’s Early Work, Outline, and Methodology

Yitskhok Leybush Perets, better known in English as I. L. Peretz (1852–

1915), was a major leader of Eastern European Jewry in the years prior
to the First World War. During this period, Yiddish was the most widely
spoken language of the Jews in Europe. While he was best known for
writing in Yiddish, Peretz was in fact a prolific bilingual writer in Yiddish
and Hebrew. Through his work and his deep involvement in Jewish com-
munal life and politics, Peretz earned great respect during his lifetime and
continues to be revered to this day. Numerous studies have been issued on
Peretz;1 nonetheless, a very central component of his life remains severely
understudied, though it offers the potential to better understand his body
of work and communal involvement overall.
This book strives to illuminate a key part of Peretz’s life and art
that has often been neglected in recent years: namely, his close align-
ment with the needs of the Jewish working class and his deep devo-
tion to progressive politics. In the mid-1890s, he began to visualize the
Yiddish-speaking working class as his target readership. I show that
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” applies to Peretz,
and I call this period “the radical years of I. L. Peretz.” By offering close
readings of Peretz’s work from this period and by analyzing his Yiddish
journal, Di yontef bletlekh (The holiday pages), I seek to recast the way
political activism is understood in scholarly evaluations of Peretz’s work.
Peretz’s journal revolutionized the means of artistic production. In my
analysis, I employ a partially chronological, partially thematic scheme,
following Peretz’s radicalism at its inception and then the various ways in
which it was synchronically expressed through its initial intense decade.
In this introductory chapter, I first discuss the historical and cultural
context for Peretz’s radicalization, then I move on to review the previous
scholarship on the subject of Peretz’s politics, and I conclude by outlining
the book’s chapters.
xiv | Introduction

Figure I.1. Peretz on the cover of a Cuban edition of his works (1951–52)
entitled The Legend of Peretz. Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
 Introduction | xv

The Backdrop of Peretz’s Proto-Socialist Phase (1888–92)

Like his good friend and collaborator Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936), Peretz
was inspired by Aleksander Świętochowski (1849–1938), one of the founders
of the Positivist movement in Poland. Świętochowski preached for a swift
adaptation of society to progress and argued that true progress could only
be accomplished through a change in religious traditions.2 In 1890 Yitskhok
Leybush Peretz (sometimes known as Leon Peretz), son of middle-class fam-
ily of merchants, left his hometown of Zamość, a small town in southeastern
Poland of fewer than fifteen thousand people at the time, about half of whom
were Jewish, like the family of Rosa Luxemburg. He then established himself
permanently in Warsaw. He was a lawyer by profession and known in the
literary world as a Hebrew poet. In Warsaw, he began to form relations within
the intelligentsia. Sokolow describes his transformation and his integration,
noting that Peretz became “more Polonized”: “He used to speak Polish then;
and he used to use this language with us and at his home, and anywhere
he went. Mainly he read Russian literature, but he also used to read a lot in
Polish, and I remember that Świętochowski influenced him a great deal.”3

Figure I.2. Peretz in the late 1880s.

Reprinted from I. L. Peretz, Briv un redes
fun Y. L. Perets, edited by Nachman
Mayzel (New York: IKUF, 1944), p. 100.
Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
xvi | Introduction

Figure I.3. Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw, ca. 1912.

Wikimedia Commons.
In the Jewish positivist circles, the attitude toward the Yiddish lan-
guage, the dominant vernacular of Eastern European Jewry, was purely
practical. The Jewish masses needed information about crafts and trades
(melokhe), personal hygiene, and the sciences, and to be understood such
information would have to be in Yiddish. Peretz stressed in a 1888 letter
in Hebrew to the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) the great
need “to enrich [Yiddish] literature with science books.”4 However, despite
plans to establish a popular-science library in Yiddish, among the posi-
tivists the feeling was that it would not be tragic if the so-called Jewish
jargon (how Yiddish was referred to back then) eventually disappeared.5
Already in 1886, Peretz confessed his affinity to Yiddish (“the language
of Beril and Shmeril”) in his Hebrew poem “Manginot Ha-zman” (The
melodies of the time):

My fellow writers, ,‫אחי הסופרים‬

Do not hold a grudge ‫אל תטרו לי איבה‬
If I am fond of ‫אם לי שפת בריל‬
The language of Beril and Shmeril— —‫ושמריל ערבה‬
And I would not say with contempt ‫ובבוז לא אקרא‬
“Inarticulate” regarding their tongue .‫”עלגים” ללשונם‬
For it is the language of my people ‫כי לשון עמי‬
I shall hear it coming out of their mouths! !‫אשמע מגרונם‬
Not the holy tongue. .‫לא שפת הקדש‬
Not the language of the prophets, ,‫לא לשון הנביאים‬
But the language of the exiled. .‫אך שפת הגולים‬
The language of the “Hebrews”!6 !”‫לשון ה”עבריים‬
 Introduction | xvii

This plea to his fellow Hebrew writers not to be hated for writ-
ing in Yiddish was characteristic of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers,
who all felt a need to excuse their linguistic preference to other members
of the Jewish intelligentsia.7 Peretz had been a Hebrew writer since the
1870s, although he was also capable of writing in Polish. He first expressed
his ideas concerning writing in Yiddish in his aforementioned letters to
Sholem Aleichem. He told his friend about the inseparable connection
he felt between nationalism and language.8 In another letter to Sholem
Aleichem in 1889, Peretz expressed an ambition, also shared by other
writers at the time such as Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh (1835–1917;
known as Mendele), to form a standard Yiddish literary language that
would unite the different Yiddish dialects. Through this nationalist prac-
tice of standardization, it would be understood by Jews in different parts
of Eastern Europe. He saw the need to constantly expand Yiddish so that
it could be a fertile field for writers to develop.9
In his 1891 article “Bildung” (Education), Peretz emphasized the
functionality and the usefulness of writing in Yiddish for spreading mod-
ern ideas, as he had previously written in his personal correspondence.
At the same time, he deemphasized any intrinsic value that the language
possessed: “We want to encourage our people to write in Yiddish, because
we have about three million people who understand only Yiddish. But
we do not consider jargon to be holy. We sympathize very openly with
those who wish to substitute Yiddish for a spoken state-language . . . we
sympathize even more strongly with the adherents of spoken Hebrew.”10
Peretz here does not fully break away from the Jewish Enlightenment’s
agenda to eradicate Yiddish in favor of European state languages and
Hebrew. Thus, he sympathizes with Safa Brura (Clear Language, 1889–
91), a society for the promotion of Hebrew as a spoken language,which
Peretz was associated with.11 Instead, he offers a temporary tactical com-
promise: the Yiddish language should be developed in order to promote
modernizing the millions of Jews who only speak Yiddish. In the long
run, Yiddish would run its course, and other dominant languages would
take its place, an inevitable cost of progress.
Initial ideologies aside, through the creation of Yiddish literature
and by participating in related projects, Peretz played a key role in pro-
ducing a modern standardized textual Yiddish language, despite Polish
being more natural to him as a spoken language. At the popular literary
salon he hosted, discussions were held in Polish rather than Yiddish.12
Yudl Mark contends that Peretz’s Yiddish became much more refined and
richer during the last fifteen years of his life (1900–1915) compared with
xviii | Introduction

his earlier language.13 But the birth of his Yiddish productivity, alongside
his political transformation, clearly happened during the earlier years and
therefore demands special analytical attention.
As opposed to a kind of territorial nationalism that puts its emphasis
on the need for sovereignty, Peretz’s nationalism was first and foremost
defined in linguistic and cultural terms: it is a folk nationalism, which
centers on the issue of class, meaning that Peretz’s is a nationalism of the
common people, of the Yiddish speakers. The latter group became his pro-
fessed muse, the “folk” was for him “the only genuine source of national
creativity.”14 Peretz believed that what the Jewish folk needed most at the
time was modern education (Bildung).15 “Chauvinism is awful!” Peretz
wrote,16 even as he was in the process of establishing an ideology that
incorporates some basic nationalist thinking.17
On the surface, Peretz’s version of Bildung encompasses a whole
nation: a large group of people that, through the use of modern means
of communication (mostly the press), becomes able to imagine their com-
monality. He wrote that his choice to use Yiddish stemmed from both
the need to “educate” the people and of “knowing” the people.18 Peretz
needs Yiddish in order to establish his nationalist project, and to do so
he must imbue it with the power to accurately reflect “the people,” who
are capable of unlocking its spirit and truly knowing its essence.
The role of Yiddish becomes even more acute when taking into
account that Peretz’s brand of nationalism lacked a territorial compo-
nent. Der Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln, un Rusland
(The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia),
known as the Bund, whose establishment, I argue, Peretz played a key cul-
tural role in, were influenced early on by the ideas of Austro-Marxists Karl
Renner and Otto Bauer, who had conceptualized the model of nonterri-
torial autonomy.19 The national-cultural autonomy platform for Eastern
European Jewry, who were scattered over vast areas among other groups,
stood in contrast to the proto-Zionist nationalism of the time, which was
based on the narrative of “return” to the historical territorial homeland of
the Jews in Palestine. Regarding the option of Jews migrating westward, to
Western Europe or America, Peretz in 1891 thought it was an unfeasible
solution for the poor masses since any country would eventually limit the
entry of masses of people without any capital. Most Jews, according to
Peretz, did not possess even the small capital needed for travel.
Peretz did not believe that Eastern European Jewry could ever
acquire a modern education through Hebrew: “In Hebrew we lack even
one science,” he wrote (8:10). On the one hand, he broadened the maskilic
 Introduction | xix

(Jewish Enlightenment) themes of knowing the state language (Polish in

his case) plus Hebrew to include Yiddish (“three million people live in
it”20). On the other hand, he confronted what he called “nationalist chau-
vinists” who adhered strictly to Hebrew (the “holy tongue”) and would
throw out the “nanny” (i.e., Yiddish) before it had completed its mod-
ernizing task. Peretz, as was common in his time, has personified and
feminized Yiddish, the homely mame-loshn (mother-tongue).
Economic development in the Russian Empire and the relative tol-
erance exhibited toward Jews since the mid-to-late nineteenth century
sparked massive waves of Jewish migration to the cities, such as Warsaw,
Lodz, Bialystok, and Odessa, from outlying provinces. A new social class
was growing within the Jewish population by the end of the nineteenth
century, made up of working-class, Yiddish-speaking Jews.21 According to
the lowest estimates, there were about 400,000 Jewish wage workers in
the Pale of Settlement in 1898. Interestingly, 60 percent were handicraft
workers, and the rest worked in agriculture or were day laborers or factory
workers. They were almost exclusively employed by Jewish employers.22
Jan Bloch (1836–1902) was a philanthropist, financier, and railway
giant who belonged to the Jewish plutocracy of Warsaw, which domi-
nated the board of the Warsaw Jewish community.23 He also became well
known for his passionate advocacy for pacifism, arguing that a future
armed conflict would have disastrous consequences for all participants.24
Bloch financed both the statistical expedition to the Tomaszów region
that was represented in Peretz’s major early prose effort in Yiddish, Bilder
fun a provints rayze, and the first two volumes of the almanac Di yudishe
bibliyotek (1891). For the expedition, he recruited members of the Jewish
intelligentsia like Peretz and Sokolow to gather information about the Jews
living within the Pale of Settlement. Jews were restricted to living in the
Pale according to czarist laws dating from the early nineteenth century.25
However, as Jacob Lestschinsky writes, “the rapid growth of capitalism in
Central and Eastern Europe during the 19th century . . . forced the Jewish
masses to change their living places as well as their social appearance;
forced them to seek a new place in the world and a new occupation in
society.”26
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the economy
was unstable, Jews feared that the discriminatory May Laws of 1882 that
were already in effect in the Pale (which prohibited Jews from the coun-
tryside within the Pale, thus further limiting their economic opportuni-
ties)27 would be applied to Jews in Poland as well. Such laws would block
the road for Jews wanting to integrate into the changing economy.28 The
xx | Introduction

goal of the expedition was to prove by scientific methods that Jews in fact
do contribute to the general economy, that they work the land, and that
many of them, in contrast to the common stereotype, are impoverished.29
Up until 1893—when he strengthened his ties with Jewish
socialist activists as they were taking their first steps in appealing to
Yiddish-speaking workers30 and with socialist intellectuals such as Dovid
Pinski—Peretz served as a middleman between the capitalist Bloch and
lower-class Jews through his cultural productions. His target readership
was middlemen as well, and his professed goal was to create a middle-class
Jewish intelligentsia. Their mission to prove that Jews were contributing
to the modernization of the economy served as a way of advocating for
the modern economy itself. Peretz’s sense of doubt toward alternatives to
the contemporary economic system was evident from his writings.31 One
can speculate that Peretz’s commitment to his patron prevented him from
suggesting any radical social solutions at this stage. Sokolow described
the relationship between the economic elites involved in Jewish commu-
nal affairs, like Bloch, and middle-class Jews, like Peretz: “The heads of
the community thought about it, and an idea began to flow regarding
the use of Peretz’s strength for a spiritual purpose.” In other words, the
“Blochs” would use the “Peretzs” to keep the simple Jews in “spiritual”
check. The idea of Di yudishe bibliyotek, the first Yiddish almanac that
Peretz created, was born out of those meetings.32 The participation of the
middle-class Jews in Jewish politics gave birth to a proto-nationalist stage
in Jewish politics.33
A valuable testimony regarding Peretz’s state of mind at the time
surrounding the expedition through the Pale of Settlement is found in
Sokolow’s essay years after the fact, “Yosl the Crazy (Sketches from My
Memory).” In it, one gets a glimpse of the transformative value of the
expedition, which I argue played a role in pushing Peretz to embrace
socialism:

Our private goal was to sail in the Jewish world, to renew

what we knew from our childhood, and in order to observe
new impressions. . . . We both had seen beforehand that advo-
cacy is an effort in vain, that it’s about as useful as a pair of
glasses is to a blind person, or physical therapy to a corpse; but
Peretz the poet, in the beginning, awoke, became angry, and
afterwards froze while in rage. For both of us the work was
the purpose and not a means. I was then heavily occupied in
literary and public work; I wanted to shatter the walls of my
 Introduction | xxi

prison and break out, to get some fresh air; similarly Peretz
jumped out of his hiding for the same multi-varied trip around
the Jewish communities, like Jewish travelers in the Middle
Ages before us. . . . Going quickly from city to city, from one
small village to the next, it was an expedition of Jewish Don
Quixotes, even more interesting than the literary visions of
Mendele the Book Peddler with his strange twists.34

Peretz is portrayed here as poet first and foremost (his main claim to
literary fame at the time), somewhat out of touch of regular people’s lives
and who increasingly became angry and frustrated by the reality of pov-
erty he witnessed. The pessimistic feeling of two late-nineteenth-century
Jewish influencers going on a hopeless battle that Sokolow expresses here
also appeared in Peretz’s first literary account of a visit to the shtetl in
1887, several years prior to the statistical expedition. The Heine-inspired
Hebrew poem “The small town” contains many motifs that Peretz would
later develop in the Yiddish prose of Bilder: the deteriorating marketplace,
the economic struggle for survival, the hunger, the fires, the dybbukim,
the isolation from the world, and the meeting of the shtetl Jews with the
modern urban Jews. The character of the modern Jew is portrayed as
having a hard time communicating his position to the shtetl Jews. He
is a man modernly dressed and mannered, but still he wants to prove to
traditional Jews he is a Jew like them. The protagonist tells them,

“Oh, brothers, calm yourselves, ,‫ הרגעו‬,‫ אחי‬,‫“הה‬

I am not a gentile, !‫הה שמעו שמוע‬
And not a wealthy person ‫אינני בן נכר‬
The short uniform .‫ולא אדון ושוע‬
Gave the wrong impression; ‫המדים הקצרים‬
Only one faith, ‫אך שקר בי ענו‬
Only one God between us.” ,‫ אך אחת‬,‫אמונה‬
As soon as they heard .”‫גם אל אחד לנו‬
Away they dispersed, ‫אך שמעו נפזרו‬
“Or a heretic or a baptized Jew, ,‫לכל עבר ורוח‬
Or an instigator seducer!” ”!‫ או מסית מדיח‬,‫“אפיקורס או מומר‬
They dispersed, from afar ,‫ מרחוק‬,‫נפזרו‬
I would still hear the curse . . . . . . ‫עוד אשמע הקללה‬
Is this supposed to calm down ‫הזאת המרגעה‬
A troubled soul?35 ?‫לנפש אמללה‬
xxii | Introduction

The last question is asked after the speaker starts the poem express-
ing the hope of finding some relaxation in the shtetl (“The town here is
small, / Here I will rest my soul”). Dan Miron describes the unnerving
shtetl reality that is revealed to the modern protagonist as “a frighten-
ing Darwinist image . . . an economic jungle, where everybody is so
busy in the war for survival, that that becomes essentially the content of
his existence.”36 In reality, Peretz himself was barely out of the shtetl at
the time he wrote Bilder. The statistical expedition was the first under-
taking that Peretz engaged in after moving to Warsaw in 1890.37 Peretz
ran a thriving legal practice in the late 1870s and during the 1880s in
Zamość, representing prominent Polish and Jewish clients. During this
period, he lectured in a workers’ evening school and was active in other
civic affairs. After a decade or so of practicing law, he was stripped of his
license in 1887 for allegedly promoting Polish nationalism and socialism.
Unable to resume his legal practice, he moved to Warsaw the following
year.38 Thus, Peretz had only arrived in the big city from the large town
Zamość a few months before setting out for Tomaszów, a region about
thirty kilometers from where he had grown up.39 Reconnecting with tra-
ditional Jews cannot have been as difficult for Peretz, the son of shop
owners in Zamość, as he portrayed it in Bilder. The sense of pessimism
and frustration, and of “[freezing] while in rage” (“‫)”קפא תוך כדי התגעשות‬,
expressed in these early Yiddish texts represents a phase of exposure to
the reality of poverty while not yet embracing the activist solution of class
organizing and socialist struggle.
The overall significance of Peretz’s evolving political consciousness
as a result of being exposed to poverty and to socialist activism on the
Jewish streets was that it led him to produce cultural works relevant to the
socialist cause. If in the years 1888–92 Peretz was functioning as a com-
mitted agent of the hegemonic class, from 1893 onward he made an effort
to establish himself as an organic intellectual, committed to the interests
of the Jewish working class. According to the Italian Marxist Antonio
Gramsci, every exploited social group needs to develop its own cadre
of intellectuals in order to help shape its people’s culture and way of life
according to its own interests rather than according to the interests of the
bourgeoisie.40 These “organic intellectuals” articulate class perceptions and
aspirations for the group in its own language.41
Peretz himself did not belong to the Jewish working class, but,
as I argue in this book, he consciously bound himself to it, thus becom-
ing a critical source for Jewish proletarian culture. As Gramsci writes,
“an intellectual who joins the political party of a certain social group
 Introduction | xxiii

is merged with organic intellectuals who belong to the group itself, and
bonds himself tightly with the group.”42 Peretz, as I show throughout
this book, indeed joined the ranks of the nascent Jewish Labor Bund in
spirit. An early Bundist activist in Warsaw called it “a kind of moral bond
between the socialist Jewish youth and Peretz” created through a series of
meetings beginning in 1893–94.43 In later years, the Bund would become
the biggest Jewish Marxist party.

The Bund

Founded in Vilnius in 1897 by Jewish Marxists, the Bund’s initial goal was
to recruit Eastern European working-class Jews to the emergent Russian
revolutionary movement. The use of Yiddish—rather than Russian or,
later, Polish—would help create a mass movement of Yiddish-speaking
workers. Through strikes, Jewish workers were organized to seek bet-
ter working conditions at their workshops. In 1905, the Bund added
national-cultural autonomy to its platform, on top of advocating socialist
revolution and civic equality. At the time, the Bund claimed approximately
35,000 members in 274 branches and was the largest and best-organized
Jewish political party in Eastern Europe. However, in the Soviet Union,
the Russian Bund was eventually liquidated by the authorities.44 Between
the world wars, Poland became the party’s center of activity. It enjoyed
legal status as a political party, and its candidates were chosen for munic-
ipal positions. In opposition to Zionism, Bund leader Vladimir Medem
sharpened its ideological commitment to do’ikayt (hereness): the belief
that the future of the Jewish people lies in the Diaspora they reside in
and the commitment to change and improve that place of residence.45 The
party positioned itself as the guardian of secular Yiddish culture, opposing
attempts to cultivate Hebrew culture at the expense of Yiddish. The Bund
supported the Yiddish school network TSYSHO, active in more than one
hundred communities, and it played a central role in the development
of Jewish newspapers in Russia and Poland. By the mid-1930s, the Bund
had become the dominant Jewish organization in Poland, leading the
struggle against antisemitism. Until 1949, the Bund continued to carry
out activities, but the organization was eventually wiped out when Poland
adopted the Stalinist line. The Bund as an organized political party ceased
to exist in Eastern Europe while maintaining chapters in the decades that
followed in places like the United States; France; Melbourne, Australia;
and Tel Aviv.46
xxiv | Introduction

Regarding the relations between Peretz and the Bund, I rely on the
work of Yoav Peled, who in his book Class and Ethnicity in the Pale (1989)
examined the rise of an “ethno-class consciousness” amongst Jewish work-
ers in the Russian Pale of Settlement. The same year Peretz was starting
to publish his radical work, 1893, was also the year when the Jewish
social democratic intelligenti (active in Lithuania since the late 1880s)
went from working in small, elite workers’ circles to agitation on a mass
scale, “appealing to the workers on the basis of their immediate mate-
rial needs.”47 Following Peled, who examined the emergence of the Bund
using analytical tools borrowed from political economy and sociological
discourse, I argue that Peretz played an instrumental role in helping the
Bund develop a Jewish, culturally unified ethno-consciousness.
Various theories exist regarding the emergence of the Bund. The
traditional view based its reasoning on the socioeconomic realities of
Jews, while Jonathan Frankel emphasized the role of politics.48 Frank Wolff
emphasizes the transnational character of the Bund from its inception
but tends to essentialize such elusive concepts such as yidishkayt and
mishpokhedikayt (family-ness) as a basis for a secular Jewish identity
(inherently national).49 Recent scholarship by Roni Gechtman uncriti-
cally adopts the Bund’s own anti-nationalist rhetoric, utopian aspirations,
and self-characterization. Gechtman also tends to lump Peled with other
Israeli historians, assuming Peled’s scholarship suffered from “the ten-
sion between the goals of Zionist historiography and the Bund’s political
and ideological commitments, namely the party’s radical opposition to
nationalism in general and to Zionism in particular.”50 But did the Bund
“radically oppose nationalism”? Is Peled’s scholarship part of the proj-
ect of “Zionist historiography”? It’s much easier to show how the Bund
clearly opposed territorial Jewish nationalism and statehood in the form
of Zionism but actively promoted Yiddish schools and Yiddish letters in
Eastern Europe, because even “national cultural autonomy is rooted in
the theoretical home terrain of nationalism”51—and to show how Peled’s
scholarship is critical of nationalist projects in all their forms.52
In his examination of the formation of the Bund and the rise of
an “ethno-class consciousness” among Jewish workers in the Russian
Pale of Settlement, Peled places the Bund’s usage of (Jewish) “ethnicity”
as a symptom of a split labor market. In a split labor market, the concept
of ethnicity is used both by the hegemonic group as an argument to ensure
its dominance within the society and by the minority group as an orga-
nizational tool in its struggle for equality.53 While later Bund historians
shed light on many other aspects of the Bund’s history and ideology, it is
 Introduction | xxv

Peled’s focus on the ethno-class consciousness that provides a particularly

powerful lens through which to explore the ways Peretz’s work during
these years participates in redefining ethnicity in radical terms.

Previous Scholarship on Peretz and His Politics

The first Peretz scholar who emphasized Peretz’s socialist art and devo-
tion to working-class Jews was Shakhne Epshteyn in his long essay Y.
L. Perets als sotsyaler dikhter (Y. L. Peretz as a social poet), published in
1916. Epshteyn states that, contrary to Peretz scholarship’s emphasis on
Peretz’s “artistic significance,” he wants to focus on the “social content
of [Peretz’s] works.”54 Epshteyn overemphasizes literary content without
discussing the means of artistic production and form. While I also analyze
the content of Peretz’s literary works and examine their commitment to
progressive politics, I am not less interested in the means of art produc-
tion. Revolutionary artists must also revolutionize the means of producing
art, as Walter Benjamin taught us, in order to make it more accessible to
more readers, and thus they create new class relations between themselves
and their audience.55 Moreover, I disagree with Epshteyn’s misleading
dichotomy between “artistic significance” and “social content.” In con-
trast, I am exactly interested in the interplay between the two elements,
which, weaved together, can give birth to groundbreaking political art
such as Peretz’s challenging and multidimensional socialist literature.
The idea that Peretz made a radical turn in the mid-1890s was first
compressively presented in a 1934 book by the Soviet literary critic Ayzik
Rozentsvayg entitled Der radikaler periyod fun Peretses shafn: “Di yon-
tef bletlekh” (The radical period of Peretz’s creative work: The Holiday
Pages). Rozentsvayg’s excellent effort emphasized the content as well as
the production of the Holiday Pages (the journal Peretz produced in the
mid-1890s) and Peretz’s class position, and it puts forth the demand from
the artist to commit to social realism, in line with the Soviet hermeneutic
doctrine of the time. I do not demand from an artist any commitment
to a certain genre or style of writing, nor do I present any negative atti-
tude toward modernist trends in art. Therefore, I refute the long-standing
convention in Peretz scholarship that his interest in new literary styles—
specifically his shift to neoromantic Hasidic stories and away from his
earlier social realistic and naturalistic writings—coincided with a rejection
of revolutionary politics.56
xxvi | Introduction

In contrast to Rozentsvayg, who was also restricted by official Soviet

guidelines of literary criticism, I argue in this book that Peretz’s stylistic
shift reflected his ongoing search for new ways of expressing his radical-
ism. I analyze Peretz’s radical-creative spirit through a holistic lens, which
might still point to contradictions but is free of Rozentsvayg’s somewhat
mechanical relationship between the work of art, the mode of produc-
tion, and social class—an approach that does not adequately consider the
possibility of sincere internal ideological struggle.
In the process, I also refute other notable prewar and mid-century
Peretz scholars like H. D. Nomberg,57 and more so Shmuel Charney,58
who emphasized Peretz’s psychological personality portrait as a so-called
noncommitted seeker, always on the look for new ideas and philosophies.
Therefore, due to his restless character, Peretz was unable to fully com-
mit to any political party. Charney acknowledges that a shift occurred in
the mid-1890s in Peretz, since he began interacting with Jewish socialist
activists—and, as I argue, that Peretz, as a result of those meetings, began
seeing working-class Jews as his target readership. However, Charney feels
obligated to stress that “Peretz did not become a socialist in the partisan
sense of the word, and surely he did not become a Marxist-proletarian
socialist.”59 Charney’s claim about partisanship is anachronistic, because
Peretz played a key cultural role in the formation of the Bund among
proto-Bund groups, before the party was actually founded. And one
cannot speak of official membership in a party that throughout Peretz’s
lifetime was forced to operate underground because the czarist regime
deemed it illegal.60 Regarding Peretz not becoming “a Marxist-proletarian
socialist,” judging by his various works and activism and considering the
government restrictions he operated under, I do see Peretz as a socialist
who was heavily influenced by Marxian thought and politics, embodied
by the proto-Bund and the Bund. From “Bontshe Shvayg” to his Hasidic
short stories, to essays and cultural production, I show in this book
Peretz’s unambiguous commitment to serving the needs of the Jewish
working class. However, my strongest disagreement in this book is with
later Peretz scholars.
If earlier scholars mainly debated the extent of Peretz’s progressiv-
ism, postwar American and Israeli Peretz scholars began to reinterpret
Peretz’s legacy from a conservative perspective. In the mid-twentieth
century, the rich progressive tradition of Peretz critique that emphasized
Peretz’s socialist work and his deep affection for the socialist cause and
toward working people began to give way to work that sought to deem-
phasize Peretz’s relation to the labor movement. Interpreters such as
 Introduction | xxvii

Chone Shmeruk (1921–97), who was head of the Department of Yiddish

at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1970–82), presented Peretz as an
ardent anti-revolutionary, constantly in a state of doubt and despair, resis-
tant to any fixed political ideal, and certainly never committing himself
to the socialist cause.61 Similarly, Ruth Wisse (1936–), the distinguished
Yiddish professor at Harvard (1993–2014), argues that Peretz’s texts from
the 1890s display a “constant tension between radical and conservative
impulses.”62 She suggests that Peretz was “used” by socialists for their
purposes rather than acknowledging that he was an alert and willing
participant engaged in a process of mutual inspiration.
In fact, as I argue in this book, Peretz’s work from that period is
characterized by a clear affection for the cause of the proletariat, and
Peretz was actively engaged in stimulating Jewish workers to action, until
his 1899 arrest for a speech he made at an illegal workers’ gathering
despite his awareness that undercover police were in the crowd. I discuss
in this book at length examples of his Yiddish social-protest literature
from this period, but moreover I argue that in later years he continued
to produce, though less intensively, socially oriented literature, including
his so-called Hasidic stories.63
One of Peretz’s major sins in the eyes of his American neoconserva-
tive interpreters was that he held negative views toward Zionism, which
at his time was taking its very early steps. Already in his lifetime, Peretz
was vehemently attacked in the Zionist press for expressing such views.
The criticism included booklets parodying his work, written by Peretz’s
contemporary David Frishman. At the time, Peretz polemicized with his
attackers with full rhetorical force. Posthumously, the most vicious attack
against his views came from Wisse at the end of her book I. L. Peretz and
the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (1991). According to Wisse, if Jewish
national power, as expressed by the Zionist movement and the current
State of Israel, had existed during World War II, then the Holocaust would
not have occurred. Wisse’s neoconservative Yiddish scholarship not only
rejects Yiddish Diaspora nationalism but attributes to it, and to Peretz as
its inspiring messenger, a degree of responsibility for the destruction of
European Jewry.64 While Wisse unquestioningly supports Israeli statehood
and military power, Peretz maintained his belief that “all states were coer-
cive and culturally reductive.”65 Until his last days, Peretz viewed “freedom
of conscience, human culture and ethics” as the “only conditions for a free
life and victory.”66 One of my motivations to write this book was the scant
up-to-date Peretz scholarship accessible in English and the centrality in
the field given to Wisse’s neoconservative Peretz scholarship as result.67
xxviii | Introduction

Rozentsvayg divided Peretz’s creative journeys into three central

ideological periods: a preradical Peretz up until the mid-1890s, followed
by a radical period from 1893 to 1905 and a reactionary period during the
last decade of his life, characterized by his closeness to bourgeois nation-
alist and decadent ideals.68 Rozentsvayg’s periodization does reflect much
of Peretz’s wonderings. Its main fallacy and my point of disagreement with
him in this book concerns the so-called late reactionary period. I argue
that Peretz never had a period past 1893 of utter rejection of radical
socialist politics. He expressed doubt on occasion, but to the end of his
life, since he was exposed to the ideas of Jewish socialists, the latter group
remained his cultural-political milieu, his point of reference, his base of
support, his base of affection.69
With all that in mind, one can undoubtedly state that, first, after
1893 a radical socialist twist did occur in Peretz’s writings. He invested
himself in those years with an unprecedented intensity in writing
social-protest literature in various genres and styles. And, second, in later
years, even while he continued to produce radical work (though far less
intensively), these works were occasionally accompanied by works that
openly criticized socialists and socialist ideologies.

Outline of This Book

The first chapter in this book discusses the proto-socialist stage of Peretz’s
writing career through his major Yiddish essays and literary work, from
the time he settled in Warsaw in 1890 up until 1893, when the radical
shift occurred. Most of his early cultural productions in Yiddish were
published in the almanac Di yudishe bibliyotek, which he also edited. It
was published only twice due to lack of commercial success.70 Though
some awareness of social-class issues appears in his early writings as well,
Peretz did not actively associate with Jewish labor groups. Moreover, his
target readership was not working-class Jews but middle-class “enlight-
ened” Jews, in an effort to create a national intelligentsia.
In the second chapter I show how Peretz’s new sense of commit-
ment to the interests of the Jewish working class was expressed not only
in his many essays, works of prose and poetry, and speeches in front of
working-class audiences but also, and maybe first and foremost, through
the radical new ways he has produced art itself. This radicalization of the
means of production is evident in the radical Yiddish journal Di yontef
 Introduction | xxix

bletlekh. Its content is examined throughout the second chapter (including

further discussion of its relation to the nascent Bund) and beyond.
Peretz’s Hebrew work receives special focus in the third chapter,
where I analyze his ambitions to write radical literature in Hebrew. I show
also that in his usage of Hebrew Peretz had ambitions to be innovative and
that he left his mark on that language’s literature. I examine his genuine
attempts at producing radical Hebrew literature both in light of earlier
attempts at producing Hebrew socialist literature and with respect to his
radical works in Yiddish. I show that the inner contradiction of producing
radical socialist work in Hebrew while the language of Jewish workers
was Yiddish led Peretz to experiment only for a short time with writing
radical Hebrew work. I also examine in this chapter, through a look at
his essays and satires in both Hebrew and Yiddish, Peretz’s regard toward
Zionism, which was mainly negative. Peretz strongly opposed the program
of the influential Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am, who proposed creat-
ing a Jewish spiritual center in Palestine. Peretz saw such a plan as elitist
and completely alienated from the true needs of Eastern European Jewry.
In the fourth chapter, I look at Peretz’s early writing career
as a Hebrew poet and at his 1890s Hebrew poetry while giving attention
to the poetry he was producing during that decade in Yiddish. Poetry in
Yiddish was a new medium for Peretz, as was writing in Yiddish alto-
gether. Examining his Yiddish poetry from his radical period, I will ask
to what degree this poetry can truly be called radical political poetry.
Peretz’s poetry serves as a critical bridge in accessing his development
as a writer and producer of Jewish proletarian culture in both languages.
The fifth chapter shows how Peretz’s Hasidism-inspired works, both
in Hebrew and in Yiddish, used the Hasidic metaphor in varied and com-
plex ways. Peretz’s Hasidic stories were often misunderstood and mis-
taken as reactionary by orthodox Marxist literary critics. Similarly, they
were often mistakenly viewed by nationalists as simple Jewish folk tales.
Both misinterpretations neglect the socialist core of many of these sto-
ries. I view in Peretz’s Hasidic work an attempt to construct a mythological
base for the Jewish labor movement and thereby have an important effect
on the radical reader. My analysis also considers additional philosophical
influences and aesthetic aspects that enrich and inform these stories.
Through my work about Peretz, I hope to give the reader a bet-
ter understanding of his development as a writer, of his engagements
with radical politics, and of the resulting radical literature that was the
vivid expression of his alignment with the needs of working-class Jews in
xxx | Introduction

Figure I.4. Peretz card with his minibiography in Yiddish. Israeli National
Library.
 Introduction | xxxi

eastern Europe. I also hope to provide the reader with a deeper under-
standing of the cultural productions that became the cultural foundation
of the nascent Jewish Labor Bund in eastern Europe. But my hope is
that my work will also contribute to scholarship in fields beyond Jewish
studies by helping to decipher the complex relationship between radical
movements and the cultural productions and cultural agents associated
with them. Similar to the uncovering of the silenced radical Martin Luther
King Jr., who tackled in his later years issues of poverty and warfare
and was described by Cornel West as “the most significant and effective
organic intellectual in the latter half of the twentieth century,”71 I aspire
to uncover in this book the neglected radical Peretz and his role in the
Jewish labor movement.
 Chapter 1

Education, Professions, and

Literary Proclamations
Peretz between Warsaw Positivism and Proto-Socialism

In the editorial comments to the second Yudishe bibliyotek (1891) casually

entitled “What’s up?” (Vos hert zikh?), Peretz wrote about the working
class and its worsening condition, which might read as sympathetic to
its plight:

Every day new machines are coming out that replace human
labor. The workers in the meantime are increasing in number
and from day to day have less work and even less income,
because competition reduces the cost of labor. In all of the
European countries, as is in the United States of America, the
working class is restless, unsatisfied, and constantly rebelling.
Governments fear rebellions and wish in any case not to let
the size of the proletarian class grow.1

Later in this essay, it becomes clear that Peretz is writing mostly in order
to discourage emigration to the United States rather than to identify with
the working class, as one might conclude from the last passage. In a letter
from around 1887–88 to Moyshe Altberg, his cousin and childhood friend,
Peretz explains why he was banned from practicing law. This rejection
was certainly a catalyst for the development of his Jewish national senti-
ment, and it paralleled the experiences of many other middle-class Jews
of the time who suffered similar discrimination and arrived at the same
conclusions. According to his letter to Altberg, Peretz believed that he
was banned from practicing law because his competitors falsely informed
2 | Adi Mahalel

the government that he was a socialist. He describes his futile attempts

to convince the authorities that he was not a socialist:

For a long time I have been very restless. I had to put

up a tough battle with those who do not support me, who
told the authorities that I am a socialist. Are you laughing?
Nevertheless, I was very scared. The battle itself was a tough
one, and in addition, I managed the struggle in great secrecy,
so the matter wouldn’t become known to anyone. My parents,
my wife, and the people close to me didn’t know a thing. I bit
my lip and kept silent, knowing all the while that the danger is
great. Now, praise the Lord, the struggle is over and, praise the
Mighty One, I fell in battle. I couldn’t clearly prove that I am
not a socialist, nor an enemy of the government, nor a hater of
the church. I don’t defend any trials of revolutionaries . . . well,
they made me out to be a socialist. Even though I have not yet
uttered out from my mouth any word and not yet written any
word against the order of the world. And thus, they swallowed
me like a freshly ripe fruit at the beginning of summer.2

The twice-repeated use of the phrase “not yet” (my emphasis) plants the
seed of Peretz’s radical outspokenness through much of the 1890s, sug-
gesting a more radical perspective was already fomenting in his heart,
even though at the time he considered the idea of being a socialist laugh-
able. Remember that the Bibliyotek as well as the statistical expedition
were funded by the capitalist Jan Bloch, a fact that made any open call
for class struggle problematic. However, in a private letter, Peretz could
reveal his true thoughts and feelings, and in this one he did not signifi-
cantly diverge from the positivist, middle-class-oriented mindset of the
Bibliyotek.3
In his Yiddish essay “Bildung” (1891), Peretz had put forth a plat-
form of education and outreach to the Yiddish-speaking masses of Eastern
Europe. In Iber profesyonen (About professions; also 1891), he encour-
aged Yiddish-speaking Jews to take on useful modern professions so they
would not be left behind by the socioeconomic changes sweeping Poland
at the time. While he wrote in a straightforward manner in his essays,
this subject received a more nuanced treatment in his major debut in
Yiddish prose: the short story “In postvogn” (In the mail-coach) and the
longer Bilder fun a provints rayze (Pictures from a travel journey). In
 Education, Professions, and Literary Proclamations | 3

these key texts, published between 1890 and 1891, Peretz wished to ele-
vate the low symbolic status of Yiddish into that of a modern European
Jewish-national language. Still, these texts did not express an alignment
with the working class, nor did they embrace socialism. However, I show
in this chapter how these texts, examined carefully, contain the seeds of
Peretz’s ideological transformation of the mid-1890s toward socialism.
Through different manifestations of expression and sentiment, one can see
signs he was beginning to recognize the idea of conflicting class interests,
albeit vaguely. Examined together, they are key to understanding the for-
mation and the genesis of the radical Peretz.

Bildung for the Masses, Professions for the Common People

Our program is Bildung: education; we want to educate our people, turn

the fools into smart people, turn the fanatics into educated people, and
turn the idlers into workers who are useful and respectable, capable
of working for their own good and in this way for the general good.
The Jewish professions at times are so specialized that their equal
in the twenty-first century would be that when one specialist would
lift up the upper eyebrow, the second would push down the bottom
one, and a third would examine the infected eye.
—I. L. Peretz, 18914

The first quotation opens Peretz’s essay “Bildung,” which was featured in
the Yiddish almanac Di yudishe bibliyotek. This almanac and this essay
in particular represent a desire to create a public sphere in Yiddish, one
that aspires to be both modern and Jewish.5 This is a new public sphere,
in which Jewish intellectuals of all sorts, located across the European
Jewish geography, can rationally discuss society’s problems, and do so
in Yiddish. Early on, Peretz imagined his Diaspora Jewish community
in progressive terms. Unlike the mainstream Zionist current, which was
taking its very early steps at the time, Peretz saw the positive effect of
exile on the Jewish consciousness:

Because we are in exile . . . our egoism is the purest

human-love! Because we feel that as long as human-love does
not prevail, as long as there is jealousy and hatred, as long as
there are rivalry and wars, life won’t be good for us. For this
4 | Adi Mahalel

reason, we constantly seek peace. For this reason, our hearts

are like a sponge for all the newest ideas. For this reason,
we have a heart, and we have feeling and compassion toward
the unfortunate. We share a connection with the expelled and
displaced, with the persecuted. (Ale verk, 8:4)

Here, Peretz was constructing a Jewish identity founded on the princi-

ples of seeking universal social justice and peace and solidarity with the
underprivileged. In his view, progressivism and living as a minority in the
Diaspora benefited Jews much more than creating their own army and
competing in this world of “rivalry and wars.” Complimenting and prais-
ing (albeit through essentializing) Diaspora Jews for being open “for all
the newest ideas” was Peretz’s way of convincing Jewish intellectuals that
the Jewish masses would be receptive to the Bildung platform. The focus
on education was not innovative, since education was also the focal point
of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) preceding Peretz.6 Shmuel
Feiner, relating to the early Haskalah in Western Europe, notes that “the
maskilim placed a special emphasis on the moral rehabilitation of the Jews,
and internalized the educational ideal of the Bildung, one of the hallmarks
of the German Enlightenment.”7 In Eastern Europe close to a century
after the Haskalah, Abramovitsh’s (Mendele’s) first published article was
the Hebrew essay “Mikhtav al dvar ha-khinukh” (A letter regarding edu-
cation). It focused on the need for Jewish children to learn Russian and
professions and suggested Jewish educators should worry about their own
professionalism before complaining about their unmotivated and under-
achieving pupils.8 But Peretz’s article was innovative in its use of Yiddish
as a serious political tool.
Bildung in German literally means a process of building oneself, or
self-improvement through culture and education. Within the Haskalah,
the concept of Bildung was always used to mean creating, through educa-
tion, a rational (i.e., modern) individual, a person capable of organizing
their life rationally and successfully. Ideally, this individual would also
develop moral and aesthetic sensibilities. Peretz offers his version of the
concept: “We want Bildung, but we don’t mean the Bildung that people
used to speak of. . . . We mean the Bildung that makes factories, trains,
highways; Bildung that teaches you to work for your own benefit and for
the benefit of the world, the Bildung that also makes a person honest
and good” (8:12). Peretz distinguished a broader and deeper version of
Bildung from the superficial Bildung of the Jewish Enlightenment. That
“old Bildung” worried about appearances and concerned itself with useless
 Education, Professions, and Literary Proclamations | 5

diversions such as the study of languages for their own sake. In contrast,
Peretz’s Bildung is more practical (better suited to the demands of the job
market), more beneficial for society (concerned with infrastructure), and
more ethical (concerned with how people treat each other). His version
of Bildung resonates with the Warsaw Positivism strand of thinking with
its emphasis on cultural and economic development. A socialist writer
would have added an emphasis on democratizing the economy and put
out a plan to achieve it. Peretz here is still struggling in matching the
progressivism of Jewish Diaspora and its openness to new ideas (as he
envisioned it in this article) with a full-on progressive platform. It is curi-
ous that Peretz used the plural “we,” as if a group of people is standing
behind his project, although he had not yet gathered a following. Even
if by “we” he meant the collective of Yiddish writers, his mini manifesto
would still have applied to only to a very small group of people. One
of his few readers, fellow writer and future collaborator Dovid Pinski,
wrote, “In his article ‘Bildung’ he addressed ‘all honest educated persons’
to help educate the people. He called on them to return to their people,
whom they had abandoned. He wanted them to come and help bring
his version of Bildung to the people. It seems to me that his call did not
reach any further than my circle of people in Vitebsk. No one responded
from anywhere, and nothing began to happen.”9 When Pinski stresses his
small “circle,” he is reviling the elitist top-down outreach strategy at hand
here: the way to reach people was not through targeting mass readership
but rather through strategic targeting of informal networks of intellec-
tuals. Moreover, even among those targeted, merely a handful of people
were willing to sign up for Peretz’s plan. The lack of enthusiasm toward
Peretz’s calls speaks to the fact Peretz did not offer the intelligentsia any
meaningful productive message to bring to the masses. Besides receiving
access to information about modern professions in their own language,
he is not providing the masses a compelling path to improving their lives.
Modern professions per se are insufficient if workers do not receive a liv-
ing wage and have zero job security, all of which require social struggle
and political organizing to obtain. The article is devoid of such issues and
was thus doomed not to generate excitement and enthusiasm. However,
through portraying Diaspora Jews as a group aligned with progressive val-
ues, Peretz was indirectly (and likely unintentionally and unconsciously)
implying that Jews (including himself) would be receptive to the new
progressive socialist agenda on the horizon. In a major way, choosing
to write in Yiddish over other languages signified a progressive cultural
choice of writing in a linguistic medium the working class shared.
6 | Adi Mahalel

“Bildung” was sealed by the open wish that “the main thing that
ought to be seen, as much as possible, is that the people should have a live-
lihood” ,10 emphasizing a central feature of the Haskalah: its dubious
slogan regarding the “productivization of Jews.” In the long pamphlet
article Iber profesyonen (About professions), initiated by Peretz’s Jewish
positivist circle, Peretz followed the agenda of making Eastern European
Jews “productive.” He proposed that Jews need to acquire productive
occupations and integrate themselves in the modern industrial produc-
tion process in order to extricate themselves from the poverty they were
experiencing. Historically, because Jews could not own land, they were
occupied as artisans, handicraft workers, traders of goods, and in gen-
eral the manufacturing of finished goods (like tailoring) as opposed to
producing raw material. These occupations were increasingly becoming
outmoded due to new methods of production.11 Peretz was focusing here
on how Jews can adapt to industrialization in Poland.
Peretz describes the changes capitalism brought to Eastern Europe,
including the terrible poverty it brought for Jews. The traditional prein-
dustrial occupations of the Jews were dying out. Their roles as commercial
middlemen between farmers and landowners were less in demand due
to improvements in transportation and manufacturing. Peretz predicts,
“Three quarters of Jewish professions will fall away and all must start to
produce, to practice craftsmanship, to work in the factories” (Iber pro-
fesyonen, 14). The source of these numbers is the same as sources in
charge of the statistical expedition.12 Peretz acknowledges here the rise of
the working class as a major factor in the economy, yet he still does not
adapt his political platform to this new economic reality.
Similar to Haskalah literature, which repeatedly cited the places
where the Talmud and Midrash speak in praise of craftsmanship and
handicraft workers, Peretz also made an effort to back his agenda with evi-
dence from traditional Jewish sources: “The Talmud for example had per-
ceived artisans in a different way: ‘Whoever doesn’t teach his son a craft,
is like he taught him theft!’ ‘Great is the craft, it gives the person respect!’
‘Love the craft and hate the rabbinate!’ ‘The Torah can’t exist without the
craft!’ The few words shown here are enough to prove that past genera-
tions had praise for those who work with their own hands not with some-
one else’s” (Iber profesyonen, 4). Also, in his compiled booklet about the
cholera epidemic, which he based on German and other sources, Peretz
tried to show how most of the hygiene rules have a basis in ancient Jewish
tradition.13 This usage functions as a precursor to Peretz’s use of coded
“traditional Judaism” in promoting a radical socialist agenda, as I discuss
 Education, Professions, and Literary Proclamations | 7

in chapters 2 and 5. A significant part of Iber profesyonen is devoted

to distinguishing between the Christian worker and the Jewish worker,
which Peretz bases on well-known stereotypes of Christians and Jews.
While the Christian worker divides his hours in an organized fashion
between work and rest, “You [the Jews] do not,” he accuses his Yiddish
readers.14 Nevertheless, Jewish workers, according to Peretz, do possess
many advantages in comparison with Christian workers:

You drink less!

You are (in the provinces) more educated, in any case all of
you can pray, a lot. You can write a bit, you come out of some
form of traditional Jewish education.15

You are more easygoing, more relaxed, and live better with
your family. (Iber profesyonen, 22)

Peretz’s assertion that a Jewish worker has a better family life than his
Christian counterpart stems from the stereotype of gentile workers held
by Eastern European Jews.16 One can strongly argue such stereotypes serve
to discourage cross-ethnic/religious working-class solidarity. For example,
according to Peretz, the grave advantage Christian workers possess against
their Jewish counterparts is their love of work for its own sake as opposed
to the Jewish affection for money and laziness:

A Christian worker loves his occupation; you [Jews] work for

the most part to get time off, to get the task over with; you
never have in mind the work but your earnings; you barely
have a bit of money and you work less; you get a lot of money,
you throw away your craft and become merchants, saloon
owners and the like. . . .
People say “Jews are thieves”; that is totally true; as much
as a Jew steals money from himself, a Greek and a gypsy
don’t steal from one another . . . our handicraft worker have
unfortunately a very bad name, and not for nothing you earn
such a name! (Iber profesyonen, 22–31)

Ironically, Peretz’s expedition to the provinces portrayed in Bilder aimed

to dispel such biased accusations that Jews were lazy, unproductive
money-lovers, but still Peretz repeats these stereotypes in his own writings.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Ten minutes later the anchor was weighed, and they were
steaming out towards the breakwater and the open sea.
Meanwhile Ella and Clarence had engaged a small, swift boat to
row them across to the foot of Mount Edgecumbe Park; and climbing
at a great pace up the steep road that skirts the walls, they got into
the field below Maker Church to get a last glimpse of the yacht. They
were in time to see clearly against the blue of sea and sky the bright-
hued pavilion with its curtains thrown back, and a group of scarcely
distinguishable figures underneath.
“Yes—yes, I can see them—I can see them, George and Nouna
and Sundran, too!” said Clarence excitedly.
Ella was shorter-sighted, stamped her foot with impatience
because she could not make them out, and was fain to be content
with watching the yacht until it was a mere speck. At last she could
scarcely see it, for her eyes grew dim with rising tears. Clarence had
now time to feel angrily jealous of her interest in the vessel.
“Poor little girl! Poor little Nouna!” she said at last. “How white and
worn she looks still, so different from the brilliant little creature who
came to us at Maple Lodge!”
“Perhaps she will die and leave him free,” said Clarence rather
bitterly.
But Ella’s expression changed to one of sincerest anxiety.
“Oh, no, indeed I hope she won’t! It would break his heart!” she
said.
“I thought you considered her such an inappropriate wife for him?”
Ella reddened. She had thought so once, and she thought so no
longer; but when and how her thoughts and feelings on the subject
had changed, she hardly knew.
“It is very difficult to judge accurately in such matters. You see it’s
impossible to deny that they’re passionately fond of each other, and
you mustn’t judge of the chances of a marriage by the way it came
about, you know.”
“No,” said Clarence, interested, “marriage is an odd thing.”
“Well,” said Ella brusquely, “we must be getting back now.”
“Won’t you wait till the yacht’s out of sight?”
Ella stopped and looked out to sea again, but she dug the end of
her sunshade into the ground with nervous impatience.
 “I’m so sorry it’s all over; we’ve had such a jolly time getting it all
ready, haven’t we?” said he sentimentally.
“Oh, yes, well enough,” she answered rather crossly, feeling
herself an unpleasant void at the heart which she feared might lead
to some foolish exhibition of weakness.
“It was an interest in life, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, but there are plenty more left.”
“For you, yes, because you’re so good.”
“Nonsense, I’m no better than you might be if you liked. It was
your money that did most of it, remember. I assure you I don’t forget
the obligation.”
“Now, Ella, don’t be ridiculous. What do I care about the miserable
money?”
“You’d care a great deal, if you were wise. A rich man who makes
himself comparatively poor by the good things he does with his
money is a fine fellow.”
Clarence cleared his throat two or three times, and began to shake
violently.
“Do you—do you think, Ella,” he began at last huskily, “that you’d
ever—care to—care to—make a fine fellow—of me?”
Ella turned sharply about and faced him.
“Can’t you do it for yourself?” she asked loftily.
Clarence shook his head.
“Now you know I can’t,” he pleaded gently. Then, as she made no
answer, he looked out to sea again, and saw that the Scheherazade
was dwindling to a little grey point on the horizon. “Now I’ll give you
till the yacht is out of sight to make up your mind,” said he.
Then they both looked at the vanishing speck. The moments
passed, and neither spoke, though they could hear and almost feel
the beating of each other’s heart, and though each felt the silence to
be desperately disconcerting.
“It’s gone!” said he.
“No, it isn’t!” cried she.
Both were growing intensely excited. Ella opened her eyes wider
and wider, and strained them to the utmost. Clarence tried to speak,
but she stopped him by thrusting out her hand right in front of him,
holding her breath. He looked down at it for a couple of seconds, and
then ventured to take it very gently in his right hand, and to put his
left on her shoulder. When he had remained in this position for a few
moments, she drew a long breath, and blinked her eyes violently.
“Don’t cry,” said Clarence soothingly, and he stooped and kissed
her.
“I haven’t answered you,” she objected, raising her shoulder
pettishly.
“Never mind that now. Let me comfort you, and you shall answer
me by and by.”
But Ella still looked persistently out to sea.
“The yacht’s quite gone now,” she said in a disconsolate voice,
“and with it your twenty thousand pounds. I suppose, from a strictly
business point of view, I owe you some compensation.”
“Well, twenty thou is twenty thou,” said Clarence, whose spirits
were rising.
Ella raised her hand to her chin reflectively, a little beam of
mischief coming into her eyes.
“On the whole,” she said at last musingly, making no further
objection to the encroachments of her companion’s arm,
“considering that I’m the ugly duckling of the family, perhaps I might
have made a worse bargain! And to tell you the truth, Clarence,” she
added presently in a gentler voice, with a touch of shyness, when he
had made her seal the contract with a kiss for each thousand, “if you
had gone your way and I had gone mine after the way you behaved
over that yacht, I—I should have missed you awfully!”
The sun was growing hot over the land and over the sea, and a
dim white haze seemed to soften the line between blue sky and blue
ocean, as they stood still side by side under the tower of old Maker
Church, savouring of the strange sweetness of having crowned an
old romance and laid the foundation of a new one with the fitting up
of the yacht Scheherazade.

Away over the quiet sea the little yacht steamed, the red-gold
evening sunlight bathing her decks and cresting with jewels each tiny
wave in her track. Under the silken canopy of the little pavilion
George was still sitting, with Nouna curled up asleep by his side;
while the freshening breeze, which rustled in the heavily fringed
curtains, blew straight in his face, bringing health and hope with its
eager kiss, and sweeping away like noxious vapours the dark
memories of the bygone winter. Ambition was stirring again within
him, and a craving for hard work, that his faults and follies in the past
might be atoned for by worthy achievement in the future. Lost in
thought, he had for a moment forgotten the present, when a slight
movement of her right arm, which lay across his own, brought his
sleeping wife again to his recollection. Bending down with a softened
expression in his eyes, he looked long at the tiny face, the sweeping
black eye-lashes, and the full red lips, the mutinous curves of which
gave him a warning he scarcely needed that, when once the
depression of weak health was past, it might still need all his love for
her and all her love for him to keep the little wilful creature within the
due bounds of dignified matronhood. The “semblance of a soul,” as
Rahas called it, had indeed peeped forth in her, and George
Lauriston’s belief that “the influence of an honest man’s love was
stronger than that of any mesmerist who ever hid pins,” had been
amply justified; but Nouna was not, and never would be, the
harmless domestic creature, absorbed in household duties, whom a
husband can neglect or ignore with impunity. Such as she was,
however, George was more than content that she should be, and the
wavering young heart which had turned to him in the dark days he
was determined by every loving and wise means to keep true to him
in the brighter time.
And so, with good promise of a fair future, the sun went down in a
golden haze on the calm sea, as the yacht still sped on for the warm
lands of orange and palm.

THE END.
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Florence Warden was the pseudonym of Florence Alice (Price)
James.
The Ward & Downey edition (3 vol., London, 1887) was referenced
for most of the changes listed below.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. armchair/arm-chair, lattice-
work/lattice work, etc.) have been preserved.

Alterations to the text:

Punctuation: missing periods, quotation mark pairings/nestings,
etc.
Italicize two incidents of “fiacre” to maintain consistency.
[Chapter VI]
Change “At last a board creeked in the hall outside” to creaked.
[Chapter VII]
“of which her vegetabe nature… began to describle to her visitor”
to vegetable and describe, respectively.
[Chapter X]
“Miss Nouna Weston to our office a quickly as possible on receipt”
to as.
[Chapter XI]
“and was familar with every phase of fast life” to familiar.
[Chapter XII]
“pang of yearning towards the sincere and oteadfast old friend” to
steadfast.
[Chapter XIV]
“at last she scarcely gave more, …, then an occasional nod” to
than.
(“You came here this morniug to see your husband drill?”) to
morning.
[Chapter XV]
 “little tyrant that ever capitivated a man’s senses and wormed”
captivated.
[Chapter XVI]
“and certainly done his utmost to persuade him to aecept it” to
accept.
[Chapter XVII]
“and the swarthy white robed Sundran, walking with noiseless” to
white-robed.
[Chapter XXI]
“first direction and then set about carrving out the second” to
carrying.
[Chapter XXII]
“rattled on Dicky, encourged by George’s lenity” to encouraged.
[Chapter XXIII]
“Even the highflown speech was like Nouna in her serious” to
high-flown.
“keep her from having her life ruined by any man’s pig
headedness” to pig-headedness.
[Chapter XXVI]
(“That if I would call in—some dy—bay myself—he would show) to
day—by.
“one of the widows was burst open with a crash” to windows.
[Chapter XXVII]
“quick turn of every head to the left, and and hoarse cry” delete
one and.
“by the time he got inside the gate way of the house” to gate-way.
[Chapter XXVIII]
“Chloris shrugged his shoulders, but she was impressed” to her.
[Chapter XXX]
“To his surprise, the Oriental seem quite relieved to find that” to
seemed.

[End of text]
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
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