The Human Touch

It Seems that an essayist, critic and journalist, one Chaim Lieberman, who is quite a big shot in Yiddish literature, if there is such a thing, has written a letter to Z. Weinper, who is the editor of the Oifkum, a monthly magazine in Yiddish, to the effect that he is through with literature. By that he means that he will cease to write literature, although he will continue to turn out journalism, and he will cease to read literature. Without specific reference to Mr. Lieberman, isn’t it true that when a man says he is through with literature, what he really means is that literature is through with him, or was through a long time ago? Up to the present writing there has been no news that the lions at the Forty-second Street Library entrance collapsed at the news of Mr. Lieberman’s defection.

Mr. Lieberman is, or rather, has been, quite a person in the Yiddish world of letters. He has lectured at Columbia University; he has written books on O’Neill and on Ernst Toller and he published two others entitled “Literary Silhouettes” and “Writers and Books” and has also written for the Columbia University Press on the history of Yiddish literature-all of which activities would seem to make him appear a literary journalist rather than a creator of literature.

The reason for Mr. Lieberman’s strike, or boycott, or surrender, lies in his discovery, at this late date, that literature and the makers of literature do not serve their own ideals, but are most willing prostitutes to a Hitler, say, or to a Mussolini, or to any leader of shirts who wins for himself a position which enables him to crack the whip over others. What irks Mr. Lieberman is not only that literature can submit to co-ordination, in Germany, or Italy, or Russia, or even the United States, but that it will and can go hoarse with loyalty on behalf of any despot; that it serves not itself, but those who seek to enslave mankind-although Mr. Lieberman takes the trouble to point out that Russia is not exactly in the same class as Germany.

DEFINING PROSTITUTION

All this of course is extremely touching. When a Russian novelist believes in Communism, and an Italian in Fascism and a German in Hitlerism and they write in harmony with their faith, there is no prostitution. It is when a writer protests too loudly an allegiance he does not feel that there is prostitution. Now, is it possible that Mr. Lieberman feels that no German writer can be a sincere Hitlerian, that every man who declares himself, as a man of letters, for Hitler is a hypocrite, if not a prostitute? If he does, that belief does credit rather to his ingeniousness than to his maturity. The fact, however, seems to me to be the contrary.

The Nazis are notably poverty-stricken in men of letters. They have had to make a hero out of a writer of doggerel rhymes like Wessel, whom they are planning soon to beatify; and they have had to take up Johst, a second-rate dramatist whose “Schlageter” they brought in from the provinces, and they have accepted the peace offerings of only one great man of letters, who is now too old and too tired to fight them-Hauptmann. After all, they haven’t the Manns, they haven’t the Zweigs and they haven’t anything like a Feuchtwanger and even the literate Nazis can lift themselves only so many inches by their bootstraps. Even their Goebbels is a disappointed man of letters whose ink has turned to vinegar. So far as the power of expression goes the Nazis have no match for Lenin and Trotsky, or, even descending the scale, for Mussolini.

After all, if Mr. Lieberman wanted an example par excellence of a writer suborning himself, or being suborned, for purposes in which he could not have believed he might have gone to early history, to Josephus, the Jew who served Vespasian and took a Roman name as part of his reward. Great literature has been written in spite of the fact that here and there a man wrote against his convictions, or wrote warmly for a thing which he felt but tepidly. Besides, men don’t create literature so much as literature creates men. On second thought, it sounds tautological to say great literature. A book, an essay, a poem, a story is either literature or it isn’t.

Perhaps Mr. Lieberman, in his innocence, confuses the words literature and journalism. A man doesn’t put on his frock coat, a gardenia in his lapel, and kid gloves on his hands and say, as he dips a mauve-colored pen into violet ink: “Ah, now I shall create literature.” And he does not, by the same token, roll up sleeves which show sweat stains at the armpits and say: “Now I’ll create merely journalism.” No, my dear tovarish, it isn’t done that way. A man writes a little casual piece in a country paper which is read by no one you would suppose mattered, but somehow that piece falls into discriminating hands and is reprinted and reprinted, and quoted and quoted and it becomes literature. And another man writes a great big panoramic novel, something pretentious, and no one gives a damn, and it’s not literature.

Also, there’s another criterion. An honest, clumsy man is more likely to create literature than a clever, dishonest man. And by that I mean that if a fellow, not believeing in Hitlerism, decides to take the easy way and write something the Nazis will like and for which they will reward him, he will be unable, with the best intentions in the world, or the worst intentions, for that matter, to turn out anything that won’t give him away-even to the Nazis he is so eager to serve.

ITS OWN ACID

The main point about literature is that it contains within itself its own acid. If it’s flashy, if it’s dishonest, if it’s prostitute, then whatever else it is, it isn’t literature. It isn’t literature even when the reviewers say it is. It may be a social document, or a legal argument, or a profession of faith, or a boost for your friend or a knock for your enemy, or an insignificant description of an insignificant occurrence in your life, but it hasn’t got that certain thing, which will make a reader a couple of years hence, a couple of thousand miles away, glow with the recognition that this is the stuff.

So, please, Mr. Lieberman, reconsider your decision, which can hurt you much more than it can hurt literature, and stick, if you know how, to literature, for there is still a lot of fun and a lot of enlightenment to be derived from the reading of what other men have created and from the attempt to create something of your own that you may take delight in and to which some of your friends may point with pride. You do want your friends to be proud of you, don’t you?

However, if what Mr. Lieberman means is that it is a futile things to attempt to create a literature in a language like Yiddish, I command him to look, or look again, into A. A. Roback’s “Curiosities of Yiddish Literature” and take heart out of the knowledge contained therein. If the writers in Yiddish cease to have pride in their language, who shall have pride in it?