News Brief

The seventh volume of the new Russian Soviet Encyclopedia of Literature which has just been published here devotes six pages to the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Mendele Mocher Seforim, which is more space than is devoted to any other Russian literateur.

In the article Mendele is described as continuing his work in the first Hebrew period, the work of the Jewish bourgeoisie of the Haskalah. His development in going over to the Yiddish tongue is characterized as a swinging over to the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie. The “Klein Manschele” is described as the foundation stone of modern Yiddish classic literature.

While the main motive of Yiddish bourgeois literature was the struggle between parents and children, Mendele’s motif was the struggle of the people against the Jewish oligarchy, the Kahal, and he portrayed the class war, the exploitation of the poverty-stricken Jewish masses by the leaders of the community.

The author of the article is J. Nusinoff, professor of Western literature at Moscow University.

The volume contains short notices of a number of other Yiddish writers, including Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav, the Chassidic Rabbi, dealing with his mystic religious tales, and the Yiddish poet Menachem, who now lives in America, and who is described as a national chauvinist.

ASCH, BIALIK, OTHERS

The previous six volumes of the encyclopedia included appraisals of Shalom Asch, Bergelson, Bialik, M. L. Halperin, Peretz Hirschbein, Jacob Dineson, Yehoash, Kvitko, Isaac Kipnis, Lipman-Levin, Moses Litvakoff, Peretz Markish, and other Soviet writers.

Asch is described as the poet of the dying Jewish past, the artist and ideologist of Jewish nationalist prosperity. But he is a great talent, the article adds.

Bialik is described as a great poet, with a powerful spontaneous flow of languages, complex rhythms and a mastering of the Biblical lingual form, which it is said, he has creatively reconstructed. The article finds fault however with Bialik’s rhetorical style, his pomposity of language, and his misuse of canonised Biblical phrases and images, which give to his work the appearance of hyperbole.

He is described as a narrow nationalist, a great pessimist, and a metaphysician who conceives Jewish life as something static, and who sees the way out of the Jewish tragedy in his grandfather’s sacred tomes, which he has turned into a “religion without faith.”

The encyclopedia contains hundreds of biographies and appraisals of Jews writing in other languages than Yiddish and Hebrew, but does not mention in such cases that they are Jews.

Twenty-seven pages are devoted to Yiddish literature in general, illustrated with pictures and facsimiles, and thirteen pages are given to Hebrew literature in general. In both cases this is exclusive of the space devoted to single writers.

The section on Yiddish literature consists of the following subdivisions: Yiddish literature from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries; Yiddish literature at the end of the eighteenth century; Yiddish Soviet literatures and Yiddish literature outside the Soviet countries.

The treatment of Hebrew literature is divided into Ancient Hebrew literature, Medieval Hebrew literature, from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, the “period of decay” from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the new Hebrew literature, and the Post-war He brew literature.

The Bible goes into the section on Ancient Hebrew literature and has eight pages devoted to it.

It was originally intended to give Yiddish literature and Yiddish writers two per cent. of the total space of the Encyclopedia, but it was afterwards decided to give them ten to twelve per cent. of the space.