In "Bontshe Shvayg," Peretz introduces the main character at the moment when he has just died and crossed the threshold into the "other world." Bontshe Shvayg is a meek man whose only outstanding characteristic during his life on earth is his perpetual silence, even in the face of the most painful circumstances: a botched circumcision, a wife who cheats on him, children who throw him out of his own house. You name the terrible circumstance, and this guy has probably endured it without a complaint.
When he arrives at the great gates of Heaven, complete with winged cherubs and gold everything, Bontshe meets a Heavenly Tribunal. In typically Jewish fashion, though, the tribunal is more like a courtroom trial. His defense paints a picture of a martyr who bore the great burdens of the world with no complaint. When the defense rests its case and the Heavenly Tribunal is ready to admit Bontshe Shvayg they, of course, decide in his favor: "The Heavenly Tribunal can pass no judgment on you. It is not for us to determine your portion of paradise. Take what you want! It is yours, all yours!" The humorous twist is that Bontshe is not a martyr or a saint. He isn't otherworldly. To the great amusement of the prosecution, his only request is "a warm roll with fresh butter every morning." In his overly literal conception of Heaven, Bontshe Shvayg mocks the preoccupation of many religious Jews with deliverance in the "other world" while ignoring life on earth
Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" presents a similar main character with a far different philosophical implication. Unlike "Bontshe Shvayg," which is in the third person, "Gimpel" is a first person account of Gimpel's foibles and unfortunate circumstances. Gimpel is quite the gullible fellow, seemingly incapable of learning to be skeptical when others tell him outrageous things. He is tricked into marrying an unfaithful woman. Luckily, Gimpel has some redeeming factors in his life: he runs a successful business, he has children who love him, and he has an unshakable faith in God. Hell, he doesn't even want to divorce the woman that he catches cheating on him. Bashevis Singer also strays far away from the message Peretz delivers at the end of "Bontse Shvayg." At the end of "Gimpel, the imagery is mystical, the tone transcendent:
"No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. the gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared--I carry them in my beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be fooled."
While faith and tradition may be imperfect--Gimpel is a "fool" after all (though on a side note, we were told that "fool" isn't necessarily a perfect translation of the word in Yiddish)--it's all the Jews have to unite them as a people. It's a cynical transcendence, at best.
The distinction between these two Yiddish stories would be unremarkable without putting them into historical context. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote "Gimpel the Fool" in the years that immediately proceeded a grizzly time for Jews. Between the pogroms in Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and the mass persecution of Jews in the Stalin regime, it is safe to say that Bashevis Singer saw the brutal consequences of Jewish "assimilation" in the modern world. Like gullible Gimpel, who takes blow after blow from others, Jews must hold onto their traditions, turn into their communities, and try to pick up the broken pieces of themselves for the true world beyond the earth.
While it is understandable, Bashevis Singer generated a great deal of controversy amongst the Yiddish literary world. Those who had helped to create and consume the culture of Yiddishkeit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries believed Yiddish represented cosmopolitan humanist values. Jewish isolation is exactly the worldview they worked so hard to shed. As a non-territorial language of a certain people,Yiddish promised to unite Jews everywhere while while allowing Jews to integrate into their own societies. Nevertheless, Isaac Bashevis Singer, not Y.L. Peretz, won a Nobel Prize. With the rise of nationalism, Jews eventually abandoned the promise of Yiddish and adopted Modern Hebrew and the nation-state of Israel. The drawbacks and benefits of that move have been debated for decades in numerous books, articles, and dissertations, so I will leave Israel out of the equation for now.
This debate is one of the conflicts that really draws me into the politics of Yiddish literature. I think it is a compelling question, especially for my generation: is it possible to reconcile one's identity with a particular community and one's identity in a larger society? My own answer to this question has always been complicated. I am an American, but I have always felt like an outsider as a Jew. At the same time, I am not educated so much in the religious aspects of Judaism, which makes identifying as a Jew in the United States a very difficult label. American society tends to reduce "religion" to a check box, to siphon off one's "faith" into a category entirely separate from the culture in which one lives day-to-day life. What I see in Yiddish and in the time when it was a flourishing literary language was an identification with a Jewish peoplehood that did not reduce one's identity in such terms. It represents humanism with a self-aware outlook.
Obviously, though, this is not without its problems. What does it mean to be Jewish without religion? More generally, what does it mean to identify as "American" and something else, or to be a global citizen? If history proves anything, lines, labels, and borders on a map (whether mental or geographical) are difficult to negotiate. Peretz lived in a world where Jews appeared to be flourishing as individual citizens and as a transnational group. The Old World ways were impediments to assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer witnessed the consequences of Jewish assimilation. No matter what Jews believed of themselves, they continued to be perceived as unquestionably different. Without religious traditions, Jews would continue to endanger themselves as a people. This post-Holocaust skepticism still exists in many communities, and even among more secular Jews. Integrate with the greater society, sure, but always walk with a mirror in hand, watching for the goy persecutor.
Luckily, I think much of my generation sees the problems and have become disillusioned with this outlook. Whether the extremists like it or not, the world's borders are becoming less and less relevant. While I don't see a Yiddish revivalist movement growing like wildfire, I think we do have many things to learn from the Yiddishkeit.
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