Staging Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literary and Religious Culture in the Face of Disaster
Michael T. Williamson

In 1906, after thousands of Jews were killed in the pogroms that attended the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz published a play, A Night at the Old Marketplace, that staged nineteenth-century Jewish culture in surrealist terms. Attempts to stage Peretz’s play have not been well-received, and the most recent 2007 production was widely panned for combining “intellectual pretensions with vaudevillian flops.” In 1937, Jacob Glatstein responded to anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland with a travel narrative, When Yash Arrived, that features a surrealistic stage recital of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Jewish intellectual history. This play has been ignored. The fate of these two texts might be said to stand for the fate of Yiddish literature in the twenty-first century: it is either performed in academic papers as a form of high art, celebrated in postmodernist novels or in (often expensive) cultural discovery workshops for its earthiness and kitschy authenticity, or simply overlooked.

In this paper, Williamson suggests some alternative ways of approaching representations of nineteenth-century Jewish culture during times of crisis. Williamson considers how the Soviet writer, der Nister (the Hidden One), uses the guise of popular realist historical fiction to compose a series of performances of nineteenth-century Jewish literary and religious culture between 1941 and 1948. During this period, Jewish religious life was not only destroyed in Nazi-occupied Europe, it was also heavily censored, if not banned outright, in the Soviet Union. Combining knowledge of nineteenth-century religious literature, especially the literary performance of belief that defines Bratslaver Hasidism, with knowledge of the Yiddish stage gained from his wife, Lena Singalowska, der Nister—the hidden one—conceals volatile imaginative performances of nineteenth-century Jewish life within an ethnographic historical cover. Williamson concludes by arguing that the appropriate critical tradition from which critics should draw as they study der Nister is African American Literary Studies, particularly Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s analysis of the fiction of another embedded ethnographer of the space between, Zora Neale Hurston.


Michael T. Williamson is Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as Director of the MA in Literature Program and the MA in Composition and Literature Program. His essay on Abraham Sutkever and the prophetic mode of witnessing in Yiddish poetry is due out soon in The CEA Critic. His essay on the Yiddish poet Yehoash and middlebrow interwar poetry was published in The Space Between.