Under Whose Sign? Hebraism and Yiddishism as Paradigms of Modern Jewish Literary History

Abstract

In 1974 the Yiddish Poet Malka Heifetz Tussman, Born in Russia, Living in California, Published a Small Volume of Poems in Israel. This peripatetic author and text are paradigmatic of the cosmopolitan, multilingual nature of modern Jewish literature. The book, by a woman who was at various times a Yiddish teacher, an anarchist, and a writer of Russian poetry and English essays, was entitled‘Under Your Sign.’ As the title indicates, the politics and poetics of sign systems are central concerns of this volume. I offer a few stanzas from one of its poems—‘Widowhood’—to suggest the multiplicity of the signs of Jewish identity and literature. What we see in Tussman's poem, and more dramatically when we supplement it with two English translations, is that although it rails against the ways in which the sign (e.g., letter, word, trope) destroys, it also points to the sign's generative powers. And the poem offers a way of understanding the creative tensions that have dominated critical and creative expressions of modern Jewish literature. Under the signs of “Hebraism” and “Yiddishism,” we encounter two conflicting but equally productive views of Jewish literature, one that posits continuity and another that posits adaptation as the defining characteristic of Jewish culture. Tussman's poem, like these different paradigms of Jewish literary history, enables us to use the sign as a way of overcoming the divide between two languages and two views of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) world. My goal in what follows is not to protest against the reign of the sign on behalf of some notion of Jewish authenticity. To the contrary, I propose yet another sign—structured as a binary—to highlight the ambivalence of the sign “Jewish literature” and to stimulate debate about matters Jewish and what matters to Jews.