Gender, Land, and Folk in Shloyme Ettinger's SERKELE

• In Event: Space and Place in Yiddish Culture

Abstract

Shloyme Ettinger’s maskilic satire Serkele ends on a curious note. The returned maskil, Dovid, passes judgement on the play’s three main female characters – Hinde, Serkele, and Freyde-Altele. Hinde, the virtuous ideal of maskilic womanhood, is saved, but so is Serkele, the titular villain whose greed and cruelty seem unredeemable. Freyde-Altele, Serkele’s conceited and assimilated daughter, is refused rescue, and must leave her betrothed for the rich Lithuanian innkeeper, Shmelke Troyniks, away from Dovid’s house. Furthermore, she is told to stop speaking amateurish German and to return to speaking Yiddish. In this paper, I aim to investigate why these characters, particularly Freyde-Altele, receive their respective fates. In so doing, I argue that the play’s ending highlights an underacknowledged aspect of maskilic ideology: that not all European Jews were meant to be ‘enlightened.’ In part building on Shmuel Feiner’s articulation of the pseudo-Haskalah (Feiner 1996), in which the maskilim are portrayed as a conservative cultural vanguard, I propose that there must necessarily remain a Jewish folk outside of the urban maskilic strongholds, speaking the otherwise-deplored language of Yiddish, against which the maskilim can define themselves by declaring only certain sectors of Jewish life worthy of their reform. Through relationships between gender, land, and folk, I will show how maskilic thought demands a distinct category of Jews who are not suitable for the project of the Haskalah. Here, the frame of gendered oppression that structured traditional Judaism merely becomes a European male form of patriarchal control (Hyman 1995, Boyarin 1997, Parush 2004, Seidman 2016). From Serkele’s climax comes a presentation of both access to and restriction from the Haskalah that offers a kind of proto-diasporic nationalism as a consequence for being unable to join the maskilic vision of modernity, a consolation for those unqualified to fit maskilic standards and who are then sent away to retain the qualities of a Jewish folk that the maskilim deemed irrelevant for themselves, yet necessary for the sustainability of modern European Jewry.

Author

• Jacob Hermant, University of Toronto