“The Lips that Have Often Smiled So Foolishly”: Ambivalent Jewish-Polish Relations in Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg’s Shtetl Stories

• In Event: Remaking it New: Yiddish Socio-Political Thought

Abstract

Itshe Meyer Vaysenberg’s iconic novella, “A shtetl” (1906), realistically depicts the life of Jewish plebeians, class struggle and violence within Jewish society. While initially the Polish peasantry and clergy seem menacing, they do not harm the shtetl’s Jews; at the end, it is not the Polish peasants or priests who assault the shtetl but rather Russian soldiers, who round up all the striking workers, put them in chains, and drag them off. Such descriptions, combined with Vaysenberg’s insistence on the need to create Yiddish orthography which would reflect Polish Yiddish dialect, led critics such as Yisrael Chaim Bilecki and others to argue that the author’s autochthonic characters reflected a positive attitude toward Poland and Poles, especially those of lower classes.

Yet already the formulation of several Polish characters in “A shtetl” (the quote in the title above describes the Polish caretaker of the shtetl’s bathhouse); and works that Vaysenberg wrote a few years later, such as the plays, “In Expectation” (“In dervartung”, circa 1909) and “Day of Judgment” (“In tog fun gerikht”, 1918-1919), displayed hatred toward Jews as the hallmark of a profoundly antisemitic Polish society. “In Expectation” portrays three Jewish sisters-in-law who live in a remote village when a blood libel spreads around, and their neighbors terrorize them.

My paper analyzes Vaysenberg’s ambivalence toward the Polish people – as individuals and as a whole – in his shtetl stories and plays, and the evolution from the earlier days of his career in the 1900s through the interwar period. That ambivalence and its development had a significant corollary: Yiddish critics such as Bal-Makhshoves (Yisroel Isidor Elyashev) and Shmuel Niger contrasted Vaysenberg’s naturalistic style and his bleak portrayal of violence and class enmity with Sholem Asch’s idyllic and highly romanticized picture of a shtetl in his 1904 novella, “A shtetl”. Even if Vaysenberg’s realistic portrayal of the shtetl was a direct response to Asch’s sentimental novella, the two writers demonstrate common dynamics in their relation to Poles and Polonization: initial idealization or at least positive attitude followed by disillusionment and disappointment when encountering Polish antisemitism While Polonization among the country’s Jewish population would become stronger in the years following World War I and Poland’s regained independence, Vaysenberg would not hesitate to express his growing dissatisfaction with Polish society.

Author

• Gil Ribak, University of Arizona