'Modernness' and Mush:
SLOAN, JACOB
'Modernness' and Mush The Book of Fire. By I. L. Peretz. Yoseloff. 448 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Jacob Sloan Editor, translator, "Notes From the Warsaw Ghetto"; author, "Generation of...
...They are good reading, and Leftwich conveys the clean directness of Peretz's Yiddish...
...That is why Peretz is so close to us, and why we feel in our bones he will not survive...
...Stated technically, it may be put this way: Peretz suffers because of a lack of congruence between style and subject, manner and matter...
...With apologies to Hollywood and Madison Avenue, I find these too sincere...
...What is disturbing about Peretz is how his "modernness," which brings him closest of the Yiddish classics to us, also spoils him for the ages...
...The innocent mass media commentators were struck with the piece's spirituality...
...The result is a tone compounded of condescension and uncertainty...
...This is particularly true of the Yiddish classical trio: Mendele Mocher Seforim, Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, all of whom lived at or about the same time...
...But this urbanity chose to address itself to provincial milieus, to the small town that had passed its peak...
...Peretz approaches moral indignation, but does not quite hit it—and backs off...
...It was very easy: For Peretz's attitude toward Bontshe, as indeed toward all his "little people" is quite ambiguous—and there is an important element of superiority cum-shmaltz in it...
...When Peretz's "Bontshe the Silent" was done on TV there was a great outcry, from both sides...
...Peretz's census-taker is something else altogether, a figure typically less involved in the milieu he reports, rather than comments on...
...This is the type of writer—and person—we see around us all the time these days...
...Bontshe the Silent" was written as a piece of social protest by a socialist, or socialist fellow traveler, at the selfvictimization of the lumpenproletariat...
...in our current lingo, Peretz was afraid of the "public relations implications...
...his sentimentality, like that of all Yiddish literature, is perfectly all right, hut not his large areas of mush...
...Detachment and ambiguity are more than balanced by self-consciousness and stylishness...
...How could the TV show have gone so far wrong...
...The more important reason is that, when you come down to it, they do not rise above their special culture...
...For Peretz is one of those people who takes refuge in levity from the fancied accusation of being too heavy-handedly serious, and takes refuge in spiritual portentousness from the fear of sordid radicalism...
...This was "accentuating the positive" with a vengeance...
...But the shared contemporaneity and relative recency of these three Yiddish culture heroes is only part of the reason for their sameness...
...If one was to judge a writer like Peretz in a kind of temporal vacuum, suspending any considerations but the esthetic (as ?. ?. Forster does with English writers in his celebrated lectures on Aspects of the Novel), asking whether he stands on his own feet without any of the special props we all tend to lend Yiddish writers chronicling East-European Jewish life before the Catastrophe—at the risk of seeming wantonly iconoclastic (Peretz's name has become a slogan for many unreconstructed Yiddishists), one would have to answer no...
...author, "Generation of Journey" There are times nowadays when, reading or working on a translation from modern Yiddish literature, I have the uneasy feeling that I have seen all this before: the sentiments, the situations, the characters, the general style, all keep repeating with slight variations...
...the sophisticated Yiddishists complained that the TV show missed Peretz's real intention...
...Peretz is easy for us to feel empathetic with but his limitations are all too clear, probably because they are faults we share...
...Of course, Mendele, affectionately nicknamed Grandfather, perceptibly influenced the other two —both because he came first and because he was the strongest-minded...
...It is very interesting to read the characteristic anecdote that Leftwich recounts in his rambling but rich introduction: Peretz advised Sholem Asch to burn up his muckraking God of Vengeance...
...He is, as S. Niger pointed out, the first truly urban Yiddish writer...
...This, to my mind, is the reason why Peretz will not stand, for all his ironic vigor and narrative talent...
...But, cried the informed, that wasn't what Peretz meant at all: In the original, the devil laughs at this simplemindedness, and Heaven itself trembles in sorrow...
...The TV program interpreted Bontshe's request, incredibly modest as it was, in the most favorable light, as the apotheosis of saintliness, enveloping it in triumphant background music...
...I say this though I have enjoyed Peretz's stories many times, in the original and in translations, and I took pleasure in Joseph Leftwich's versions in Book of Fire...
...One is happy to rediscover Peretz's sheer story-telling skill and his social intelligence and wit, which can be devastating when Peretz is at the top of his bent (as in "The Benefactors...
...But where I do cavil is over Peretz's charm and religious moralizing—that is to say, the Chasidic stories on which his popular reputation is presumed to rest...
...and one remembers with fondness The Mad Talmudist with its psychological acumen...
...Taken on their own terms, Peretz's stories are fine as entertainments...
...Hence the close resemblance between Mendele's book-seller and Sholom Aleichem's milkman...
...You may recall that Bontshe, a paragon of humble and uncomplaining misery, when offered his heart's desire in Heaven, asks meekly for a soft roll...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 1
