Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
248
Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
248eBook
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Overview
At the turn of the 20th century, Jewish families scattered by migration could stay in touch only through letters. Jews in the Russian Empire and America wrote business letters, romantic letters, and emotionally intense family letters. But for many Jews who were unaccustomed to communicating their public and private thoughts in writing, correspondence was a challenge. How could they make sure their spelling was correct and they were organizing their thoughts properly? A popular solution was to consult brivnshtelers, Yiddish-language books of model letters. Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl translates selections from these model-letter books and includes essays and annotations that illuminate their role as guides to a past culture.
“Covers a neglected aspect of Jewish popular culture and deserves a wide readership. For all serious readers of Yiddish and immigrant Jewish culture and customs.” —Library Journal
“Delivers more than one would expect because it goes beyond a linguistic study of letter-writing manuals and explicates their genre and social function.” —Slavic Review
“Reproductions of brivnshtelers form the core of the book and comprise the majority of the text, providing a ground-level window into a largely obscured past.” —Publishers Weekly
“The real delight of the book is in reading the letters themselves . . . Highly recommended.” —AJL Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253012074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl
Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America
By Alice Nakhimovsky, Roberta Newman
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta NewmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01207-4
CHAPTER 1
The World of the Brivnshteler
ENCOUNTERING MODERNITY
The age of the brivnshteler was an age of modernization, which some Russian Jews pursued, some resisted, and most accommodated to one degree or another. The brivnshteler served as an agent of change, guiding Jewish readers in their adaption of new social, cultural, and economic realities. It was also a reflection of change, encompassing within its pages almost the full range of Jewish responses to modernization.
The earliest Russian brivnshtelers appeared against a backdrop of political and social fragmentation. In the early nineteenth century, the authority wielded by the rabbinate was under attack, as the spread of Hasidism gave rise to a competing religious establishment. The cohesion of Jewish communities was further broken by the military draft instituted by Nicholas I. With no good way out, community leaders used the children of the poor to fulfill conscription quotas dodged by the rich through influence and bribes. The kahal—the autonomous Jewish community council—continued to run local communities even after being formally outlawed in 1844, but its authority over individuals was considerably weakened.
Another challenge to the religious elite served as a forceful instrument of modernity. The Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment—was a reformist rethinking of Jewish intellectual and community life that started in Berlin and reached Russia in the early nineteenth century. Proponents of the Haskalah, maskilim, drew from the ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as from Hebrew translations of medieval and Renaissance works of philosophy, science, and history. The self-appointed teachers of their nation, they became, in the formulation of Olga Litvak, a Jewish intelligentsia—"the bearers of a modern Jewish metaphysics and the founders of a new Romantic religion." As implacable opponents of Hasidism but critics of complete secularization, maskilim pursued a modernizing agenda that included spiritual and cultural renewal as well as the social and economic integration of Jews into the broader society. While most remained religiously observant, they espoused ideas that the Jewish establishment considered subversive.
The story of the maskilim intersects with that of the brivnshteler because of the Haskalah's emphasis on the acquisition of non-Jewish languages (initially German) and its interest in broadening the scope of Jewish education. The first authors of brivnshtelers were maskilim. But these early Jewish intellectuals were also fundamental in reforming the institutions and subject matter of Jewish schooling more broadly. In the 1840s, when the intentions of the imperial government could be interpreted generously, some maskilim bypassed Jewish channels of influence to cooperate directly with Russian authorities. They shared with Russian government officials the idea that Jews should be transformed into productive subjects of the modern state and saw education as the key to promoting acculturation. Traditionally minded Jews, seeing the same linkage, did what they could to resist.
A law of 1844 mandating the establishment of government schools for Jews was followed, over the next few years, by the opening of specialized primary and secondary schools under the control of the Ministry of Education. Fearing that this largely secular education would cause Jewish religious identity to fatally unravel, Jewish communities replicated their response to the military draft and filled the schools with orphans and the children of the poor. But the unexpected success of the educational recruits led some prosperous parents to change their minds. The draft deferment that accompanied enrollment was a strong incentive, but so were practical benefits of secular study.
To get a sense of what secular schools looked like from the point of view of a maskil, we can turn to an 1865 brivnshteler by Hirsh Lion Dor. Through the medium of a model letter, Lion Dor is ecstatic in his praise of the new curriculum, which he sees as the foundation for Jewish renewal, self-respect, and prosperity under an enlightened imperial government:
Day in and day out, in the schools which opened in Vilna a few years ago, young children blaze ahead in skill, in languages, in the sciences, which was unheard of until our age. Before, no one could write or do arithmetic or open their mouths in any language. They were the laughingstocks of other nations. Now, however, everyone possesses the greatest sophistication. There are finally very skilled men, in Russian, German, French, and other languages; in arithmetic ... like the greatest mathematicians. It is lovely to behold and beautiful to hear.... Their livelihood is taken care of. They will never know need and won't have to go looking for a way to make a living as in the past, when some of ours, in impoverished circumstances, finally came home [from yeshiva] and had no way to make a living. And so, understandably, they barely managed to find jobs as a janitor [strazhnik] via a friend, family member, or acquaintance for a low salary, earning their bread with sweat to support a wife and children, all because they hadn't been educated and had no skills or profession.... But through the favor of the government and the help of our educated Jews, who with the schools have opened the eyes of our clever children ... each and every one of them will study and dedicate themselves to good, which will be pleasing in the eyes of God and the other nations, and especially our government.
The educational reforms involved girls too, though differently. Girls from well-off families had never been as sequestered from secular subjects as their brothers. Because women did not engage in the study of religious texts but did participate in economic life, girls from families who could afford it learned Russian and German, the two significant languages for entry into the outside worlds of culture and business. At the most basic level, girls of marriageable age were supposed to be capable of drafting a business letter—a specialty of the brivnshteler. Higher up the social scale, merchant families who moved or aspired to move in Russian circles expected their daughters to be conversant with Russian and German high culture.
Wealthy girls could always be educated by private tutors. But in the 1840s, enlightenment-minded educators began to open schools for them as well, more than one hundred between 1844 and 1881. Even some religious Jews sent their daughters to these schools, in the belief that education would make them more marriageable. As modernization progressed, education became decoupled from marriage, and young women pursued it with intensity. By 1909, the law faculty at the Bestuzhev Higher Women's Courses in St. Petersburg—the most prestigious postsecondary institution for women in Russia—had a Jewish enrollment of 20 percent, despite the restrictions on Jewish residence in St. Petersburg that remained in effect until February 1917.
The new educational opportunities open to girls and women are reflected in the pages of late-nineteenth-century brivnshtelers, where letters about girls seeking education are not uncommon. Bernshteyn's nayer yudisher folks-brifenshteler (Bernshteyn's new Yiddish folk brivnshteler) includes a letter from a young woman living in a city, begging her mother to send her niece to live with her so that the little girl can get a proper education. The young woman is making a living—no husband is mentioned—and she will either send her little niece to school or teach her herself. But little Rokhele must leave their "God-forsaken shtetl where there is no school and not even a proper teacher."
The education law of 1844 also aimed at the reshaping of Jewish religious life. In addition to primary school, the law mandated the establishment of secularized rabbinical seminaries, which the Yiddish-speaking public called rabiner shuln to distinguish them from yeshivas. The two rabiner shuln, one in Vilna and the other in Zhitomir, had the goal of producing a new class of Russian-speaking rabbis whose limited immersion in Talmud would be preceded by four years of secular fortification in modern languages, Latin, mathematics, physics, and penmanship. More impressive in theory than in reality—instruction had to take place in German because the students couldn't handle Russian—the curriculum did not bring any sweeping changes to Jewish religious life. But the rabiner shuln did play an important role in the creation of secular Jewish culture. The writers Mendle Moykher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh) and Yitskhok Yoyel Linetski, as well as the pioneering playwright Avrom Goldfadn, all studied at the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir. The maskil Avraham Paperna, author of a number of Russian, Hebrew, and Judeo-German letter manuals, studied at both Zhitomir and Vilna.
The students of the rabiner shuln—by 1855, a combined total of around five hundred—were drawn largely or perhaps exclusively by the secular subjects, which put them on the path to entrance exams for Russian secondary schools (gymnasia) and universities. Bowing to the inevitable, authorities dropped the "rabbi" part of the curriculum in 1873, and turned the schools into pedagogical institutes. The future writer and editor Abraham Cahan studied at the one in Vilna. Despite his loathing for the imperial government and anything connected with it, Cahan saw the institute's mission in the same unclouded terms as had his predecessor Lion Dor, as a laudable way "to prepare teachers for a new kind of Russian preparatory school for Jewish children." Enrolling in the school was a way for Jewish adolescents to join the larger society, not just by studying the same subjects as Russians of their own age, but even—as Cahan remembers without irony half a lifetime later—wearing a uniform, just as they did.
Cahan was hardly alone in his enthusiasm. By the late 1870s, before the government developed second thoughts about the desirability of educating Jews and established exclusionary quotas, Jews constituted more than 10 percent of secondary school students in the Russian Empire. This move toward secular studies represents, of course, only one side of the picture: traditional religious education continued to be the route for most boys, and girls from poor families got very little schooling at all. But expectations had changed, as had desires.
The growing interest in secular education is part of the rise of a Jewish middle class, evident even as the great majority of Jews lived in poverty. Brivnshtelers reflect the social aspirations of readers as well as their struggles not to descend down the class ladder. The threat of such descent is evident in letters that bring up the precariousness of business and employment. But potential rewards also beckon, seen in occasional flights of fancy projecting the possibility that readers could travel in the social circles of extremely wealthy Jews. The 1901 bilingual Yiddish-Russian Der hoyz-korrespondent (The household correspondent) includes a letter from a young man to a prospective father-in-law, whose daughter he met at a ball given by the fabulously wealthy Baron Gintsburg. Fantasy aside, anxieties brought about by ascending the class ladder could be allayed by brivnshteler letters that modeled proper etiquette. A reader who had to write to a prospective father-in-law of a higher class might consider himself lucky to have Der hoyz-korrespondent close at hand.
The brivnshteler came of age in the aftermath of a fateful event: the assassination of the liberal Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Jewish hopes for political and social progress were set back by the wave of pogroms that followed the assassination, as well as by a series of exclusionary laws issued over the next decade. These laws limited Jewish trade, restricted Jewish entrance into professions, and cut off higher education for all but a tiny percentage. Jews previously permitted to live in Moscow, such as artisans, army veterans, and wealthy merchants, now had these privileges rescinded. The May Laws of 1882 made new Jewish settlement in rural areas illegal, even within the Pale. Laws restricting where Jews could travel or live were part of a longstanding policy that accorded certain impediments (or, alternatively, privileges) to the various legally designated social groups in the Russian Empire. It can be argued that Russian peasants had it worse. But the peasant cause engaged the sympathy of the entire liberal intelligentsia. The ever-constricting Jewish future was, by and large, a problem just for Jews.
A search began for new ways to negotiate Jewish identity in the modern world, giving rise to new Jewish ideologies—Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Diaspora Nationalism. Some of these originated before the pogroms, but it was in the decades that followed that they captured the Jewish imagination. There were demographic changes as well. After 1881, mass emigration from the Russian Empire increased dramatically. More than 2 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States between 1881 and 1914, an estimated 1.6 million of them from the Russian Empire. Tens of thousands of others emigrated to Europe, Canada, Latin America, and South Africa.
Other countries were not the only attraction for Jewish migrants. Even before 1881, the prospect of making a living or even achieving prosperity had drawn thousands of Jews to Russian cities outside the Pale. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than 300,000 Jews had taken up legal residence elsewhere in the Russian Empire, including major cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow. The amount of illegal settlement is hard to calculate, but is well attested to in memoirs and literature. In one of his Menakhem Mendl stories, Sholem Aleichem's bumbling hero finds himself in what he fears is a police raid on his Jewish boarding house in Yekhupets, Sholem Aleichem's name for the city of Kiev. The financial markets of Kiev/Yekhupets were full of Jews, most of whom were not allowed to stay in the city overnight.
Brivnshtelers would address many of these changes, though often with a time delay. Manuals from the 1880s are similar to those published before the pogroms and the start of mass emigration. They project a sanguine view of economic and social progress: Jews do business, seek education, and engage in steadily modernizing modes of private life. Into the twentieth century, a longstanding wariness of politics made brivnshtelers vigilant in avoiding any reference to anti-tsarist sentiment and activities. There are no mentions of political parties such as the Bund, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and other revolutionary organizations to which Jews belonged. The silence persists even after censorship was lifted in the wake of the Revolution of 1905. It was still, after all, illegal to engage in revolutionary activity, and espousing radical ideas in print would have taken considerable daring. Another likely factor is the inertia of genre: since brivnshtelers had never before dealt with politics, there was no particular imperative to break the mold. About the closest that some of the letter manuals come to politics is an affinity for Zionism. Mordkhe Betsalel Shnayder's 1901 bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish Koyvets sipurim u-mikhtovim [Kovets sipurim u-mikhtavim] (Collection of stories and letters) cautiously promotes the project of a Jewish home in Palestine. Shnayder's book is also supportive of official policies aimed at Russification, a view not shared by all of his fellow authors, as we can see in a letter from one post-1905 manual complaining that life in the Russian Empire did not present a lot of opportunity for Jews.
As we move closer to the twentieth century, an increasing number of model letters focus on emigration, primarily to North America, but also, in a handful of cases, to South America and Palestine. While Jewish socialism remains a forbidden topic, the style and substance of letters reflect a growing responsiveness to the problems and lives of working-class people. There is an occasional acknowledgment of serious Jewish poverty. Above all, by the early 1900s, letters show a robust turn to colloquial Yiddish, which had become the language of a vibrant new literature, an emerging system of secular education, and, in politics, the preferred medium of Diaspora Nationalism and the socialist Bund.
Politics, like modernity and change, draws attention more than stasis does. If only for that reason, we should keep in mind that throughout the nineteenth century, many Jewish institutions, customs, and lives continued without sharp breaks with the past. The brivnshtelers of the era reflect this duality, with some authors striving to present new content that would be relevant to new life situations encountered by readers and others representing continuity with the past by printing recycled letters from times gone by.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl by Alice Nakhimovsky, Roberta Newman. Copyright © 2014 Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
Introduction: A Paper Life
1. The World of the Brivnshteler
<A>Encountering Modernity<>
<A>The Brivnshteler and Traditional Education<>
<A>The Brivnshteler and the history of model letters<>
<A>Yiddish Language, Yiddish Publishing, and the Brivnshteler<>
<A>The Brivnshteler and Yiddish Literature<>
<A>What makes the brivnshteler Jewish?<>
2. From the Pages of Brivnshtelers
<A>Modernity and Mobility<>
<A>Parents and Children: Russia<%>
<A>Parents and Children: America<>
<A>Courtship and Marriage: Russia<>
<A>Courtship and Marriage: America<>
<A>Business<>
<A>Judaism and Jewish Identity<>
<A>Imagining America<>
Conclusion: Beyond Letters
Bibliography
<A>List of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Brivnshtelers<>
<A>Other Sources<>
Index
Author bio
What People are Saying About This
"The vibrant world of the brivenshtelers, indispensible Yiddish guides to the art of letter writing for geographically mobile Jews, comes to life in this riveting volume. For the first time, model letters for every occasion—from desperate requests for money to advice about romance and jealousy, from excuses about late rents to accusations about having a Christmas tree—are accessible in rich detail and variety. Through the window of these long-forgotten manuals, unique for their paradoxical 'fluent banality,' this new history of Jewish emotions, sentiments, social propriety, and everyday life in Eastern Europe and America blazes a fresh, pioneering trail."
The vibrant world of the brivenshtelers, indispensible Yiddish guides to the art of letter writing for geographically mobile Jews, comes to life in this riveting volume. For the first time, model letters for every occasion—from desperate requests for money to advice about romance and jealousy, from excuses about late rents to accusations about having a Christmas tree—are accessible in rich detail and variety. Through the window of these long-forgotten manuals, unique for their paradoxical 'fluent banality,' this new history of Jewish emotions, sentiments, social propriety, and everyday life in Eastern Europe and America blazes a fresh, pioneering trail.
The vibrant world of the brivenshtelers, indispensible Yiddish guides to the art of letter writing for geographically mobile Jews, comes to life in this riveting volume. For the first time, model letters for every occasion—from desperate requests for money to advice about romance and jealousy, from excuses about late rents to accusations about having a Christmas tree—are accessible in rich detail and variety. Through the window of these long-forgotten manuals, unique for their paradoxical 'fluent banality,' this new history of Jewish emotions, sentiments, social propriety, and everyday life in Eastern Europe and America blazes a fresh, pioneering trail.
Such factors as a relatively high incidence of literacy and a widely scattered geographical distribution made Yiddish speakers prone to writing letters and, generally, committing to paper aspects of their experience. This book is a magic window into daily lives of people residing in various corners of the globe but sharing a common language and culture, epistolary culture in particular.
Such factors as a relatively high incidence of literacy and a widely scattered geographical distribution made Yiddish speakers prone to writing letters and, generally, committing to paper aspects of their experience. This book is a magic window into daily lives of people residing in various corners of the globe but sharing a common language and culture, epistolary culture in particular.