The hasidic story and the Yiddish cabaret: folk performance as a barbaric disruption in S. Y. Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy

ABSTRACT

Focusing on S.Y. Agnon’s novel The Bridal Canopy (Hakhansat kala), 1931, this article investigates an under-explored path in modern Jewish literature where folklore and popular culture serve as a radical disruption of European literary norms. Whereas modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures typically strove for what Dan Miron called “cultural normalcy,” struggling to mould Jewish materials (including language, modes and genres of writing, and ways of life) into European literary standards, Agnon’s first novel flaunts “Jewish otherness.” Agnon orchestrates a polyphony of Jewish performers, including the storyteller, the badkhn, the purim-shpiler and the popular Yiddish cabaret the Singers of Brod. Introducing the sensibilities of the Yiddish vernacular into the highbrow Hebrew book, improvised performance into the written text, simple rhyming into Agnon’s rich prose – all these disturbances add up to what might be called, following, Theodor W. Adorno’s term, a “barbaric” interference in the esteemed European genre.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Zehavit Stern is a researcher of Yiddish and Hebrew literature and Yiddish film, theatre and folklore, currently teaching at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University in Israel. She holds an MA in Yiddish literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). Between 2010 and 2015 she was the Idel and Isaac Haase Fellow in Eastern European Jewish Civilization at the University of Oxford. She has published on Yiddish and Hebrew literature and on Yiddish film and theatre, and is currently working on a book entitled Reclaiming Barbarism: Eastern European Jewish Folk Performance and The Invention of a National Heritage, in which she examines the interwar fascination with the Purim-shpil and the badkhn and the emergence of the narrative that presents these folk performances as art heritage.

Notes

1. From Agnon's speech honouring Martin Buber on his 80th birthday (February 1958). See Agnon (1976, 260).

2. All Translations from the Hebrew are by the author, except when I was able to use Israel Meir Lask's partial translation of The Bridal Canopy. See Agnon (1967). In these places I refer in brackets to the relevant page in the translation). Agnon might be drawing here on Y.L. Peretz, who uses a similar parable in his introduction to his Hebrew adaptation of Ha'ofot vehagevilim (a story by Rabbi Nachman of Breslav). Referring to Rabbi Nachman's stories as “holy stones set with gold,” Peretz complains about the current state of culture, where people prefer popular, commercial amusements over deep truths, and concludes: “one needs to save the precious stones from the sand.” See Peretz (1962, 83).

3. Agnon quotes here from Ahad Ha'am's article “The Renaissance of Spirit” (Tehiyat haruah), originally published in the Hebrew periodical Hashiloah (issue 5–6) in 1903. See Ahad Ha'am (1959, 176).

4. Agnon praises the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Hillel Zeitlin, saying that “[h]is books are close to the way of Hasidism” (ספריו קרובים לאורח החסידות). See Agnon (1976, 261).The Bridal Canopy was originally published in three parts in 1919 in the New York-based Hebrew periodical Miklat (“Refuge”). However, as many critics have noted, this embryonic version differs significantly from the final form, first published in 1931, in which the pseudo-pious story became a heterogeneous, polyphonic novel. See Miron (1996, 15–18), La’or (2008; 79).

5. See Miron 1973, 83. Miron corroborates this claim by pointing at Linetski’s pen name Der beyzer marshelik (a sharp-tongued wedding-jester), Abramovitch’s acting skills, and Sholem Aleichem's ongoing fascination with the theatre (Miron 1973, 80–84). In my book manuscript “Reclaiming Barbarism: Eastern European Jewish Folk Performance and the Invention of a National Heritage” I complicate and historicize this claim and expose the specific historical moment in which modern Jewish artists recognized and embraced the “performative nature” of Yiddish culture. See Stern (2011).

6. The term “bizarre” is used by Arnold Band in his introduction to the novel's English translation, and his own analysis Miron builds on this in epithet. See Miron (1996, 28).

7. Notable examples for literary works with a clear “ethnographic” stance are Yisroel Aksenfled’s novel The Headband (Dos Shterntikhl, 1861) and Shaul Tchernichovski’s idylls Elka’'s Wedding (Hatunata shel elka), Dumplings (Levivot), or Circumcision (Brit-Mila), published in his Sefer ha'idilyot in (1922). Agnon’s ongoing cooperation with Buber was planned to culminate in a joint anthology titled “Sefer Hasidim,” similar to Bialik's “Sefer Ha’agada.” For further reading on this see La’or (1994).

8. The term “Salvage ethnography” was coined by Jacob Gruber in the 1960s in reference to and criticism of British colonialism. Gruber referred to the fact the ones who conquered and destroyed native peoples were also the ones who document them. Gruber also criticized the tendency of European ethnographers to “save” only a few artifacts, without their culture. See Gruber (1970). See also Gabriela Safran’'s use of the term in relation to Sh. An-Ski’'s work: Safran (2000). 

9. On the novel as the embodiment of “the religion of sex,” see Watt (1957).

10. For the Russian futurist manifesto “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” see Burliuk et al. (1912).

11. This paragraph is cited from Meir Lask's English translation of The Bridal Canopy (See Agnon 1967, 368). Since this is a partial translation, I could find only few of the relevant paragraphs, and translated the rest myself (Z.S). Where I did use Lask's translation I add the page number ofn the English translation in brackets.

12. A story from the Babylonian Talmud recounts how Rabbi Yohanan used to sit next the the entrance of the Mivke so that the women who leave the mikve (and are presumably about to have sex with their husbands) would have children as beautiful as him. See Bavli, Berakhot, 20a.

13. See Agnon (1960, 388).וכך היה עושה קודש חול, פעם בחלש ופעם בקול, והמנגנים מקישים, וכלי הזמר מרעישים, וכל לב מלא כאב

14. For a discussion of melitza as “a cult of the biblical phrase” see Alter (1988), 23–24. For a revisionist discussion of melitza and especially Mapu's Love of Zion see Miron (1979), esp. 17–21. Post-maskilic writers and literary critics were unified in their rejection of melitza, which they deemed was removed from truth. Moreover, in Bialik's article Yotser hanusach, melitza becomes a general term denoting all the “primitive” prose that precedes Abramovich.

15. The vast scholarship on The Bridal Canopy has so far paid only little attention to this disruptive polyphony. While some scholars strove to solve the riddles of the lengthy performances of the Broder Singers and the Jerusalemite (both over 20 pages long), to the best of my knowledge none have tackled the many small-scale performances or examined the oral polyphony as a whole. Even Miron, who in his 1986 Hebrew essay “The Domestication of the Foreign Genre” acknowledges to some extent Agnon’s use of traditional Jewish sources to challenge European norms, considers only written genres such as the Midrash, the Mayse-bukh, the pinkasim (booklets used in the early modern period to co-ordinate and document Jewish communities), and hasidic hagiography, while ignoring the multiple oral genres constantly disrupting the novel’s plotlines. See Miron ((1986) 1992). Moreover, in his 1996 monograph Under a Motley Canopy, Miron, as I’ve shown, takes a more universalistic stance.