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Ghetto, Shtetl, or Polis?: The Jewish Community in the Writings of Karl Emil Franzos, Sholom Aleichem, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon (review)

2002; Purdue University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sho.2001.0149

1534-5165

Susanne Klingenstein,

Jewish Identity and Society

Reviewed by: Ghetto, Shtetl, or Polis? The Jewish Community in the Writings of Karl Emil Franzos, Sholom Aleichem, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon Susanne Klingenstein Ghetto, Shtetl, or Polis? The Jewish Community in the Writings of Karl Emil Franzos, Sholom Aleichem, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, by Miriam Roshwald. I.O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy and Criticism of Literature Nr. 30. San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1997. 192 pp. (Borgo Press has gone out of business; copies of this book can be requested from Mordecai Roshwald, 8811 Colesville Rd. #502, Silver Spring, MD 20910-4332; phone: 301-585-1352; e-mail: roshwaav@georgetown.edu.) Does it make sense to write a book comparing a coconut, a pomegranate, and a peach? One might argue that they are all God’s creations, delicious to eat, and requiring the [End Page 174] blessing borei pri ha-etz. And one might say that comparing them to each other brings out the properties unique to each of them. Miriam Roshwald has embarked on just such a project in her book Ghetto, Shtetl, or Polis? about two giants of Jewish fiction, Sholom Aleichem and S. Y. Agnon, and one lesser known though no less intriguing writer, the Austrian realist Karl Emil Franzos. All three wrote about poor Jews in nineteenth-century eastern Europe. Yet their attitudes toward their subjects, their literary devices and schemes of redemption were so different from each other that one wonders why one should bother comparing them. Franzos was born in 1848 in an eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, a district physician, was a Germanophile who saw to it that his son learned German along with Hebrew, Latin, and Polish. After the father’s early death in 1860, the family moved to Czernowitz, the capital of the crownland Bukovina, an eastern outpost of the Habsburg empire that sported a sophisticated Jewish population with an active cultural life in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German. At school, Franzos fell in love with classical philology, yet he pragmatically decided to study law in Vienna. In 1872 he became a correspondent for Vienna’s prestigious daily Neue Freie Presse. It printed his reports about his travels through the Balkan countries, eastern Europe, Turkey, and Egypt. In 1877 Franzos published The Jews of Barnow, the first in a long series of slightly preachy fictional works shaped by the then fashionable principles of literary realism. Throughout his life Franzos remained committed to the ideals of the Haskalah and the ideas of the failed democratic revolution of 1848/49. He is pained by the squalor of life in provincial eastern Europe. Like coconuts, his fictional works are hard on the outside—seemingly scornful and sarcastic, Franzos describes rotting villages exploited by feudal lords and inhabited by half-barbaric paupers, Jews and non-Jews, steeped in the superstitions of their forebears. Penury, as a result of resistance to modernization, Franzos regards as a moral failure, a lack of will to improve one’s lot. Franzos is harsh on the Jews because he believes they could change their social circumstances if they wanted to do so. Like all liberals he has faith in social progress and subscribes to the perfectibility of the individual. He is convinced that the new age will accept the modernized, secular Jew. Sholom Aleichem, born in the Russian Ukraine in 1859 as Sholom Rabinovitch, understood from the outset that the Jews’ willingness to change would change nothing about the non-Jews’ view of them and that abandoning Jewish faith, habits, and customs that gave whatever support they could to the disenfranchised Jews was too high a price to pay for an emancipation that seemed to be a chimera of Jewish wishful thinking rather than a serious political offer on the part of non-Jews. Since the rural Jews had no power to affect their social situation, Sholom Aleichem was generous and comforting toward them. His stories and novels are like ripe peaches, soft, sweet and juicy at the [End Page 175] first bite, yet concealing a hard, bitter core—his disillusionment that oppression, poverty and ignorance could be alleviated in the near future. Agnon, born in 1888 into a fairly comfortable life in provincial Austria...