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The Stunning Career of Micha Yosef Berdyczewski

2020; Indiana University Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/prooftexts.38.1.06

1086-3311

Cutter,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

Reviewed by: The Stunning Career of Micha Yosef Berdyczewski ed. by Avner Holtzman William Cutter The Stunning Career of Micha Yosef Berdyczewski Avner Holtzman, ed. Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Ketavim, vols. 13–14 (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2016, 2017). The various spellings of the family name for Micha Yosef Berdyczewski might be seen as a parable for his present obscurity. How do you look him up? Berdichewski, Berditschevski, Berdyczewski? How do you know who he really is? Was he the leader of a group who truly understood the radical nature of the Hebrew national renascence, or was he a lonely figure in Berlin scribbling away on every topic that came to mind? How could one purchase (as I did a few years ago) a copy of possibly his most important novel for five shekels and then be told by a friend that I had "overpaid"? This uncertainty is even more suggestive because, late in his life, he changed his pen name to Bin Gorion. He made this change in order to suggest an ancient provenance, even though he argued that this provenance was not clearly defined, and even though he longed for a solid German identity. His life was informed by such contrasts and contradictions: a Hasidic background that he revered even though he fled from it; a doctorate in aesthetics in Berne, Switzerland; a sojourn in Breslau, where he met up with new forms of Jewish observance that he found trivial; and a quiet secular life of writing in Berlin. He was fifty-six years old when he died in Berlin in 1921 after a ten-year sojourn. There he produced novels, short stories, essays, letters, and scholarly [End Page 179] discussions; he continued to study and write on rabbinics, folklore, and the future of the Hebrew language. He wrote essays on all the Jewish subjects of the day, and he developed remarkable anthologies of (sometimes recondite) Jewish lore. He tried unsuccessfully to publish belles lettres in German. He read, it seems, everything that was available in Hebrew, and almost everything that he could get his hands on in Yiddish and in German. One legend has it that, during World War I, when he often studied in the nearly empty library of the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, MYB managed to intimidate the few patrons who dared to borrow a book that he might want to use. At various times he was editor or consultant for important journals that brought him into contact with most of the very Hebrew greats with whom he carried on polemics. As far as one can tell, Berdyczewski never taught in a public forum, but the literary elite "learned" (not in a formal way) from him through his writings and by way of his acolytes. Although his Berlin apartment seems to have been ziemlich bourgeois, he and his family were poor—barely getting by on his wife's income as a dentist. To the present time he is often identified as a Nietzschean for his fascination with destroying old structures, and because of his involvement with the rebellious young writers who bristled at the Jewish conventions of the time and who represented the tragic face of Jewish experience.1 His biographer and curator, the remarkable Avner Holtzman of Tel Aviv University, has completed a fourteen-volume edition of MYB's narrative prose, essays, letters, articles, scholarly research, biographical notes, and diaries. They depict a man of staggering intellect and restless commitment to a Jewish people he consistently refused to define. MYB even failed to systematically define his own philosophical or intellectual commitments, announcing at various times that he was going to be devoted to a new intellectual agenda and then shifting to an entirely different program of study and production. His struggle against essentialist perspectives on Jewish life was expressed most vividly in his rejection of Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik's aron hasefarim (the official canon) and some of the essays of Asher Ginsburg (Aḥad ha-Am) that defined Jewish essence and set boundaries for what should and should not be included as part of "Jewish" literature and thought. One could say that he privileged the notion of "Jews" over "Judaism"—a people over Torah...