IV

During the last twenty years of his life, Abramovitsh set himself to recording or imagining his childhood experiences, writing a long and ultimately unfinished fictionalized autobiography, translating from Hebrew to Yiddish and vice versa as he progressed. The novel, called In Those Days in Hebrew and Shlomo, Chaim's Son , in Yiddish, has a complex publication history. It appeared in stages, with a Hebrew preface coming out in 1894, the same year as "In the Days of the Noise," and what would become the fourth and fifth chapters following five years later.^[27]   Considering Abramovitsh's involvement with the "language question" in the 1880s and 1890s, it is not surprising that the self-translated fictionalized autobiography that occupied his final years is both an exploration and product of the writer's bilingualism.

The preface starts familiarly enough, with Mendele alighting from a train in N—— (presumably Odessa), filled with the usual complaints and wry observations about travel and the big city. The effect of this opening is to reassure the audience that they are on familiar ground, even if the scene is a major metropolis. But Mendele's eventual destination could not be more unsettling: he proceeds to visit his writer-friend Reb Shloyme in his middle-class apartment, which is filled with philosophical and disputatious Hebrew writers.^[28]   It soon becomes clear that we are meant to read Reb Shloyme as none other than Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh. The effect of placing a deliberately transparent fictional representation of the author under the critical scrutiny of the first-person

narrator who is presumably his creation is to plunge the reader into a hall of mirrors, confusing the categories of author and fictional character. The writer and Mendele discuss literature, not only abstractly but also in the most practical sense: Mendele agrees to help Reb Shloyme into print. The writer's consent to write his autobiography, if Mendele promises to do the work of publishing it, completes the reversal of figure and frame.

The meeting between Reb Shloyme and Mendele reunites a Europeanized Hebrew writer and his more traditional friend—and folk-hero narrator. The fact that the first-person narrator is a Yiddish speaker while the writer, described in the third person, is part of a Hebrew circle, suggests the complex asymmetry of Abramovitsh's bilingual authorship. By setting up an encounter between a Yiddish and a Hebrew writer, Abramovitsh could turn the tables on himself as invisible author and lay open the world of the Europeanized writer to his Yiddish narrator's ironic gaze. A pattern emerges: in the biographical notes, Abramovitsh defends his love for Yiddish against the harsh criticism of the "lovers of Hebrew"; in "In the Days of the Noise" his fictional Yiddish speaker takes potshots at an effeminate new Hebrew speaker. The preface takes this process a step further, satirizing a writer fortified in his comfortable circle of fellow authors and "lovers of Hebrew." This preface provides us with a "view from below" of the enlightened, serious, Hebrew-loving Odessa writers of which Abramovitsh was the very center.

The conversation among the Hebrew writers that forms an important part of the preface is interrupted by a yeshiva student looking for a place to sleep for the night, as itinerant yeshiva boys did in traditional Eastern Europe. The intrusion reminds Reb Shloyme of his own wanderings in his youth, which ultimately leads to his writing an autobiography. Like Mendele, the yeshiva boy is a double for the writer, entering, as Mendele had, without being immediately recognized by the older man. Abramovitsh, then, begins his fictionalized autobiography with a triply refracted authorial self, the fictional setting of a stormy Odessa night serving as a giant prism for reflecting a life split by abrupt transitions from one way of life, and one language, to another.

It may be significant that it is only with the entry of the young boy that the absence of women from the room becomes apparent; the writers become aware that a stranger has entered the house when they hear the voices of Reb Shloyme's wife and daughters, who are in the corridor, talking with the student. The men's belated perception of their absence provides a pretext for one of Mendele's philosophical digressions.

Immediately after the tea was finished, Reb Shloyme's wife and daughters felt themselves superfluous in the company of men who had matters of learning [divrey torah ] to discuss and got up and left the room. There can be no doubt that wives of scholars have a portion in the world to come, for they certainly get nothing from their husbands in this one. Scholars [talmiday chakhamim ] differ from uncultured people in a number of ways: the average man spends a lot of time talking with his wife, even more with the wives of others; but a scholar doesn't even talk to his own wife. . . . [I]f an ordinary person invites his friends over to play dice, his wife joins the quorum [mitstarefet laminyan ] and plays with them all night long; the wife of a scholar, as soon as she serves the tea has no place there, and she hurries out of their sight. And that's how it was with Reb Shloyme's wife and daughters.^[29]

The passage is obviously ironic, but the target is not immediately clear; it might be Reb Shloyme's imperfect relationship with his wife, but it could also be Mendele's reading of this relationship. And Mendele digs both at scholars who spend no time with their wives and at "the average person" who spends more time talking to other people's wives than to his own.

The most obvious level of irony, it seems to me, is generated by Mendele's "translation" of the modern setting into traditional Eastern European Jewish terms, addressing the writer as "Reb Shloyme" and describing this member of Odessa's middle-class Jewish intelligentsia in language more appropriate for a Torah scholar. Mendele may operate within a traditional conceptual structure, but to read him as a "simple Jew" underestimates the irony and self-consciousness of his posture. When Mendele declares that the wives of Torah scholars must receive a share in the world to come, we are prepared to hear that it is because of the merit of their diligent husbands, for Mendele's words sound like the opening of a pious rabbinic epigram. But Mendele comically frustrates our expectations by continuing with a wry critique of these scholars for not giving their wives anything "in this world."

Mendele's translation of modern Odessa customs into the conceptual framework of an earlier time stands in extreme contrast to Reb Shloyme's disconnection with the past. When Mendele first walks in, Reb Shloyme fails to recognize him. And Reb Shloyme has forgotten the old world to such an extent that when the yeshiva student asks to sleep in the school, the older man either cannot interpret the request or wishes to make clear the difference between a small-town yeshiva and a proper Talmud-Torah in the city: "Is my school some kind of hotel?"^[30]   he asks the boy sarcastically, although, as he later remembers, he himself had slept in synagogues and study houses in his youth.

Mendele's conflation of present and past reflects his quaint ignorance ("real" or feigned) of modern realities, but it also provides an insight into Reb Shloyme's unhappiness. Mendele's flattened perspective, ironic or not, allows him to see the continuity beneath the apparent disconnections of Reb Shloyme's modern Weltanschauung . Anyone can see that "Reb Shloyme" is no old-fashioned Torah scholar—he can barely even remember being a student—but his treatment of his wife and daughters suggests to Mendele that he might as well be one. That is, Mendele may be connecting the modern writer and the traditional scholar not because of his ignorance of modernity but because of his critical perspective on it. Mendele makes clear that the secular Hebrew literary world continues the traditions of religious Hebrew scholarship in at least one sense—by excluding women.

While the associations between Yiddish and Jewish women have often been noted, the connections between Hebrew and Jewish men have only rarely been subject to critical scrutiny. In this preface, however, Mendele describes the religious exclusion of women from the realm of the Holy Tongue as present in the arena of the secular Hebrew culture. The language of the masculine religious sphere, in Mendele's conflation, reappears in the still-masculine language of literary small talk (Mendele calls this "divrey-torah," the discourse surrounding Torah study).^[31]   The sexual segregation Mendele notes in Reb Shloyme's house adds another dimension to Abramovitsh's perceived sense that in writing Yiddish, he is betraying the world of important men, coming too close to those "ordinary" men who get enjoyment from female company. And Mendele's slightly risqué reference to extramarital flirtation ("the average man spends a lot of time talking with his wife, even more with the wives of others") reminds us of Abramovitsh's unsettling comparison of writing Yiddish with committing adultery.

Mendele's contribution to this version of the sexual drama of choosing a language sharply contrasts with his disapproval, in "In the Days of the Noise," of Hebrew as the realm of sexual license and disrupted gender roles. Here Mendele provides a critique, not of the stammering and feminized language of the new Hebrew speaker, but of the overly masculine language and social arrangement of the accomplished Hebrew writer who participates in the transmission of patriarchal Hebrew culture. What emerges in the two Hebrew fictional works Abramovitsh published in 1894 ("In the Days of the Noise" and the prologue to In Those Days ) is a double-pronged attack, from two nearly contradictory positions, on the

valorization of Hebrew among Abramovitsh's peers, the "lovers of Hebrew."

Abramovitsh wrote the prologue in Hebrew, the language he used to explain himself to his fellow writers. The autobiographical novel appeared first in Yiddish, although both the preface and the prologue were translated to provide a (never completed) text in both languages. The first sections of the fictionalized autobiography to appear, which would eventually become the fourth and fifth chapters of the novel, suggest that Abramovitsh envisioned this work as something of a Bildungsroman , detailing the educational influences of the young Shloyme in an Eastern European "portrait of the writer as a young boy." Chapters 4 and 5 of In Those Days present us with what we might call Shloyme's literary patrilineage and, more surprisingly, the somewhat obscured lines of his literary matrilineage. The fragmented image of the author presented in the prologue, with Mendele, Reb Shloyme, and the yeshiva student together setting the scene for Abramovitsh's autobiographical composition, gives way in these two chapters to a double world of literary influence, one explicitly marked by gender.

The first presents the young Shloyme's entry into the arena of masculine Jewish learning and describes his father's search for a teacher who will teach him biblical and not only talmudic texts; the chapter goes on to record the powerful impression an apocalyptic and visionary passage from Isaiah made on the young student, from which Shloyme formulates an image of God as "a powerful and terrible lord, full of rage and vengeance, holding his strap and letting loose a mighty blow for every sin."^[32]   Chapter 5 describes a different literary influence, this one transmitted to Shloyme not through official male channels but by his eavesdropping on the rituals of his mother and her circle of female friends. The two chapters, taken together, give an almost programmatic account of a young boy's introduction to the classic patterns of Ashkenazic bilingualism. Quoting extensively from both Hebrew and Yiddish religious texts, they are a map of the competing and complementary influences of the two literary traditions: the sublime biblical prose that shaped the Hebrew literary tradition and the intimate reworkings and translations of the Bible and liturgy for women that were such an important part of Yiddish literary tradition and a genre in which, we might recall, Abramovitsh himself participated.

The narrator is fully conscious of the effect his citation of Yiddish women's literature may have on his reader. At the end of the fifth chapter,

the narrator uncharacteristically breaks the frame of the story to address the reader in a direct and passionate defense of Jewish women's traditions.

Now let him come and mock, whosoever might find it in his heart to say that the things mentioned here are nonsense. Let them bring forth such burning emotions, such pure and heartfelt emotions, hot tears, prayers, and love—love for Torah and wisdom, love for humanity, for the whole world of human beings! And all this belongs to whom? To Jewish women, daughters of Israel from the common people who, if you look at them from outside, seem to be nothing; if you look at them in the market, they seem quite ignorant. But if only we had many more of these women with such feelings and such words.
Let those people, those people hear . . . and know what a Jewish heart means. Let them hear—and be silent!^[33]

Writers like Isaac Meir Dik directly addressed the female reader. In these chapters, the narrator is clearly speaking to an audience that views "simple women" with contempt. Rather than writing an autobiography whose "high" register matches the education of the audience the Europeanized author cultivated, however, In Those Days insists on the value of the "low" genres and uneducated readers of traditional Yiddish culture. Yet even this fierce defense of Yiddish women's religious literature (or orature) vacillates between serving as the spokesman for what lies hidden "inside the hearts" of Jewish women and looking at Jewish women "from the outside."

The fifth chapter presents Yiddish women's history through its descriptions of the protagonist's mother, Sarah. Sarah is both an exemplary and a typical woman, who serves as a leader of women less familiar with the religious texts than she is and a pious transmitter of women's ritual practices. She is a woman learned in

all the tkhines of Erets-Israel, in the Ma'ayan tahor , in all the laws incumbent on a woman, she read the Tsenerene , the Menoyras-hama'or and all such books. She showed the women how to pray, what to say, when to get up, recited aloud for them and kept a lemon or some drops in the women's section for reviving herself or others if they felt faint.^[34]

The narrator goes on to quote Sarah's candle-rolling prayer and to describe the female setting for the enactment of the ritual.

She cut many threads for each wick. Women, broken-hearted neighbors stood around her. She read aloud for them with a quivering voice deep from her heart:
"Lord of the World, merciful God. May these candles which we are about to put in the synagogue in honor of your great Name and in honor of the

pure, holy souls arouse the holy fathers and mothers to pray for us from their graves so that no evil, trouble or suffering befall us and may our candle and our husbands' candle and our children's candle not be extinguished before their time, God forbid . . . [ellipses in the original]
"As I lay this thread to make a wick for our father Abraham, whom you saved from the fiery oven, so may you purify us from our sins and may our soul return to you as innocent as when it entered our body. By the merit of my laying this thread for our mother Sarah may God remember in our favor what she suffered when they led her dear son Yitzhak to the altar. May she intercede for us before You that our children not be kidnapped, not be taken from us, that they not be thrown far away from us like blind lambs."^[35]

Ashkenazic women's personal prayers have often been read as unmediated expressions of feminine pain, yet Sarah's tkhine is both deeply traditional and subtly transgressive. It calls on the past (including the matriarchs, as is customary in these prayers, whereas traditional liturgy typically refers only to the patriarchs), but in the antinomian form of asking the dead ancestors to intercede for the living.^[36]   Moreover, the prayer audaciously sets the actions of God and of the woman performing the ritual on a level of symbolic equivalence, as if the woman were proposing an equal exchange of services: "As I lay this thread . . . so may you purify us." This passage is different in the later Hebrew version of the text, where the two parallel actions—his rescue of Abraham and his hoped-for salvation of the Jewish soul—both belong to God: "This wick I lay out for Abraham. Save us as you saved him." The Yiddish narration of Sarah's recitation of the text grants her more authority as well, describing her as singing "in her own tune" rather than, as in the Hebrew, "in a tune"—one not necessarily of her own composition. The Yiddish mother, then, is a creative, autonomous artist, acting, in a sense, on a par with God, while the Hebrew one more modestly follows the authority of an already established tradition.

The text itself, in both versions, leaves the question of the originality of this prayer ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so: is the fictional Sarah reading from a collection of women's personal prayers, perhaps the one mentioned in the catalog of books Sarah has mastered, or is she improvising her own prayer? In fact, the prayer Sarah recites appears to be taken in part from the seventeenth-century collection attributed to Sarah Bas-Tovim entitled The Three Gates , which appears on the list of books Sarah knows in the Hebrew version of this passage. The reference to Sarah as having had her son taken from her, though, is almost certainly not from the prayer collection, since it refers directly to the historical drafting of Jewish boys during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855).

By adding this reference, the prayer politicizes the spiritual heritage of its traditional texts in this passage. When Shloyme's mother invokes her namesake Sarah the Matriarch, whose son was also "kidnapped," to protect her own family from the army recruiters, she implicitly compares Abraham's pious willingness to sacrifice his son on God's orders with the opportunistic acts of Jewish flunkies carrying out the unfair and oppressive czarist edicts. The comparisons between God and the czar, and between Abraham and the khapers , are audacious and subversive in both languages. But in Abramovitsh's Hebrew version, the subversive quality is somewhat softened by adding, in the next phrase, Sarah's request for salvation on the basis of the meritorious piety of Isaac (described in various midrashim on Genesis), who stretched out his neck under Abraham's knife: "And for the sake of the bound [Isaac] on the altar who stretched out his neck under the knife have mercy on our children and make us worthy, Father, to hire a teacher for our sons to teach them Torah."^[37] The Hebrew version thus places the Jewish woman's experience in a larger biblical and midrashic context, while the Yiddish views Sarah's loss of her son solely from her perspective. By focusing solely on Sarah's experience of her son's disappearance, the Yiddish version more directly and strongly supplies the female voice for a biblical narrative in which she never appears.

In fact, it would be wrong to read these differences as stemming either from the Yiddish writer's greater fidelity to an actual artifact of women's culture or from the Hebrew writer's conservative adherence to Jewish exegetical tradition. The Hebrew version of Sarah's prayer more closely resembles the Yom Kippur tkhine attributed to Sarah Bas-Tovim than the Yiddish version.^[38]   The Yiddish version, rather than being an unmediated primary artifact of female Ashkenazic religious expression, seems instead to be of Abramovitsh's composition, either from the memory of his mother's prayer or from a reworking of Bas-Tovim's prayer for the Yiddish audience of his day.

As tempting as it is to decide that Abramovitsh's Yiddish prayer captures a lost artifact of Jewish women's culture, the autobiography itself finally prompts a recognition that what is most Yiddish in it is also what is most stylized, most self-conscious, and most fictional. It is significant, after all, that what is pseudo, the pseudonym, the pseudoautobiographer, what is transparently fictional in the preface's gallery of characters, is connected with Yiddish while what is identified with the "real" belongs to the sphere of the Hebrew writer. For all the artificiality of Hebrew novelistic discourse in Abramovitsh's time, Yiddish still had a quality that

lent itself to fictionalization, to romanticization, to a "folksiness" that is not so much authentic Eastern European Jewish culture, whatever that may be, as it is a construction of the authentic.

The features of Abramovitsh's moves from Hebrew to Yiddish and back again to a Hebrew made flexible by the intervening Yiddish writing are well known. The services that Yiddish, the "servant girl," performed for Hebrew, "the Lady," are the basic stuff of modern Hebrew literary historiography. But In Those Days reveals another part of the story, more rarely discussed, and that is Abramovitsh's second transition from Hebrew into Yiddish, of which this novel is the salient example. The Hebrew-Yiddish polysystem eventually ended in mutual disentanglement, with Hebrew asserting its autonomy from Yiddish and Yiddish from Hebrew. The Soviet Yiddish community, for instance, actively distanced their language from Hebrew, to the point of avoiding its Hebrew component and using Yiddish orthography for the Hebrew words they kept. But a similar distancing from Hebrew, though for different reasons, characterizes Abramovitsh's return to Yiddish. This return to Yiddish in the 1890s derived not from the utilitarian demands of the Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment but at least partly from an informed critique of the social arrangements and values associated with Hebrew. In both his Yiddish and Hebrew prose of the 1890s, Abramovitsh presents the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature as vying on equal terms with its Hebrew counterparts. And Abramovitsh's inclusion, or invention, of a feminine Yiddish counterpart to the more faithful Hebrew version of Sarah's tkhine and a feminine commentary on the canonical Hebrew tradition signifies his openness to these previously marginalized feminine traditions.

For the Eastern European Jewish community, Hebrew and Yiddish existed on a cultural and linguistic continuum; the demand for a national literature required that this continuum be split into two—and this affected Yiddish as much as Hebrew literature. What Abramovitsh the Hebrew writer of the biographical notes, "In the Days of the Noise," and the preface did for Abramovitsh the Yiddish writer of Sarah's remarkable prayer was to invest Yiddish writing with a self-consciousness that ultimately resulted in making it more Yiddish, as it were. Sarah Bas-Tovim's Yiddish prayer, which almost certainly provided the basis for Abramovitsh's Hebrew text, is actually a not atypical combination of Hebrew and Yiddish, with a large admixture of biblical and midrashic quotation. The Hebrew version translates the Yiddish sections into Hebrew, leaving the Hebrew quotations intact. The Yiddish, by contrast, removes most

of these quotations, so that the resulting prayer contains everything in the original that was least traditional; without the extensive biblical allusions, the prayer is revealed as a conduit of a separate and distinctly feminine approach to the Jewish library. When the matriarch Sarah suffers the loss of her son, and the self-sacrificing piety of her son remains outside the text, the result renders the subversive aspects of Jewish women's prayer more visible. Thus what appears at first glance as the Jewish woman's freedom from an adherence to a canonical text and a resulting creativity of religious expression reappears, but this time in the person of the male Yiddish writer.

In this last work, Abramovitsh bids farewell to Mendele, but only to return more directly to the "women's literature" that is among Mendele's stock-in-trade. If, as Niger said, Abramovitsh brought the "altar and Holy Ark" into the "women's section" of Yiddish literature, it is also true that, by the end of his literary career, he had brought the zogerke, the women's prayer leader, back into Yiddish literature. More than that, Abramovitsh led the zogerke into the "men's section," the central and hegemonic space of Hebrew literature, where she had never been welcome before.