I

The gravesite of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) in the Workmen's Circle Cemetery in Brooklyn is itself a complex and paradoxical text. On one hand, the ornately carved stone, with its ten-foot-tall crenellated towers rising on each side, leaves no doubt about the importance of the life it marks (see fig. 1). On the other hand, the grave is set "among the common Jewish workers, just ordinary folk," in accordance with the writer's will; and the stone itself bears a self-effacing message that denies the grandeur of the monument on which it is inscribed.^[1]   The epitaph, written by the already widely acclaimed author when he became seriously ill in 1905 (although he did not die until 1916), describes an ordinary, almost anonymous man, very nearly a pacifist Yiddish version of the "Unknown Soldier."

Do ligt a yid, a posheter,
Geshribn yidish-taytsh far vayber,
Un farn prostn folk hot er—
Geven a humorist a shrayber.

Dos gantse lebn oysgelakht,
Geshlogn mit der velt kapores.

Di gantse velt hot gut gemakht,
Un er—oy vey—geven af tsores!

Un davke demolt, ven der oylem hot
Gelakht, geklatsht un fleg zikh freyen,
Hot er gekrenkt—dos veyst nor got—
Besod, az keyner zol nit zen.

[Here lies a simple Jew,
who wrote yidish-taytsh  for women,
and for the common people—
he was a humorist-writer.

He ridiculed all of life,
reviled the world.
The whole world made out very well,
and he—alas—had troubles.

And precisely when his audience
was laughing, applauding, and having a good time,
he was ailing—only God knows this—
In secret, so no one would see.]^[2]

This self-portrait in verse, for all its claim to reveal a sacred deathbed truth, is evidence of the persistence of Sholem Aleichem's impulse toward presenting himself in theatrical and folksy ways. Important to the epitaph's presentation of a stylized Yiddish writer is its mention of his equally stylized Yiddish readers, his "fictionalized audience."^[3]   Sholem Aleichem identifies his work with "women" and "common people," referring less to his actual contemporary readers than to a literary convention, the writer's address to this particular audience often found in certain genres of older Yiddish texts. The epitaph fictionalizes this audience in transparently anachronistic terms, resurrecting an era in which Yiddish writers did in fact address a readership conventionally referred to as "the women and the common people." The clearest marker of this anachronism is the appellation "yidish-taytsh," a name for the Yiddish language associated (along with "ivre-taytsh") with the older religious literature for women which by 1905, when the epitaph was first composed, had been out of general currency for at least a century or two. Why then did the writer, who had worked hard throughout his life to establish the legitimacy of Yiddish as a modern literary tongue, choose to identify himself with an outmoded Yiddish literary phenomenon? Why, in his epitaph, did he also eternalize a Yiddish literary audience

that had only tenuous historical connections with his contemporary readers?

Sholem Aleichem's epitaph, with its multiple references to the writer's audience, must be read in the light of Yiddish literature's general preoccupation with the relation between writer and reader. Throughout Yiddish literary history, and certainly through the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) era (1770–1880), the choice of Yiddish as a medium had been justified by the needs of a Yiddish-speaking collective. Shmuel Niger sees the interest in audience as central to Yiddish literary history.

Yiddish literature is unique in this one respect, that the needs of a community played the main role in its formation until recent times; [Yiddish literature emerged because of] external needs, not from the innermost impulse and burning of individuals thirsty for expression.^[4]

Sholem Aleichem's epitaph dramatizes the clash between the two contradictory traditions Niger describes. In the first tradition, common in premodern and minor literatures, the focus is on the community served, with the writer remaining anonymous or receding into the background. The second tradition, ubiquitous since romanticism, views art as the product of an individual imagination "thirsty for expression," as Niger rather dramatically puts it; in this tradition, it is often the audience that is anonymous or distanced from the artist whose essentially solitary thoughts it may be allowed, as it were, to overhear.

The epitaph brings together the phenomena Niger places in different literary periods, the attention to an audience and the impulse toward self-expression. It begins by presenting the Yiddish writer as a dedicated public servant addressing an audience not so different from himself (a "simple Jew" writing for the "common people"). But the epitaph continues by admitting us into the more private realm of this only apparently simple man—revealing the complicated and alienated heart of a troubled modern poet. The very act of confession, however, implies that the writer has not yet completely abandoned the hope of reaching his audience. Aside from the two fictionalized addressees who are actually mentioned in the epitaph (women and common people and the prosperous audience whose appreciation for the writer is blind and unhelpful), the poem imagines at least two other audiences: the first is the one that, having been let in on the secret of Sholem Aleichem's suffering, can regard itself as party to a truer emotional intimacy with the now-dead writer. The transparent theatricality of this gambit, reinforced by the

obvious disingenuousness of Sholem Aleichem's having written "yidishtaytsh far vayber," creates a second implied audience, the sophisticated readers who can be counted on to catch the writer's wink. This last historically self-conscious audience is at the farthest remove from the "women" and "common people" for whom Sholem Aleichem originally claims to be writing. Nevertheless, this sophisticated implied audience is dependent on the audience of plain folks the writer first mentions. Just as the alienated, modern Yiddish writer still bears some resemblance—if only an ironic one—to his predecessor, a public servant, so too does the modern Yiddish audience still bear some traces of its predecessor in the "women" and "common people."

Sholem Aleichem's inclusion of Yiddish literature's historical audience in his epitaph is not completely ironic. His will certainly demonstrates his respect for the "common people," at least. The epitaph, by contrast, emphasizes the centrality and independence of the female half of the stock phrase "for women and the common people," placing "women" before the line break and separating the word "women" from "the common people" with a comma. In short, Sholem Aleichem mustered all the syntactic techniques at the poet's disposal to draw our attention to the women he reclaims, in jest or half-seriously, as an important part of his audience.

Not very long after Sholem Aleichem composed his epitaph, Shmuel Niger, in his "Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader," emphasized that the connections between Yiddish and women must be sought in the question of audience.

Yiddish literature may well be unique among the literatures of the world in its having, until very recently, addressed itself to a female rather than male audience. . . . Jewish women were not only the readers and consumers of Yiddish books, they were also often the ones who encouraged the writers to write in Yiddish—to write, in fact, especially for them.^[5]

Not only was the older Yiddish literature created for a collective, as Niger insists, it also created, imagined, and sustained this collective as a feature of its textual world. The female reader, for example, was inscribed in the title of what is probably the most important work in the Yiddish religious canon, the reworking of the Bible for women by Rabbi Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Yanov, first published in 1618 and reissued in dozens of editions until the present day. The title of this work, the Tenerene (Go Out and See), alludes to the Song of Songs 3:11: "Go out and see King

Solomon, daughters of Jerusalem, in the wreath his mother wove for him on his wedding day, on the day of his heart's joy." The Hebrew imperative verbs "go out and see" are in the feminine plural.

Rabbi Ashkenazi chose his title well. The verse establishes a male object of beauty as its focus, but it acknowledges and invites the participation of women in this scene: the admiring crowd is entirely female, Solomon's wreath was woven by his mother, and the implicit cause of the king's joy is his bride. In its erotic invitation to the "daughters of Jerusalem," the title creates an arena for a joyous and mutually appreciative encounter between a male writer (or male text) and his female readers. The invitation to a female collective is hard to miss, since the Hebrew feminine plural imperative is a particularly rare linguistic form.

The Tsenerene 's implicit apostrophe to women, though, is not typical of Yiddish literature. The largest proportion of premodern Yiddish literature addressed the general public, and when women were addressed, it was usually in a formulation that included men, as in the common title page dedication "for women and uneducated men." Sometimes these authors' addresses to their readers included an apologia for writing in the vernacular rather than in the Holy Tongue. Here, for example, is Moses Altshuler's introduction to his 1596 Brantshpigl (Burning Mirror), an early work of muser , or homiletic literature.

The book was written in Yiddish for women and men who are like women in not being able to learn much. So that when the Sabbath comes, they may read this and they will be able to understand what they read. For our holy books are in the sacred tongue and often include complicated exegetical arguments [pilpul ] from the Talmud, and they are not able to understand. . . . The great masters of the Kabbalah teach us, and write, that not every human being possesses equal understanding. Thus I write this book for women and for men who cannot fundamentally read or understand the holy books in the sacred tongue.^[6]

As Chava Weissler explains Altshuler's address to "women and men who are like women," the grouping serves as cover for what might otherwise seem a lamentable lack in a man, the inability to study religious texts in Hebrew as befits a Jewish male. Since "not all people are equally well endowed . . . provision has to be made for those who cannot attain the scholarly ideal."^[7]   Altshuler accounts for the phenomenon of uneducated men by implicit recourse to the "natural" model of gender disparity. If ignorance of the Holy Tongue, like sex, is inherent and immutable, then why deprive men illiterate in Hebrew of the benefits of Yiddish religious literature?

Weinreich has made the strongest argument for the fictional rather than statistical force of Yiddish female readership. In his analysis, women readers served Yiddish literature as a permanent source of legitimacy against those who argued against the need to translate religious texts into the vernacular. By foregrounding women, who were either prohibited or strongly dissuaded from Torah study in Hebrew, the potential scandal of men who could not read Hebrew (and they were numerous) was circumvented and Yiddish granted a legitimacy born of indisputable necessity.

Because it was stamped as a literature for women, Yiddish literature obtained status in society, although not a place of" honor. Writings for the uneducated cannot possibly attain status, for they only serve temporary purposes; everyone wants to and can (albeit only theoretically) shed his ignorance. But the woman is permanent in society; hence Yiddish literature as a women's literature also attained permanence, and grew although in restricted fashion. Until the beginning of Westernization, when a new attitude toward Yiddish literature came into being, granting it full rights, the woman provided a kind of permission for Yiddish in writing. This also enabled men to enjoy this literature, although in slight embarrassment and disguise. Occasionally even distinguished scholars glanced into Yiddish books.^[8]

In Weinreich's argument, the female audience for many genres of older Yiddish literature becomes a "legal fiction," providing cover for a second class of readers hiding behind the officially sanctioned one. Weinreich describes a range of male Yiddish readers, from the uneducated man who benefited from Yiddish translations written "for women" to the man hiding his enjoyment of "women's pleasures" and the scholar "glancing" into his wife's Yiddish book or urging his sons and daughters to read them constantly, as did the respected Gaon of Vilna. We might add to this list young boys in their mothers' care and the male writers themselves, some of whom wrote under female pseudonyms.^[9]   This variegated group, particularly the man "peeking into the women's books," has been described often enough and in similar enough terms to constitute a recognizable Yiddish literary convention, a second fictionalized audience.

A female "front" for male Yiddish readers may have been necessary, but at least by the nineteenth century it was not altogether comfortable. In Abramovitsh's famous version of this scenario, for a man to read or write Yiddish required a rather convoluted mental gymnastics.

Yiddish in my time was an empty vessel, devoid of everything but prattle, vanity and deceit written by fools using meaningless language, without any reputation, and the women and poor people would read these things without

understanding what they were reading, and the rest of the people, although they knew no other language, would be embarrassed to read it and expose their ignorance in public. And if someone was tempted to look into a Yiddish text, he would laugh at it and rationalize his actions by saying, "I'm just skimming through a 'women's book,' a silly feminine thing, for the fun of it."^[10]

In Abramovitsh's description, the self-respecting male reader enticed by a Yiddish book had to take a belittling stance toward its "real" readers, among whom "the women" were prominent. This peculiar split in Yiddish readership, between men and women and within the male reader himself, had important consequences for the development of Yiddish literature. Yiddish's "femininity" undeniably affected Yiddish literature. But just as important was the male position (concealed, transgressive, ashamed, mocking, or as defiantly proud as Sholem Aleichem) to which the myth of Yiddish femininity gave rise.

The anxieties and defenses of men who read Yiddish are well documented; we also have evidence that men who wrote Yiddish were similarly touched by the feminine associations with the language. Niger, we might recall, insists that Rabbi Jacob Ashkenazi, the writer/compiler of the Tsenerene , must have been "without a doubt a feminine character, otherwise he would not have been able to compile his 'woman's bible.'" Niger goes on to describe the aversion of the masculine character to femininity, the womanish garrulousness of a Jacob ben Isaac from Yanov.^[11]

Whether one reads Niger as correctly diagnosing the misogyny of seventeenth-century attitudes toward Yiddish or expressing the pro-Yiddishist stance of his own time, his description of masculine responses to Yiddish is instructive. The "femininity" of Yiddish was a problem, above all, for men and masculinity. The choice between Yiddish and Hebrew, for bilingual writers or the bilingual community, often pitted "masculinity" against "femininity" within the individual man or male community, rather than men against women. This was especially true in the modern period, with the foregrounding of the notion of writing as individual expression. The compiler of the Tsenerene may not have given a thought to the psychosexual implications of his choice of literary medium. But for Niger, working in a period when writers worried obsessively about the choice of a literary language, these implications were all too pressing.

Abramovitsh's evocation of the Yiddish literary ambience of the midnineteenth century should be enough to assure us that Yiddish's connections

with a female audience, whether fictional, metaphorical, or statistical, did not altogether cease with "the beginning of Westernization, when a new attitude toward Yiddish literature came into being, granting it full rights," to quote Weinreich. In fact, dating "the beginning of Westernization" proves a perplexing endeavor. Does Weinreich's turning point refer to the early nineteenth-century flowering of Yiddish Haskalah literature (the Jewish Enlightenment project to educate the masses, often through satire of their "medievalism" and ignorance of Western culture)? Is he alluding to the beginning of modern Yiddish literature, sometimes marked on the Jewish calendar as November 27, 1864, when the first installment of Abramovitsh's "The Little Person" appeared? Does Weinreich mean Sholem Aleichem's launching of the Yiddish Folksbibliotek series? The appearance of Yiddish literature's first fullscale modernist, Y. L. Peretz? The 1908 Tshernovits language conference, where Yiddish was officially proclaimed a national language (though not the national language, as some delegates wished) of the Jewish people?

How and when did Hebrew and Yiddish writers cease addressing an audience partially or symbolically segregated by gender? Weinreich's periodization raises more questions than it answers. We can immediately reject the possibility that what Weinreich means by Westernization is the importation to Eastern Europe of Enlightenment ideology from Mendelssohn's Germany, since this ideology was not accompanied by any significant new appreciation of Yiddish. In fact, there is a considerable lag between the beginnings of Eastern European Jewish Westernization and the movement to grant Yiddish "full rights." If anything, the early maskilim (practitioners of the Hebrew Enlightenment) were more contemptuous of Yiddish than the rabbis had been, believing, even when they wrote Yiddish themselves, that the ugly "Jargon" was no more than a temporary stepping-stone to the Jewish acquisition of "proper" languages—especially German. Indeed, the phenomenon Weinreich associates with premodern Yiddish literature, writers excusing their Yiddish work by recourse to the needs of a female audience, reappears in virtually the same form at the heart of the Westernization project. The popular and prolific Yiddish Haskalah novelist Isaac Meir Dik peppered his sensationalistic romance and adventure chapbooks and novellas with addresses to "the dear female reader" and instructions to women "to walk in the ways of righteousness." In 1861, Dik explicitly defended his choice to write Yiddish by the old argument that women were incapable of reading Hebrew. After writing a number of talmudic parodies in Hebrew, Dik explained,

I degraded the honor of my pen to recount an abundance of divers stories in yidish-taytsh, the vernacular now spoken, to our shame and sorrow, among our people dwelling in the land (Lithuania, Poland, Byelorussia). I wrote them for the benefit of the daughters of our people who have eyes only for the Yiddish [translation of the] Pentateuch, which is writ in a stumbling tongue and wherein unseemly passages can be found that should never be uttered by the mouths of pious women and maidens.^[12]

As David Roskie writes, Dik did in fact find a large audience among women, not least because his storybooks, "in contrast with other Enlightenment works, did not frighten the pious readership."^[13]   Dik wrote two homiletic works explicitly addressed to women, both guides to Jewish laws incumbent on women. But even the books directed to a more general audience included women in their range of concerns. Roskies describes how Dik effected "a seemingly effortless transition from biblical proof-text to rabbinic commentary (Baba Bathra 6oa) to bourgeois standards of sanitation" in his homiletic Words of Righteousness (1863). In the section on lodging, Dik writes that

a clever person ought to take care not to have a person live directly opposite, as our sages interpreted the verse "and he saw Israel dwelling tribe by tribe" [Nm. 24:2] to mean that Balaam saw that the doors of Israel's tents were not exactly facing each other, so that one could not see what was happening in the other's lodging. And if, with God's help, you really obtain a good apartment with all the amenities, which is as difficult to obtain as a good match, then it is incumbent upon the housewife to keep it clean and tidy.^[14]

It was not only Dik's more obviously maskilic writing that involved women's issues. The adventure stories and reworkings of European romances tried to engage a female audience as it instructed it. In his rhyming introduction to the 1865 The Women Shopkeepers, or Golde Mine the Abandoned Wife of Brod , Dik promises that his story will be both "terrible" and morally elevating.

This is a terrible tale that took place fifty years ago in Brod
It is very important and very true; most excellent and very good
Through it our women will understand
How to run the house, treat their children and their man
And that rouge and jewelry are mere emptiness
And for us, the best fortune is family happiness.^[15]

From the historical accounts, Dik succeeded in finding his audience, selling tens of thousands of copies of his more than two hundred titles. The evidence suggests that a significant share of Dik's statistical audience, as well as the most visible figures in the audience constructed by

his texts, were women. One observer relates that "a Vilna housewife, when she went out to the market on Friday to buy vegetables and pastries for the Sabbath, did not forget to pick up something of Dik's for a few kopecks, and this was the tastiest of the Sabbath treats."^[16]

Westernization, then, did not apparently free Yiddish writers from the impulse to apologize for their language choice, nor did it obviate the need for a Yiddish "women's literature," however much it transformed the goals of such texts. To complicate the problem, "modernity" swept over Jewish communities in waves, taking different forms in the lives of specific individuals widely separated in time and space. In fact, as Niger notes, many Yiddish Haskalah novelists, despite their explicit aim of educating the masses in general, still found themselves addressing a primarily female audience as late as the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Reversing the sixteenth-century project of translating Hebrew texts into Yiddish so Jewish women would not be tempted to read German literature, Yiddish literature was now used to draw Jewish women, and their husbands, toward the secular sphere. Dik, for instance, argued that it would have been pointless for him to write his maskilic fiction and brochures for men in Hebrew.

The religious man wouldn't touch my work, much less read it, since he carefully stays away from Haskalah literature. . . . Not so for my brochures written in Zhargon [Yiddish]. Your heart, my dear female reader, is free from all those twisted ideas. You take no pride in your Jewish learning or in your holy role. . . . You will share [these ideas] with your husband or bridegroom and work on him, even if he himself hasn't read them. A wise woman can affect her man's heart better than any holy or secular book.^[17]

Dik's introduction suggests that nineteenth-century women continued to be the primary readers of Yiddish literature for much the same reasons they had always been—because of their exclusion from traditional Hebrew religious studies. What has changed is that this exclusion now represents a crucial feminine advantage in the broader social movement toward Westernization. Women, because of their now-blessed ignorance, are free of the "twisted ideas" that accompany the traditional Jewish education to which boys and men are subjected.^[18]   Something of the apparently unavoidable Yiddish apologetic remains in this address, however: Dik addresses his female readers as conduits to a male audience. While women, in Weinreich's formulation, had accorded Yiddish a permanent if diminished status by virtue of their sanctioned Hebrew illiteracy, now women were the crucial but apparently temporary means by which to reach a wider readership.

As the evidence shows, women readers were an important part not only of Yiddish readership but also of the dissemination of the "enlightened" ideas promulgated by the Yiddish Haskalah writers.^[19]   Women were more free than men not only to read Yiddish as opposed to Hebrew texts but also to read secular rather than religious literature. The different reading habits of men and women in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe are captured in the Yiddish writer Y. Y. Trunk's description of the two daughters of the Rabbi of Kalisch (1822–1889).

These aristocratic maidens would seat themselves near the window and read thick-paged novels in German and Polish, their eyes streaming tears as they sighed over the throbbing passions described within. From the courtyard rose the singsong voices of the boys who studied Talmud in the Beit Midrash [study hall].^[20]

If Haskalah literature spelled not the end but only the beginning of the end of Yiddish's "female connection," then neither can we spot the final break in Abramovitsh's work. Abramovitsh, the "grandfather of modern Yiddish literature," was also a Yiddish writer for women in the spirit of the seventeenth-century composer of the Tsenerene , although he entered literary history through his secular, "modern" prose. At the height of his literary career, in 1875, Abramovitsh published a Yiddish translation of the traditional Sabbath hymns with commentaries. As he later explained in his Hebrew "Notes toward My Literary Biography," the translation was part of a larger project of reworking the existing Yiddish version of the prayer book, which addressed its female readers in its subtitle, "A Devotional Offering: For the Daughters of Israel."

I said to myself, the time has come to act for the good of our sisters, Jewish women, and for the simple people among us, to grant them a pure offering in a clear language, because they too have souls as we do, which long to see the glory of God. And if our holy forefathers could translate the Bible into the vernacular and our rabbis could appoint a translator to help the masses understand the living word of God, should we not also adopt their ways in order to grant wisdom and ethics to the people in a language they can understand? Why should we not give to our daughters and to all the masses of Israel the good gifts and secret sweetness in our prayers and in the paths of our religion rather than letting them wander in the darkness, reading empty works and mixed-up stories filled with vanity, with our eyes looking only to the few among us?! Is each of them not holy and does God not reside in each of them?^[21]

Abramovitsh's explanation for this undertaking to his male colleagues, for all its resemblance to earlier Yiddish authors' dedications to

their readers, bears the particular marks of his historical circumstances. While not much had changed in Ashkenazic educational practices to make Yiddish translations for women less necessary, something important had changed for the men who were the potential Hebrew-Yiddish translators that might explain why Abramovitsh's apologetic is even more fervent, more insistent than Altshuler's was. It is not only that there is more at stake for the modern male writer in his choice of literary medium than there was for his premodern precursors. For Altshuler, the "natural" differences between the sexes gave Yiddish works their stamp of unarguable necessity. For Abramovitsh—the maskilic believer that women have souls "just as we do"—the continuing necessity of addressing women in Yiddish combined with the perception that to write Yiddish was to "dishonor" one's pen to create an impassioned apologetic, a blend of social outrage and heated self-defense. Abramovitsh's special pleading is as much for himself as for the women for whom he wrote his Yiddish work.

Abramovitsh's popular and critical success with a wider Yiddishspeaking audience meant not only that Yiddish writers could expect to reach men as well as women but also that the stigma of writing in a language associated with women was becoming, for the most part, a vestigial cultural memory. Once the sting of Yiddish's feminine associations had dulled, the way was paved for the humorous reclaiming or ideological transvaluation of Yiddish's "femininity." It might be useful here to pay a final visit to Sholem Aleichem's gravestone and read again his affectionately rueful identification with yidish-taytsh and its traditional audience. The gravestone should be ample enough warning against seeking a simple solution to the question of where and when Yiddish and its female audience broke off their long-established relations: among its other double messages, Sholem Aleichem's epitaph reveals the inextricability of a proud, fearless ownership and an ironic repudiation of Yiddish literary history, the simultaneously increasing and diminishing power of Yiddish ties with its female audience.