2
The Transsexual Imagination
A Reading of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh's Bilingualism

The artist's most essential quality is masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women, the begetting of one's thought on paper, in verse, or whatever the matter is.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1886

If Grandmother had a beard, she'd be a grandfather.
—Yiddish proverb

I

In the summer of 1909, the seventy-five-year-old Hebrew-Yiddish writer Sh. Y. Abramovitsh traveled through Jewish Eastern Europe on what David Frishman, a member of his entourage, called his "triumphal tour."

The "triumphal tour" went from Vilna to Bialystok, from Bialystok to Warsaw and from Warsaw to Lodz. No other writer—Jew or Gentile—has ever been accorded such honor. It was the journey of a duke. Thousands of people waited at each train station, thousands of people jostled and pushed each other to approach him, happy if they managed to shake his hand or even just catch a glimpse of his face. In Lodz ten thousand people waited outside the hotel where Abramovitsh was lodging. Ladies stood in brightly colored dresses with bouquets in their hands. The cry was periodically heard: "Long live Mendele! Long live the Grandfather." And when the writer appeared for an instant in the window or on the balcony, the shouts continued without cease. For hours the writer or any of his entourage could not leave the hotel; it was simply too dangerous. Finally, after trying various things, we somehow pushed our way through and got into a carriage. Suddenly, though, they recognized him, and what happened then is something I will never see again. I was sitting with him in the carriage, and thousands of people were around us, and they tried to lift the carriage up along with the old man inside. At last they succeeded and the cry—"Long live Mendele! Long live the Grandfather! "—broke out from a thousand throats. And as they were lifting him I felt I was being lifted up as well.^[1]

From all reports, by the end of his life Abramovitsh's stature reached proportions reserved for European royalty in his day and rock stars in our own. Abramovitsh was not the first modern Hebrew or Yiddish novelist; Avraham Mapu (1808–1867) is generally credited with having written the first Hebrew novel and Yisroel Aksenfeld (1787–1866) the first Yiddish one. But Abramovitsh, more than these predecessors, provided Yiddish and Hebrew literature with a representative figure, a celebrated spokesperson who could grant the literatures and their readers respectability by his association with it. When Frishman wrote that he felt that the crowd was lifting him up along with "the Grandfather," he meant something more than that he was lucky enough to share Abramovitsh's carriage. For Frishman, a young Yiddish writer, the adoration of the crowd overflowed the figure of Abramovitsh to embrace his own work, the literary "vehicle" he shared with the great man. Abramovitsh's literary successes, the visibility of his fame, the resonance of the Mendele persona by which he was increasingly known, and the translations of his works into Polish and Russian contributed to rescuing Yiddish literature and its readership from a humble past. What the crowd was celebrating, in some sense, was itself.

Abramovitsh's fame is particularly remarkable against the background of his beginnings as a Yiddish writer. His Yiddish literary career began in complete obscurity and only after he had overcome considerable ambivalence toward his medium. When Abramovitsh submitted his first Yiddish story in 1864 to the new Yiddish supplement of the Hebrew periodical Hamelitz , he left it unsigned for fear that a Yiddish publication would threaten his budding reputation as a Hebrew writer. It was only by virtue of the popularity of his work that the Yiddish author could come out of hiding. Previously, the conceptions of Hebrew and Yiddish derived significantly from their respective audiences. Now, the public figure of the author could represent: the languages in which he wrote. With the rise of the "classic" Yiddish authors, the image of the amorphous female collective associated with Yiddish gave way to the "Zayde," the grandfather of modern Yiddish literature, as Abramovitsh was called. For all the benevolence of the Mendele persona, the grandfather was an unmistakably masculine figure, bearded, overflowing with talmudic turns of phrase, and, most important, commanding respect. The literary critic Bal Machshoves portrays this conceptual shift in his essay on Abramovitsh's contributions to Yiddish literature, juxtaposing the image of the writer as beloved grandfather to a description of the language as a disheveled grandmother.

"Jargon," as even talented poets saw the wildness of Yiddish, suddenly, with one stroke of Abramovitsh's pen, acquired the pedigree of a clear, pure language. "The old Grandma"—as the poet [Shimon] Frug once portrayed Jargon—"with a torn and wrinkled apron in a rainbow of stripes, on one foot a chalitse shoe, on the other a white Yom Kippur sock"—all at once transformed herself into a proper language.^[2]

In Bal Machshoves's formulation, there is only a distant resemblance between the grandmother and grandfather. The grandmother is impoverished and has no family connections; her chalitse shoe attests to her being both widowed and rejected by her dead husband's brother ("chalitse" is the ceremony described in Deuteronomy 24:10 in which a childless widow whose dead husband's brother refuses to marry her "to establish a name in Israel for his brother" performs a release ceremony of unshoeing him and spitting in his face). The allusion thus presents Yiddish as both widowed and scorned—doubly bereft, that is, of a male partner. The grandfather, by contrast, provides a worthy pedigree for a generation of writers and readers eager to claim him as family.

Shmuel Niger more directly credits Abramovitsh with the sexual transformation of the language in which he worked. By providing the realm of Yiddish literature with the furnishings of proper Jewish masculinity, Abramovitsh made Yiddish safe for men.

[Abramovitsh] was the first significant writer in the folk literature who was learned in religious matters [talmid-chokhemdiker ]. He brought into it the altar, the pulpit, practically the Holy Ark as well. The literature stopped being merely a women's synagogue with its zogerke , the woman reciting the prayers aloud for the other women to repeat after her.^[3]

Niger and Bal Machshoves see Abramovitsh's triumph as a sexual exorcism, setting the bearded and bespectacled patriarchal figure where Grandmother Yiddish and the anonymous women's prayer leaders once held sway.^[4]   Nevertheless, this transfer was not a simple process. The construction of an adequate (and masculine) Yiddish authorship and a unitary and coherent bilingual Jewish authorship remained an only partially realized project in Abramovitsh's lifetime. Abramovitsh's best-known character, Mendele, in the role of a Yiddish writer, compares himself to Hebrew writers in terms of relative masculinity. In the Yiddish version of The Travels of Benjamin the Third , Mendele, the "compiler and editor" and apparently also the "cook" of the Yiddish book, describes his work as merely a temporary summary of Benjamin's adventures until the Hebrew writers rise to their task and do the job right.

So I said to myself: until my brothers the Hebrew writers, whose little fingers are thicker than my loins, wake from their deep sleep to transcribe the story of the travels of Benjamin from the beginning to the end for the good of all Israel, I will try to print a short version of them as a temporary measure. So I girded my loins like a man and got to work.^[5]

Mendele, with mock deference, presents the Hebrew writers as sleeping giants whose little fingers are thicker than his loins but whose movements are presumably too slow and ponderous to get around to Benjamin's story for a while. The allusion is to 1 Kings 12:10–11, where the royal council advises Solomon's son to respond to Israelite complaints about high taxes with this hollow boast: "My little finger is thicker than my father's loins. My father imposed a heavy yoke on you, and I will add to your yoke; my father flogged you with whips, but I will flog you with scorpions." In choosing to reverse such a falsely grandiose comparison, Mendele simultaneously presents himself as less of a man than the Hebrew writers and casts doubt on their superior strength and virility. And his vision of the Hebrew writers as lost in a deep sleep (presumably of a two thousand-year duration) suggests that age and a royal lineage may be insufficient for contemporary literary needs, and the younger, more agile Yiddish can perform where Hebrew cannot.

Mendele's borrowing of the biblical boast also reactivates the physical dimension of the allusion. In drawing our attention to the physical connections between one-half of the comparison (the finger) and the act of writing, Mendele also invites a literal and vulgar reading of the other half of his comparison (the penis), as if the size of the male sexual organ were an important aspect of literary composition! Mendele's allusion unsettles his obsequious deference to the Hebrew writers in another way. Since the biblical word for little finger is katan (small one), Mendele deviously ends up calling the Hebrew writers' digits (stand-ins for penises in size) "their small ones," while apparently gazing jealously at their thickness.

In the second allusion of the passage, Mendele describes himself girding his loins like a man, comparing his literary work to battle. In this allusion, too, Mendele uses an exalted phrase from the biblical vocabulary of war ironically, suggesting that he himself is not really a man but only playing the part of one. In both allusions, Mendele implies that he and presumably other males who write or publish Yiddish are something less than proper men, although Mendele at least aspires to that condition. Abramovitsh makes an elaborate joke here about Hebrew, Yiddish, and comparative masculinity. If the Yiddish writer considers himself sexually

inferior to his Hebrew "brother," as Abramovitsh seems to imply, then to choose Yiddish as a literary language is to throw one's sexual or gender identity into anxious question.

It is a sign of the new importance of authorship in Jewish literature that Abramovitsh was repeatedly implored to supply his readers and critics with autobiographical sketches. An often-quoted essay Abramovitsh contributed to Nochem Sokolov's literary lexicon twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Yiddish story explores the problem of Hebrew and Yiddish authorship in an exceptionally nuanced way. After narrating his early Hebrew literary career, Abramovitsh describes his turning to Yiddish for the sake of reaching a wider audience. In the apologetic motifs by which writers from Altshuler on defended their use of Yiddish, Abramovitsh explains the unfortunate impossibility of writing in "the Holy Tongue," since "most of [the people] don't know this language and speak Yiddish." Abramovitsh goes on to quote the famous question on the value of Hebrew writing that provides Gordon's poem with its title: "For whom do I toil?" From the abrupt shift in the sentence that follows, it becomes clear, however, that Abramovitsh is bringing Gordon's question to bear on the problem of Yiddish as well as Hebrew writing.

The question, "For whom do I toil?" brought me no peace and caused me great confusion. The Yiddish of my rime was an empty vessel, containing nothing but prattle and foolishness and deceit, written by simpletons with no style and no names and read by women and the poor who couldn't understand what they were reading, and the rest of the people, even if they didn't know another language, were embarrassed to read it lest it be made shamefully public that they were ignoramuses. And when someone was tempted to read a Yiddish book, he would laugh to himself and excuse his actions by saying: I just happen to be looking into a "women's book" for the fun of it, to see the foolishness of women whose minds are frivolous [sheda'atan kalot ].^[6]

Gordon's "For Whom Do I Toil?" like Abramovitsh's essay, addresses the predicament of Hebrew writers in the absence of any sizable Hebrew audience. But Abramovitsh, unlike Gordon, describes himself as choosing between audiences; for the bilingual writer, "For whom do I toil?" is really two vexing questions. The Hebrew writer might rephrase the question as, "How many readers can I hope to reach?" For Yiddish writers, the same question would read, "What kind of reader can I expect to reach?"

In Abramovitsh's description of his move to Yiddish, the difficulty of choosing a language tainted by its female audience is conflated with the choice of a language itself depicted as a debased female. Elizabeth Kloty

Beaujour has observed that bilingual writers often speak of the psychic difficulty of moving from one language to another in terms of "bigamy, adultery, or incest."^[7]   Abramovitsh's tracing of his course from Hebrew to Yiddish combines with his apparent fondness for sexual/linguistic metaphor to produce an astonishingly intricate inquiry into the psychosexual dynamics of language choice. In an introduction to his early Hebrew work on natural history, Abramovitsh sang the praises of Hebrew in conventional terms, personifying the language as his beloved mistress whom he adorned with his prose. In the case of his turn to Yiddish, the overdetermined "femininity" of the language produces a more ambivalent discourse. Drawing from a more ramified and physical vocabulary of sexual choice, courtship, and procreation, Abramovitsh describes his encounter with Yiddish as a tortured love affair.

The writers, who cared only about strengthening our holy language and felt no connection with our people, looked down on Yiddish and mocked her. And if one in a town or two in a tribe sometimes visited the accursed woman and wrote a few things, they kept them secret and covered them with their prayer shawl so that their nakedness should not be exposed.^[8]

The passage bears only a superficial resemblance to the heterosexual romantic conventions ubiquitous in maskilic tributes to the personified Hebrew language. Invoking "all the admonitions of the writer of Proverbs against sexual relations with non-Jewish women,"^[9]   Abramovitsh depicts Yiddish writing as an act as solitary and shameful as visiting a prostitute. The romance between a writer-lover and the valorized, beautiful, and worthy (if shamefully neglected) Hebrew language affirms his heroism and masculinity; by contrast, there is nothing redeeming about the Yiddish writer's sordid interest in Yiddish. After the perverse Yiddish writer secretly visits that "accursed woman," he hides his manuscript (presumably the product of this unlawful union) underneath his prayer shawl—a symbol of proper male religious conduct. Niger, in describing Abramovitsh as having brought the "holy ark" of male religious studies to the Yiddish "women's section," recognizes in Abramovitsh's work the range of references and allusions available only to a learned Jewish man. What Niger celebrates as the infusion of Yiddish with Jewish scholarship becomes in Abramovitsh's essay a furtive attempt to cover the disgraceful act of writing in a "women's language" under his prayer shawl. The metaphor implies that Yiddish writers fear sexual exposure; the Yiddish manuscript is equated with the writers' nakedness—more specifically, their sex (ervatam). The scorn to which

first the female readers and then the feminine personification of Yiddish are subjected reappears as the shame of the man who covers his Yiddish writing, which is also his nakedness, beneath the masculine cloak of the prayer shawl.

In the next passage, Abramovitsh widens his focus from the writer's "heterosexual" attention to Yiddish to the homosocial Hebrew literary culture in which this affair furtively develops.

My admirers, the "lovers of the Hebrew language," rebuked me for besmirching my honor and reputation by giving my power to that foreign woman. But my love for what was useful conquered my pride and I decided that, come what may, I would take pity on Yiddish, the unpitied daughter, and do something for my people.^[10]

The Hebrew writers, a group of judgmental and perhaps also jealous men, fiercely resent their young companion turning to a woman—or the wrong woman. Yiddish is illegitimate because she is "foreign," presumably an allusion to the language's German roots. By contrast, the narrator calls Yiddish "Yehudit" (Judith), the one Hebrew term for Yiddish that is also a woman's name, and one that means "Jewish woman." Abramovitsh evokes the familiar biblical topos that figures the Jewish people as a woman, or, more specifically, as God's lover or bride; this topos is flexible enough to describe the sinning people of Israel as a prostitute, or the defeated people of Israel as a widow. The passage reinforces the equation of the feminized Yiddish language and Jewish people in expressing pity for Yiddish as the "unpitied daughter," a citation of Hosea's mirroring of God's relationship with Israel by marrying and "redeeming" a prostitute. Abramovitsh implicitly compares his choice of Yiddish with the prophet's love for the daughter born of his prostitute-wife as well as God's forgiveness of the sinful Jewish people. Whereas the Hebrew writers reject Yiddish as both sexually and ethnically alien, for Abramovitsh, Yiddish is the primary emblem of Jewish otherness, standing in for a people whose degradation is figured (here and in Hosea) as a kind of feminization.

Abramovitsh also alludes once again to Gordon in this passage. Gordon's "For Whom Do I Toil?" includes the lines "Say to Hebrew: Pitied sister / Do not mock my words, call me: Brother."^[11]   By declaring his love for the "unpitied daughter" Yiddish, Abramovitsh challenges the Hebraist imperative of Gordon's words. While Gordon raises the "daughter" to the status of a "sister" and leaves her previous degradation only implicit in his poem, Abramovitsh's naming of "the unpitied daughter" as

the object of his love depicts a much more ambivalent sexual-linguistic choice.

The passage ends with Abramovitsh marrying Yiddish and, like an Ahasueras providing for his Esther, giving her everything she needs and having many children (or sons) with her, a series of events Miron describes as "a promiscuous affair redeemed by marriage and by orderly procreation."^[12]   The woman is redeemed, then, because there are children born of this union, the works that grant Abramovitsh fame and provide his "wife" with respectability.

And then I was inspired and wrote my first story—" The Little Person." . . . From that time on I longed for "Yehudit" and wedded her forever, providing her with perfumes and worthy goods and she became a fine-favored and beautiful matron and bore me many children.^[13]

Abramovitsh's saga of the anxiety and shame of "consorting" with Yiddish appears to reach a satisfactory conclusion: overcoming the beloved language's degradation and the writer-lover's claustrophobic social environment, the couple are betrothed, marry, and bear many children. The passage, however, leaves the fairy-tale ending ambiguous, in fact, doubly so. In celebrating the marriage of writer and language after the "birth" of the first "child," Abramovitsh implies that this firstborn child is born out of wedlock to a single mother whose lover is absent; this status may be Abramovitsh's acknowledgment that his first story was published anonymously: And as if the cloud over its legal status were not enough, the title of this "bastard" child—"Dos kleyne mentshele," or, to translate faithfully the redundancy in the original, "the tiny little person"—leaves us in the dark about its gender. "Dos kleyne mentshele"—mentshele is the neuter diminutive form of the noun mentsh (which itself has multiple meanings)—is sexually equivocal, as is the curious double-gendered figure by which the text explains and expands on its sexually irresolute title.

II

Despite its ambiguously gendered title, "The Little Person" appears to break deliberately, even radically, with the Yiddish "women's literature" that preceded and accompanied it. The prolific Yiddish writer Isaac Meir Dik, whose popularity was at its height in the 185os and 1860s, addressed his stories "virtually without exception" to his "dear female reader."^[14]   By contrast, Abramovitsh clearly imagines and works at creating a male audience in "The Little Person." The frame story takes us

into a town rabbi's study, where Mendele the Bookseller and the most powerful men of the town are convened to hear the rabbi read the last will and testament of Itsik-Avraham, one of the richest and most corrupt men of Glupsk. The frame narrative ushers the reader directly into a political, religious, and textual sphere from which women and the uneducated—the traditional Yiddish audience—are ordinarily barred. "The Little Person" invites Yiddish readers to imagine themselves as important and educated men—a radical departure for a Yiddish audience. There is some suggestion that this masculine audience may not be so easy to find or to keep. Although Itsik-Avraham's will offers a generous bequest to the community and its writer is, after all, the most powerful man in town, he nonetheless sees fit to begin his confession with these beseeching words:

In this letter, Rabbi, my entire life story is written. I beg you, Rabbi, to fulfill my request and do everything I ask of you. I beg a thousand pardons for wearying you with such a long letter. But in the end you will see that it is very useful.^[15]

While Itsik-Avraham's imploring tone may be a sign of his newfound humility, it also serves as the larger text's solicitation of male readers, the kind who will only sit still to hear a story if assured of its usefulness. After all, if the busy rabbi and the town leaders take the time to hear Itsik-Avraham's narrative, no reader need be ashamed to do likewise.

The fictional audience assembled in the rabbi's study is exclusively male, but this group is far from an idealized vision of masculine Jewry. These distinguished men, it turns out, are more concerned with their growling stomachs and hemorrhoids than with the moral issues forced on them in the course of the story. Even Mendele, who makes his first appearance in this story, at first is frightened by the invitation to the rabbi's study: he hopes that his in-laws have not lodged a complaint against him for failing to keep to the terms of his daughter's dowry. For Mendele, who will publish and circulate the will among the communities of Eastern Europe, the story is initially of interest primarily as it concerns his pocket. But "The Little Person" also aspires to another (ideal and absent) reader, the appropriately named Gutman, designated in the will as the "good man" who can carry out Itsik-Avraham's dream of founding a proper, that is, enlightened, Jewish elementary school and a school where students might later learn a useful trade. Gutman is the hoped-for addressee of the final lines of the story, in which Mendele

publicly announces that as soon as Gutman, whose whereabouts are unknown, happens upon the published story, "he should come to Glupsk, where the Rabbi is waiting for him to set up the Talmud Torah and do other good things."^[16]   Abramovitsh presents us with a Yiddish audience that is exclusively male but that is also of questionable moral standing. The sole reader whose character is beyond question never materializes. Thus Abramovitsh establishes a fictional male audience for his story and satirizes traditional and bourgeois Jewish men simultaneously.

The confession itself is organized around competing paradigms of masculine behavior, from the strong-arm tactics of Itsik-Avraham and his hypocritical mentor Iser Varger to the genteel poverty of the enlightened Gutman. Unlike Abramovitsh's first Hebrew belletristic work, Learn Well , which is subtitled A Love Story and which takes as its central concerns the "woman question" and the problem of arranged and early marriages, this story addresses itself almost exclusively to those Haskalah ideals that most concerned men: proper educational practices, productive labor, and responsible citizenship. These social problems are explored through Itsik-Avraham's attachment to one exploitative or ignorant teacher, boss, or mentor after another (Gutman is the sole positive example) in a series of failed or morally ambiguous father-son relationships.

The quest for Gutman and a proper model for Jewish life is only part of the narrative here. "The Little Person" tells another story as well, documenting the difficulties of formulating an authoritative masculine discourse in the "kitchen" language.^[17]   It is no accident, therefore, that this unsigned text is the account of a child who never knew his father, "since he died while I was still nursing."^[18]   The narrative, despite its focus on masculine development, takes its title and initial impetus from an episode in the young boy's relationship to his mother: in a strange incident that occurs in Itsik-Avraham's early childhood, the protagonist notices a "little person," presumably his own reflection, in his mother's eyes.

Once I was staring into my mother's eyes, which she would usually hit me for doing. When I saw that this time she wasn't bothering me I couldn't help asking: "Mama, what's the tiny little person in your eyes?" My mother smiled and answered, "The tiny little person is the soul, which is in no one's eyes, not in an animal's eyes, just in Jewish eyes." My mother's answer awakened many fresh, tremulous thoughts. From then on, the tiny little person caught my imagination. I saw it in my sleep, I dreamt I was playing with the little person, holding the little person, that I myself was the little person. In

short, the little person was stuck in my mind. I so much wanted to be a little person. It's ridiculous, after all, a little person is a soul! Once I had a bright idea. When my mother bent her head to take a pot out of the oven, I suddenly ran up to her from behind and knocked her on the head with my fist so that the little person would fall out of her eyes. You can imagine the beating I got for that. Besides, I didn't have anything to eat that day, because my poor mother had broken the pot of stew with her forehead.
Another time I caught a bigger punishment. I was curious to know whether an animal also had a tiny little person. So I went over to a cow in the street and while I was staring into her eyes, she gored me with her horns and hurt me pretty badly. I still have the scar on my left cheek. All these blows didn't drive out [my curiosity] even a hair; just the opposite, they just drove the thought of the tiny little person into me even more.^[19]

Clearly, Itsik-Avraham mistakes his own reflected image in the pupil of his mother's eye for a tiny creature, distinct from either his mother or himself. But by withholding a simple explanation that could lay the child's curiosity to rest, the mother sets in motion the quest that ultimately propels the narrative. The phrase "the tiny little person" becomes the site of competing interpretations, beginning with the mother's explanation that the image is the soul, the intangible property of the Jewish (or perhaps human) collective. The image, that is, strictly belongs neither to herself nor to her son, but to both of them.

Thus the image in the mother's eyes also acquires meaning in her words, just as Itsik-Avraham fails in grasping both the figure and his mother's interpretation of it. His rejection or misunderstanding of his mother's interpretation inaugurates a quest that follows "the little person" in all its linguistic, gendered permutations. Hearing the richest man in the town, Iser Varger (literally, Strangler), described as a "little person," this time meaning a "parasite" or "petty manipulator," the young Itsik-Avraham decides to attach himself to Iser to learn "the Torah" of how to become a "little person" in his own right. He becomes, in fact, Iser's "soul," which in this context signifies his "right-hand man," in another corrupt echo of his mother's words.^[20]

The figure of the "little person" transcends this particular narrative, appearing also in the metadiscourse of Abramovitsh's literary production. Abramovitsh describes his work as involving the imaginary construction of a curious figure he calls "dos kleyne yidele" (the little Jew), who both represents a part of the authorial persona and has a quasi-independent existence apart from him—a male, or perhaps androgynous, muse. David Eynhorn, Abramovitsh's personal secretary, reports this literary practice in his memoiristic essay on the writer.

"Yidele , little Jew, what do you have to say?" [Abramovitsh] used to ask whenever he had difficulties in finding the proper Yiddish expression. "When I must have a certain Yiddish word and cannot find it," he would tell me, "then I call on my little Jew, place him in front of me, and order him to talk, until he discloses the word I am looking for."^[21]

While Abramovitsh's "little Jew" has a particular knowledge of the Yiddish language helpful to the Russified intellectual who may have lost touch with the Jewish masses, it also has precedents in both Western and Jewish cultural traditions. The "homunculus," or "little person," recurs in everyday language as well as in mystical, artistic, and even scientific discourse, with various connotations. One species of this figure is commemorated in the terms by which many languages (including Hebrew and Yiddish) refer to the pupil of the eye. "The Little Person" reactivates this dead metaphor, since Itsik-Avraham becomes a student of the "little person" by first rejecting his mother's "lesson" and then pursuing the "little person" and a perverse education simultaneously.

The homunculus also has a place in Western literary tradition, which is populated by a number of mischievous little sprites (Ariel, Rumpelstiltskin, Peter Pan—who has his own homunculus in the figure of Tinkerbell) who might be said to belong to the same androgynous and preternaturally knowing literary family. In a tradition that incorporated mystical symbolism and Hebrew-Yiddish wordplay, the "little yidele " is also an explicitly textual figure, signifying the multivalent connections between Jewish identity and the Hebrew letter yod (popularly connected to the Yiddish word for Jew, yid ) which is sometimes taken to represent the "little Jew" within the "Jew" or "dos pintele yid." This conflation of text and body moves in two directions: the Hebrew letter is shown to represent the Jewish body, especially in its male form (the yod sometimes signifies the penis as well as the hand); and the Jew becomes the earthly embodiment of what is simultaneously the smallest letter and the most sacred one, the yod.

For Abramovitsh, Yiddish writing involves the cooperation of the "author" and his "little Jew," the homunculus who mediates between the Jewish masses and the intellectual writer. In the scenario Eynhorn describes, there is no maternal figure to "give birth to" the little Jew; the textual "brainchild" emerges, like Athena, from the forehead of its creator. In "The Little Person," though, the homunculus is explicitly linked with a female figure. Itsik-Avraham longs for a small play-figure he can call his own and imagines he can see such a figure before his eyes, but the figure turns out to be permanently attached to his (and "its")

mother. The mother-son violence of the "little person" narrative is a function of this wavering position: the son needs to reclaim what is, after all, "his own" image, but this image is lodged in the eyes of the mother, almost as if she is immutably and permanently pregnant with it.

The aggression of Itsik-Avraham's attempt to wrench the image from his mother's eyes is adequately explained in the novella as a continuation of the cycle of abuse and neglect that the child himself has suffered at his mother's hands. In addition, the narrative recounts the familiar enough conflict between a child's dependence on his mother and his drive toward separation and differentiation from her. This narrative, however, has a particular function as the foundational scene of Abramovitsh's first Yiddish story: the discord encoded in the "tiny little person" episode can be read as an allegory of the difficult birth of modern Yiddish literature from its "women's literature" matrix. To turn from writing in Hebrew to writing in Yiddish was dangerously to reverse the maturation process begun with the young boy's introduction to masculine discourse; while the established author characterized his shift to Yiddish as a normative heterosexual love affair, the unsure beginner might well experience Yiddish writing as an indulgent regression to the maternal realm. If "The Little Person" was to escape this regression, Abramovitsh needed to wrench his Yiddish text from the "kitchen" and from a literary arena still ringed by female spectators. Itsik-Avraham, in trying to knock his own image from his mother's eyes as she bends over the stove, is an abused child reacting in the only way he knows to the figure of authority who is most responsible for his neglect. At the same time, he may also stand in for the writer who attempts to wrench a sense of self from an overwhelmingly feminine medium and forge a Yiddish literary text in the image of the Jewish man.

In his narcissistic desire to possess "the little person" by knocking it from his mother's eyes, Itsik-Avraham demonstrates his rejection of his mother's interpretation of the image. Thus he both does and does not break the hold of his mother's eyes. And in Itsik-Avraham's encounter with the cow, the direction of this violence is reversed and the child is hurt. Both encounters attest to the "little person's" uncanny property of blurring male and female identities; in Itsik-Avraham's clash with the cow, the "little person" further demonstrates its capacity to drastically reverse gender roles: the little boy who insists on discovering whether "the little person" travels not only between people and genders but also between species is penetrated in a grotesque and transgendered rape that permanently scars him.

In the later explorations of the term, "the tiny little person" refers only to men, and its meaning is sharply opposed to the one tendered by Itsik-Avraham's mother. When Itsik-Avraham finally repudiates his sin of "being a little man," it is not to replace it with his mother's definition but rather with the ideal embodied in Gutman, that is, the nondiminutive man, the good enlightened adult male. That Gutman never in fact materializes suggests that Abramovitsh leaves the possibility of an authoritative, ethical masculine Yiddish discourse in grave question.

III

"The Little Person" can be read as both an important transitional narrative for the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingual author and as a narrative, in some sense, of this transition. Abramovitsh's 1894 story, "In the Days of the Noise" (or "In the Days of Earthquake"), is another liminal text, although in a slightly different way. After writing in Yiddish for some twenty years, Abramovitsh returned to Hebrew in 1886 with "In the Secret Place of Thunder." In this first of Abramovitsh's Hebrew texts that featured Mendele as the fictional author, the writer took his initial steps toward combining ironic biblical allusion with Aramaic phrases and a flexible, nonallusive vocabulary drawn from all the historic strata of the Hebrew language. While the 1886 "In the Secret Place of Thunder" introduced Mendele into Hebrew literature, the 1894 "In the Days of the Noise" brought Mendele into the Hebraist environment of the Zionists of Odessa; two years later, in 1896, Abramovitsh's Hebrew translations of his Yiddish stories began to appear.^[22]   "In the Days of the Noise" thus was written between Abramovitsh's return to Hebrew writing and the Hebrew-Yiddish self-translations that completed the revolution of his Hebrew prose style. "In the Days of the Noise" addresses the problem not only of writing Mendele's words in Hebrew but also of translating Mendele into a Hebrew cultural environment. If the mother-son narrative of "The Little Person" is Abramovitsh's allegory for turning to Yiddish, then "In the Days of the Noise" can be read as a comment on Abramovitsh's equally conflicted return to Hebrew.

"In the Days of the Noise" rewrites Abramovitsh's famous novella The Travels of Benjamin the Third for the conditions of the 1890s, when the idea of a pair of dreamers traveling to Palestine was no longer completely fantastic. As in The Travels , two men, Reb Leyb and Mendele himself, leave their wives and journey southward in an attempt at fulfilling their dreams of traveling to Zion. Parodying the internal Jewish traditions of

fantastic travel narratives (analogous to the medieval romances that fueled Don Quixote's quest) and satirizing the romantic Jewish dreamers who believe the accounts of the Lost Tribes and the churning magical river Sambatyon, The Travels charts the distance between the fictional religious-fantasy travel stories with their messianic tendencies and the bleak historical and geographic conditions Benjamin consistently misreads.

"In the Days of the Noise" narrows the gap between the Zionist quest and Eastern European Jewish conditions, and Mendele and Reb Leyb actually meet the Odessa Zionists, who are at least theoretically in a position to grant their request. But the dream must remain unfulfilled, because neither the Zionists nor Mendele have the means of inaugurating the necessary changes demanded by the Zionist enterprise. Mendele is particularly incapable of recognizing his unsuitability for the Zionist ideal of physical labor. As in other stories, though, Mendele's ironic function is a double one: with his honesty and down-to-earth wit, he exposes the snobbery of the Odessa Zionists; at the same time, his ignorance of this world reveals the gulf between the traditional Jew and Europeanized Jewish modernity.

For all the story's historical-political scope, the plot is closer to the stuff of domestic farce. "In the Days of the Noise" generates comedy from a series of misunderstandings. The two protagonists have signed an economic friendship pact promising to share their fortunes, meager as they are. The pact between the two men markedly resembles a marriage contract, and the friends call each other "ben-zug," a term that could mean partner but whose primary designation is "spouse." Like Benjamin and Senderl in The Travels , the two men act very much as husband and wife: Mendele is outraged when Reb Leyb fails to come home one night, and he spies on his partner's strolls with the "matron" who is his rival.

Mendele's outrage is not just at Leyb's betrayal of their friendship; Mendele also feels that Leyb's association with a woman is improper behavior for a Jewish man, in fact, unmanly. After witnessing the changes in Reb Leyb after the intrusion of this mysterious woman, Mendele erupts into a bitter series of transsexual insults, seeing Reb Leyb as a pathetic and vain female.

Reb Leyb came in and stood next to my bed, and when he saw that I was asleep he stepped back and started tiptoeing around the room with tiny steps. Then he took off his weekday caftan and put on his Sabbath caftan, after checking it over very well. Then he smoothed his sidelocks and beard and tilted his hat this way and that way, snatching glimpses at himself in the

wall mirror and from the smile on his face you could tell that he was well pleased with himself. It's possible that Reb Leyb found favor in his own eyes just like all those ugly women who are convinced, as they adorn themselves before the mirror, that they're great beauties without any equal. But to tell you the truth, I wasn't so pleased with him, and for me, his adornment was his ugliness, and watching him, the figure of the beautiful Joseph and the visage of Zlikha [Potiphar's wife] appeared in my imagination.^[23]

Mendele's comparison of Reb Leyb with Joseph and Potiphar's wife invites and resists interpretation. Is Reb Leyb a narcissistic Joseph, or is he a lascivious Zlikha, stealing glances at the beautiful male figure? Is he both the voyeuristic woman and the "beautiful" love object? And if stolen glimpses make Reb Leyb (as voyeur) a woman, do they do the same to the "sleeping" Mendele? The biblical story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, with its gender role reversals, reflects and refracts the already unsettled scene of narcissism and voyeurism between Reb Leyb and Mendele. The rift between them, then, feminizes not only the betrayer but also Mendele. In a later passage, the dejected Mendele tellingly compares the weekday gabardine Reb Leyb has left hanging on the wall to an abandoned wife.

It looked sad, the hem all muddy like a housewife's dress on Friday afternoon. Woe to the dress, for all the years she served her master faithfully, clung to him every weekday and was not separated from him until she became a rag, and now she has been traded in for another and has become a desolate abandoned wife [agunah ]!^[24]

When Reb Leyb tries to apologize for his long absences, Mendele answers, "You need to apologize to your wife, not to me," but it is precisely in this denial that his anger reveals itself. He asks Reb Leyb whether he has been acting like a bachelor because he had signed a provisional divorce agreement before leaving for Odessa, as was common for husbands leaving for war or on dangerous expeditions. Reb Leyb answers that the provisional divorce is not from his wife but from Mendele. If it were not for their mutual poverty, Reb Leyb argues, he would never have entered into the contract in the first place, and so should be released from his obligation. Both their friendship pact and its eventual dissolution, then, are couched in the psychological and legal terms of traditional Jewish marriage and divorce.

This domestic farce involves a linguistic conflict as well. Mendele misreads Reb Leyb's abandonment, since Reb Leyb is leaving not to commit adultery with the mysterious woman whose company he is keeping but to become a Hebrew teacher—the woman turns out to be a Hebraist.

Most critics read "In the Days of the Noise" as testimony to Abramovitsh's antipathy toward the early Zionists in Odessa, particularly toward those among them who attempted to speak Hebrew among themselves. The linguistic move from Yiddish to Hebrew described in this story, though, is figured as a quasi-sexual betrayal, a betrayal both of the male bond and of proper Jewish masculinity. Reb Leyb's new Hebrew-speaking world is far less sexually segregated than the old Yiddish-speaking one, and what particularly disturbs Mendele is that the Hebrew circle has broken with the sexual segregation of the traditional world. While Mendele fails to meet the masculine standards of the Hebraists, since he stammers in his attempts to speak Hebrew and lacks the physical prowess to join a Zionist colony, he in turn sees Reb Leyb as something less than a proper man. Mendele compares Reb Leyb's attempts to speak Hebrew to a woman in the throes of childbirth, an act that also feminizes Mendele as participant: "I felt that Reb Leyb was a woman in labor who was having a difficult childbirth and I was the midwife, compassionately trying every which way to get the baby out."^[25]   The same Mendele who in the Yiddish version of The Travels described the Hebrew writers as more manly than himself, here, in this Hebrew story, mocks the new Hebrew speaker as unnatural and womanish.

"In the Days of the Noise" not only reworks some of the motifs of The Travels , it also echoes the triangulated scenario presented in "Notes toward My Literary Biography." The drama of a single woman (the word "matron" is used in both texts) who disrupts the bond between men both mirrors and reverses the metaphorical conflict between Abramovitsh, the lovers of Hebrew, and "Yehudit." In the biographical notes, however, the woman is associated with Yiddish, whereas here she is associated with Hebrew. (In both these scenarios, we might note, the woman may embody language but herself remains voiceless, a medium of exchange and bone of contention in a male world, a matrix for [pro]creating texts but also the embattled arena of disputatious male ideologies.)

"In the Days of the Noise" ends with Mendele going back to the small town of Kabtsiel where he belongs, as the Zionist assures him is proper, while Reb Leyb stays in Odessa as a Hebrew teacher. The "divorce" prefigures the eventual mutual disentanglement of Hebrew and Yiddish, and on similar grounds. When Reb Leyb argues that the connection between himself and Mendele was born of historical compulsion, we might remember Achad Ha'am's similar argument that the connection between the Jewish people and Yiddish had run its historical course.^[26]   But "In the

Days of the Noise" gives Mendele the last word, even if it was Reb Leyb who initiated the divorce. "There will always be a Kabtsiel," Mendele philosophizes, and thus always a place for himself and Yiddish. In this, Mendele denies the wisdom of the Hebraists, who saw Yiddish as the temporary language of the Jewish diaspora. Whatever one may think of the prophetic truth of Mendele's words, "In the Days of the Noise" provides a countercritique of Hebraism, though, significantly enough, in fictional form. If writing Yiddish renders Abramovitsh sexually suspect—of trafficking in the "woman's literature" and being seduced into an illegitimate tryst with the exotic, non-Jewish other—for Mendele, Hebrew is the perversion of natural speech and the Hebrew-speaking intelligentsia the realm of sexual license and the perversion of proper gender roles.

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.