1. It is more correct to speak of Loshn-koydesh than Hebrew in this context to designate the language of the traditional Jewish canon. Loshn-koydesh comprises not only the various strata of Hebrew, including biblical and rabbinic, but also Aramaic, the earlier Jewish vernacular in which the Talmud is composed.

The term "Yiddish" is equally deceptive, covering a wide range of historically, socially, and territorially diverse forms of the language. Moreover, the name Yiddish, which has become nearly universally used, was common only among uneducated people until the first years of this century. Thus, "Hebrew-Yiddish internal bilingualism" should not be taken to mean a stable or fixed relation between two distinct languages but rather should be read differently in each context to which the concept might apply. For a fascinating discussion of the political implications of the use of different names of Old Yiddish by different historians, see Jerold C. Frakes, The Politics of Interpretation: Alterity and Ideology in Old Yiddish Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 21-103. Max Weinreich, The History of the Yiddish Language , trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1973] 1980), 320-325, also discusses the various names of Yiddish, including "Yiddish."

2. See Charles A. Ferguson, "Diglossia," Word 15 (1959): 325-340. By a curious coincidence of intellectual history, Ferguson's pioneering description of the phenomenon of dual-language cultures and Weinreich's description of "internal bilingualism" appeared in the same year.

3. Max Weinreich, "Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz until the Haskalah: Facts and Concepts" [Yiddish], Goldene keyt 35 (1959): 3-11.

4. Max Weinreich, "Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz," trans. Lucy Davidowicz, in Voices from the Yiddish , ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, [1959] 1975), 279-280. Subsequent references are to this abridged version of the essay.

5. Shmuel Niger, "Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader" [Yiddish], Der Pinkes 1 (1912): 106. The essay is reprinted, with one small deletion, in Niger's Studies in the History of Yiddish Literature [Yiddish], ed. H. Leivick (New York: Sh. Niger Book Committee, 1959), 35-108. All references are to the 1912 version, unless otherwise noted.

6. Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 91, cites as an early prototype of this formula the 1534 translation of Job, which is directed to "women and the ordinary people who cannot study Torah."

7. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 276.

8. Sh. Z. London, The Congregation of Shloyme , 3d ed. (Amsterdam: n.p., 1772), quoted in Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 92.

9. Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 113.

10. Ibid., 121-122.

11. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 277. Weinreich credits the Arabic and Ladino scholar Max Gruenbaum with coining the phrase "women's literature," but he argues that the phrase is not completely accurate. For an American-Jewish feminist treatment of this literature, see Chava Weissler, "The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women," Jewish Spirituality II , ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad Press, 1989), 245-275. See, as well, Dorothy Bilik's paper on Niger, "Prematurely Politically Correct," presented at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, 1991.

12. Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 130. Significantly, the term "vayber-taytsh," or women's Yiddish, is often used interchangeably with "ivre-taytsh" to describe the distinctive language and style of the premodern Yiddish translations of Hebrew source texts. Yiddish books published until the nineteenth century were virtually all typeset in the rounded letters known as "taytsh" or ''vayber-taytsh." For a discussion of the history of these terms as well as the typographical shifts that visually accompanied them, see Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 263, 275.

13. Niger's plans to rework his early essay on Yiddish and the female reader as well as his proposal for a sequel to the essay are discussed in Yitshak Rifkind, "Afterword," in Shmuel Niger, Studies in the History , 431-438. According to Rifkind, Niger assembled material to support his arguments (which remained relatively unchanged) over the course of his lifetime but never managed to incorporate this material into the essay. Niger's two articles in effect split the category of "women and the common people" to whom Yiddish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was often addressed. The separation of these conflated groups into two (which is reflected in my own work) may have had the advantage of reversing what was felt to be the feminization of the Jewish masses. Note that Niger uses the term "folk" rather than "proste mentshen" (common people), although the latter is typical of Yiddish authors' addresses. Implicit in his use of the term "folk" is the valorization of a previously denigrated category, akin, perhaps, to Niger's partial and problematic transvaluation of the feminine in his first study.

14. The French feminist critic Hélène Cixous, "Sorties," trans. Ann Liddle, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology , ed. Elaine Marks and lsabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, [1975] 1980), 91, argues that such binary oppositions are common to all patriarchal philosophical systems.

Wherever an ordering intervenes, a law organizes the thinkable by (dual, irreconcilable; or mitigable, dialectical) oppositions. And all the couples of oppositions are couples . Does this mean something? Is the fact that logocentrism subjects thought—all of the concepts, the codes, the values—to a two-term system, related to "the" couple, man/woman?

15. Christopher Hutton, "Freud and the Family Drama of Yiddish," in Studies in Yiddish Linguistics , ed. Paul Wexler (Tübingen: Niemeyer Press, 1990), 10.

16. The situation of the Ben-Yehuda family, in which the wife acquired foreign languages earlier than the husband, while he knew Hebrew from an early age, appears to be typical of young Eastern European Jews of the Haskalah period and later. This gendering of multilingualism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century has some characteristics in common with the earlier patterns of Jewish bilingualism. Just as women were more likely to read Yiddish books than their brothers or husbands, Jewish women may have been earlier and more commonly exposed to non-Jewish languages than their male counterparts, whose educational environment demanded a stricter commitment to Hebrew and Aramaic religious texts. Ben-Yehuda's tutelage by his future wife, Dvora Yonas, is recounted in Itamar Ben-Avi, "Introduction," in The Complete Works of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda [Hebrew], ed. Itamar Ben-Avi (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1941), 7.

17. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Antisemitism and the Secret Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 200. Hutton, "Freud and the Family Drama," 21, makes similar claims for Yiddish's "femininity" vis-à-vis German, although he does not link this gendering of Yiddish with the self-hatred of the assimilated male Jew who perceives himself as emasculated, as Gilman does. Instead, he more positively views the connections between Yiddish and the feminine in Freud's thought in the light of Freud's theories of sexuality and socialization: "It does seem evident . . . that in adopting German culture Freud felt that he had denied the authentic and intimate, and in this sense, the natural, the feminine and the sexual in his nature, this being in part symbolized by Yiddish." It seems likely that the relations between German and Yiddish, in contrast with those that connect Hebrew and Yiddish, are largely a reflection of ethnic and social differences (between Germans and Jews and between German Jews and Eastern European Jews).

18. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land . Vol. 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 243.

19. The clearest and most direct description of this concept can be found in Jacques Lacan, "On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis," in Ecrits: A Selection , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, [1966] 1977), 218: "What I do wish to insist on is that we should concern ourselves not only with the way the mother accommodates herself to the person of the father, but also with the way she takes his speech, the word ( mot ), let us say, of his authority, in other words, of the place that she reserves for the Name-of-the-Father in the promulgation of the law." Lacan's "insistence" on our hearing his "word" as well as his ahistorical and apolitical view of patriarchal authority should explain the challenge of his work to contemporary French feminists.

20. Hélène Cixous, " Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays," trans. Betsy Wing, in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism , ed. Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (New York: Basil Blackwell, [1975] 1989), 111.

21. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Textual Strategies , ed. J. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1969] 1979), 141-160.

22. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 116.

1. Sholem Aleichem, "Last Will and Testament," in Sholom Aleichem Panorama , ed. Melech Grafstein (London: Jewish Observer Press, 1948), 184. The will reads, in part,

No matter where I die, I am to be buried not among aristocrats, people of high lineage, or people of great wealth, but among common Jewish workers, just ordinary folk; so that the tombstone to be put up on my grave will honor the ordinary graves around mine, and the ordinary graves will honor my tombstone, in the way in which the plain, honest people honored their folk writer in his lifetime.

2. Sholem Aleichem, "Epitaph" [Yiddish], Ale verk fun Sholem Aleichem , vol. 2 (Moscow: Emes Press, 1948), 284. A Hebrew version of the epitaph, which is a near but not exact translation of the epitaph, is inscribed on the back of the gravestone. The translation was probably done by the writer's son-in-law, a Hebrew writer in his own right named I.D. Berkowitz, who also translated many of his father-in-law's works into Hebrew.

3. "The writer's audience is always a fiction," writes Walter Ong in The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 116. Ong analyzes writers' modes of projecting a collective consciousness onto their readership and recounts the history of the ways in which audiences have been called on to fictionalize themselves.

4. Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 100.

5. Ibid.

6. Moshe Altshuler, Burning Mirror [Yiddish] (1596), as quoted in Chava Weissler, "For Women and for Men Who Are Like Women: The Construction of Gender in Yiddish Devotional Literature," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (1989): 9.

7. Weissler, "For Women and for Men Who Are Like Women," 12.

8. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 277.

9. In a fascinating aside, Niger, "Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader," 127 n. 139, describes a visit to a well-known maskil, Yehoshua Mazeh. He asked the older man whether he knew the identity of this new "Sarah Bas-Tovim" who had recently published a collection of modern tkhines. Mazeh brought Niger over to the mirror, pointed to the reflection of his own wizened face, and said, "There she is." Niger also cites the rumor that the Yiddish novelist I. M. Dik was among those publishing tkhines under the pseudonym "Sarah Bas-Tovim." There is at least one irony to be noted here: Sore Bas-Tovim (who was long considered a legendary figure but is now believed to have lived in the eighteenth century) adopted a pen name (literally "daughter of good men" or, idiomatically, "women of good lineage") and cited a long patrilineage to establish herself as a member of a distinguished family of male rabbis, while, less than two hundred years later, scholarly Jewish men would take her name not only to hide their indulgence in "womanly pursuits" but also as a proud sign of their affiliation with a well-known woman writer. For the historical debate on Bas-Tovim, see Dr. Israel Tsinberg, Old Yiddish Literature , in The History of the Jewish Literature , vol. 6 (New York: Sklarsky Press, 1943), 286-289.

10. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, "Notes for My Literary Biography" [Hebrew], in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, 1958), 4.

11. Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 121-122.

12. See Isaac Meir Dik, "Introduction," in A Play vs. a Play [Yiddish] (Warsaw: n.p., 1861), 4, as quoted in David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 67. For a discussion of I. M. Dik's authorial addresses as well as a sociological analysis of his reading public, see Max Weinreich, "Isaac Meir Dik," in Studies in Yiddish Literary History [Yiddish] (Vilna: Tomer Press, 1928), 299-300.

13. Niger, "Yiddish Literature from the Mid-Eighteenth Century until 1942," in Universal Encyclopedia , vol. 3: Jews (New York: CYCO Press, 1942), 101, as quoted in Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 17.

14. Isaac Meir Dik, "Words of Righteousness" [Yiddish], (Vilna: Fin-Rozenkrantz, 1863), 41-42, as quoted in David Roskies, "Dik's Bibliography," in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fourth Collection , ed. Marvin Herzog, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dan Miron, and Ruth Wisse (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980), 119.

15. Isaac Meir Dik, The Women Shopkeepers, or Golde Mine the Abandoned Wife of Brod [Yiddish] (Vilna: Fin-Rozenkrantz, 1865), iii.

16. A. Y. Papirna, as quoted in Shmuel Niger, "Isaac Meir Dik: Biographical-Critical Notes" [Yiddish], in The Selected Works (New York: Congress for Jewish Cultures, 1954), viii.

17. Isaac Meir Dik, American Story [Yiddish], vol. 1 (Vilna: n.p., 1899); reprinted in Niger, "Yiddish Literature," 116-117.

18. This perception is not unique to the Yiddish Haskalah movement. Many Hebrew Haskalah writers also suggested that women might be the conduit to an overall Jewish acceptance of Enlightenment ideology through the instruction of Hebrew in an environment free of the "medievalism" of the traditional male educational institutions. Moreover, agitating against the oppression of women in traditional Judaism was an important goal or strategy for the Haskalah, in its Hebrew as well as its Yiddish manifestations.

19. For an analysis of female readership in the nineteenth century, and more specifically of the effects of the Enlightenment on Jewish women, see Iris Parush, "Readers in Cameo: Women Readers in Jewish Society in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe," Prooftexts 14, no. 1 (January 1994): 1-24.

20. I. J. Trunk, Poland: Memories and Images [Yiddish] (New York: Undzer Tsayt Press, 1947), 2:54. Quoted in Parush, "Readers in Cameo," 7.

21. Abramovitsh, "Notes toward My Literary Biography," 5.

22. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 90-94, 115-118, reads the creation of the Mendele persona as a function of the tension between these two sorts of concerns, the first demanding the writer's engagement with his audience and the second inviting his distance and self-concealment.

23. Weissler, "For Women and for Men Who Are Like Women," 11.

24. Yehuda Leyb Gordon, Songs of Wisdom, Parables and Narrative Poems [Hebrew], ed. Moshe Mahler and David Niger (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Press, 1965), 3.

25. Miron, A Traveler Disguised , 3.

26. This view of later generations' assessment of the Haskalah movement, particularly its Hebrew branch, is expounded in Michael Stanislawski's introduction to his biography of Gordon, entitled For Whom Do I Toil? (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). On page 6, Stanislawski notes that while most modern Jewish historians have been either Zionists or Socialists, and therefore unsympathetic with "Judah Leyb Gordon and other proponents of a gradual, liberal, sanguine transformation of the life and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe," the consensus that "Judah Leyb Gordon was simply too shortsighted or narrow-minded" may be correct.

27. Yehuda Leyb Gordon, "For Whom Do I Toil?" [Hebrew], in The Complete Works of Yehuda Leyb Gordon: Poetry (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, [1870] 1960), 27.

28. Gordon, Complete Works , 18.

29. Yehuda Leyb Gordon, "The Tip of the Yod" [1875, Hebrew], in The Complete Works , 129-139.

30. Yosef Klausner, A History of Modern Hebrew Literature [Hebrew], 6 vols. (Jerusalem, 1930-1960), 6:388.

31. Parush, "Readers in Cameo," 17.

32. Ibid., 16.

33. For a historical account of the suppression of Hebrew in the Soviet Union, see Yehoshua A. Gilboa, Fight for Survival: Hebrew Culture in the Soviet Union [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sifri'at hapo'alim, 1977).

34. "A Weak Position for a Strong Complaint," cartoon, Der groyser kundes , 30 August 1926, as reproduced in Never Say Die: A Thousand Years of Yiddish Life and Letters , ed. Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton Press, 1981), 421. Der groyser kundes: A zhornal far humor, vits, un satire (The Big Prankster: A Journal of Humor, Jest, and Satire), was edited by Jacob Marinoff and appeared from 1909 to 1928, first as a monthly, then as a biweekly, and ultimately every week. For a description of the publication history of Der groyser kundes , including its beginnings as a monthly entitled Der kibitzer , some of its frequent contributors, and its circulation (from 18,000 to a peak of 35,000 weekly), see Y. Chaykin, The Yiddish Press in America [Yiddish] (New York: Shklarski Press, 1946), 210-214.

35. Joshua A. Fishman, "Cartoons about Language: Hebrew, Yiddish, and the Visual Representation of Sociolinguistic Attitudes," in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile , ed. Lewis Glinert (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 154-155.

36. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1990), 23.

37. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 270-271.

38. While the cartoons about Hebrew and Yiddish and the term "mame-loshn" call on firmly embedded cultural myths, the polemical uses to which they put these myths are distinctively modern. In fact, the matronym "mame-loshn," for all its folksy flavor, appears in writing, according to Max Weinreich, "perhaps no earlier than the beginning of the twentieth century." The celebration of the historical associations between Yiddish and Jewish women, then, appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon, dating from roughly the same time that Yiddish was attaining status as a recognized language. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 271.

39. "No! It's a Legitimate Love Affair!" cartoon, Der groyser kundes , 5 February 1926, as reproduced in Fishman, Never Say Die , 133.

40. "Y. L. Peretz's Popular Novel," cartoon, Der groyser kundes , 16 June 1911, as reproduced in Fishman, Never Say Die , 468.

41. Der Yidisher Arbeter , 10 September 1908, as quoted in The First Yiddish Language Conference [Yiddish], (Vilna: YIVO Press, 1931), 205.

42. The First Yiddish Language Conference , 79.

43. Ibid.

44. Chayim Nachman Bialik, letter to Sholem Aleichem, in The Bialik Book [Hebrew], ed. Y. Fichman (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, 1934), 93.

45. Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 9-10, discusses the class background of Hebrew and Yiddish writers in some detail, concluding that these writers came from all rungs of society with one notable exception, the Socialist youth who gravitated toward Yiddish in their "programmatic renegotiation of the terms of collective existence" (p. 10).

46. Chaim Grade, My Mother's Sabbaths [Yiddish] (New York: CYCO Press, 1959), 14.

47. Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language , 277.

1. David Frishman, "Mendele: His Life and Work" [Yiddish], in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim: Criticism , vol. 10 (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, [1910] 1920), 56.

Abramovitsh's 1909 journey is also described in detail in The Mendele Book , ed. Nachman Mayzel (New York: Yidisher Kultur Farband, 1959), 421-427. This description includes newspaper reports and eyewitness reminiscences that corroborate Frishman's account.

2. Bal Machshoves [I. Elyashiv], "A Grandson of the Grandfather" [Yiddish], in Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim , 10:61-62.

3. Shmuel Niger, Mendele Mokher Sforim: His Life, His Social and Literary Achievements [Yiddish] (New York: Ikuf Press, 1970), 7. Shmuel Niger, The Bilingualism of Our Literature [Yiddish] (Detroit: Posy Shoulson Press, 1941), 84-85, develops the analogy between the "zogerke" (sometimes called firzogerin ) and early Yiddish literature, which functioned as a mediator between the Hebrew literary tradition and the common people. The reference to Abramovitsh as writing in a masculine Jewish tradition recurs in various critical texts, including Micha Yosef Berditshevski's entitling of Abramovitsh the "Maimonides of Yiddish literature" (Micha Yosef Berditshevski, "Mendele," in Yiddish Writings of a Distant Relative [Yiddish] [New York: Ikuf Press, 1951], 184-186); and Yankev Glatshteyn's discussion of Abramovitsh's pieces as gmorelakh , or talmudic pieces, in Yankev Glatshteyn, Basically Speaking [Yiddish] (New York: Matones Press, 1956), 11 ff.

4. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised , 30-32, describes how, in dedicating his first novel Stempenyu to Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem crowned his more established colleague the "zayde" or "grandfather" of Yiddish literature. As Miron points out, Sholem Aleichem was twenty-nine years old in 1888 when Stempenyu first appeared, while Abramovitsh was no more than fifty-two. In Miron's assessment, Sholem Aleichem's reference to Abramovitsh as a "grandfather" was a deliberately mythologizing construction, exaggerating Abramovitsh's age to camouflage

the shortness and scantiness of the tradition [Sholem Aleichem] was fabricating: By the adoption of Abramovitsh as a "grandfather," however, [Sholem Aleichem] gained for Yiddish literature much more than the dignity of old age; he supplied it with a living symbol of authority and legitimacy. The grandfather myth obviously involved myths of a grandson and of an inheritance, in short, of a dynasty. Once Abramovitsh was accepted as a reigning sire, it went without saying that only his legitimate progeny were to inherit the kingdom; moreover, it also became evident that a kingdom did exist; a kingdom which had a past and was looking toward a future. (pp. 30-31)

5. The Hebrew version is similar but makes no reference to Hebrew or Yiddish writers. Mendele never explains his inferiority to the writers, "acheynu hasofrim."

6. Abramovitsh, "Notes toward My Literary Biography," 4-5.

7. Elizabeth Kloty Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), notes the prevalence of guilt feelings in her subjects, Russian writers who turned to another language after leaving Russia: "Depending on who they are, on the circumstances of their relations to their various languages, and in what period of their careers they find themselves, bilingual writers may express their linguistic situation in terms of bigamy, adultery, or incest" (p. 89).

8. Abramovitsh, "Notes toward My Literary Biography," 4.

9. Miron, A Traveler Disguised , 14.

10. Abramovitsh, "Notes toward My Literary Biography," 4.

11. Gordon, Songs of Reason , 6.

12. Miron, A Traveler Disguised , 14.

13. Abramovitsh, "Notes toward My Literary Biography," 5.

14. Weinreich, "Isaac Meir Dik," esp. pp. 299-300.

15. Abramovitsh, The Little Person [Yiddish and Hebrew], ed. and trans. Shalom Luria (Haifa: Haifa University Press, [1864] 1984), 52. Luria reprints the earliest 1864 (Yiddish) edition of Dos kleyne mentshele with a Hebrew translation on facing pages.

16. Ibid., 118.

17. See, for example, Shmuel Niger, "Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh," in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim , vol. 1 (Warsaw: "Mendele" Press, 1927), 114, where he describes the different attitudes toward Hebrew and Yiddish among maskilic writers: "Even those who weighed every word in Hebrew, trying to 'purify the language' just chattered in Yiddish, half-German, Polish-Russian. Yiddish was the language of the marketplace, of the kitchen; there was no one with whom to have a gentlemanly conversation." Kitchen and food analogies for Yiddish are rather more widespread than the phrase "kitchen language" itself. Abramovitsh, for example, refers to Mendele as a writer/cook in the introduction to The Travels . Yankev Dinezon, Memories and Portraits [Yiddish] (Warsaw: Ahisefer, 1928), 184, relates a conversation in which Dinezon asked a bookseller why Abramovitsh had left his Yiddish work unsigned. The bookseller answered that signing his name to such ivre-taytsh books would be "like covering the borsht in the kitchen with your only shabes cloth, which you use for covering the challah.''

18. Abramovitsh, The Little Person , 52-53.

19. Ibid., 54-56.

20. Ibid., 92.

21. David Eynhorn, "Mendele at Work" [Yiddish], in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim , vol. 20 (Warsaw: Farlag Mendele, 1928), 59.

22. The Hebrew version of The Travels of Benjamin the Third appeared in 1896.

23. Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, "In the Days of the Noise" [Hebrew], in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, 1894), 413.

24. "In the Days of the Noise," 415.

25. "In the Days of the Noise," 415. The description here is a grotesque activation of the feminine metaphor Bialik would later use for the revival of Hebrew as living speech, chevlay leydah , language pangs.

26. Achad Ha'am [pseudonym for Asher Ginzberg], "The Language Conflict" [Hebrew], in At a Crossroads , vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, [1900] 1961), 301, writes that even women and the poor who knew no Hebrew always felt that Yiddish, the "borrowed tongue," was no more than "a tool for daily use" and "never felt any special love for it."

27. A complete bibliographical index of Abramovitsh's publications in both Hebrew and Yiddish can be found in Mendele Mokher Sforim: Bibliography of His Works and Letters for the Academic Edition , ed. Khone Shmeruk and Shmuel Werses (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Institute of Jewish Studies' Mendele Project, 1965). The Hebrew introduction of Of Bygone Days , entitled "Petichta alemendele moykher sforim," appeared in Pardes 2 (Odessa, 1894), 173-188. The Yiddish versions of chapters 4 and 5, which were the next installments to appear, followed throughout the first year of publication of the Yiddish periodical Der Yud (1-3, 5-8, 10, 14-15, 19).

28. While the original Hebrew version seems to indicate that both Reb Shloyme and his writer-guests are meant to be Hebrew writers (Reb Shloyme is referred to as hayisroeli , the Israelite), the later Yiddish version refers to Reb Shloyme as Shloyme Reb Chayims, as in the title, and to the writers as yidishe shraybers (i.e., Jewish/Yiddish writers). The English translation, which follows the Hebrew version of the preface, calls the group "Hebrew writers," although Ruth Wisse, ed., A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), describes in a footnote to this passage Abramovitsh's circle of friends, which included both Yiddish writers (Dubnov, for instance) and the central ideologue of Hebraism, Achad Ha'am (Asher Ginzberg).

29. Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim , vol. 5 [Yiddish], ed. A. Gurshteyn, M. Wiener, and Y. Nusyanov (Moscow: "Emes" Press, 1935), 63.

30. Abramovitsh, The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher Sforim [Hebrew], 256.

31. The irony in this critique of masculine literary culture, we should note, is different from describing women participating in a game as joining in the minyan (prayer quorum). The ironic glance at the scholars' self-importance is not shared by them, while the ordinary person may well share the still-subversive humor of describing a mixed-sex party as a defiance of the religious injunction to exclude women from a minyan.

32. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days , 268.

33. Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, Shloyme the Son of Chayim [Yiddish], in The Complete Works of Mendele Mokher-Sforim , vol. 18 (Warsaw: "Mendele" Press, 1936), 37.

34. Ibid., 36.

35. Ibid., 36-37.

36. Rabbi Meir of Rotenberg (d. 1293) questioned the validity of praying in any form other than directly to God. The folk practice of asking ancestors to intercede for the living continued despite these admonitions. See Herman Pollack, Jewish Folkways in Germanic Lands (1648-1806) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 49.

37. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days , 271.

38. See Weissler, "The Traditional Spirituality of Ashkenazic Women," in Jewish Spirituality II , ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad Press, 1989), 246, for a citation of the Sarah Bas-Tovim prayer.

1. Moshe Gitlin, "In Her Youth: Memories of a Fellow Townsman" [Hebrew], in By the Way , ed. H. Shabta'it [Tsipora Aharanovitsh] (Merchavia: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1960), 208-209.

2. Tsipora Aharonovitsh, "Materials toward a Biography" [Hebrew], in By the Way , 7.

3. Nurit Govrin, The First Half: Dvora Baron, Her Life and Works (1902-1921) [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Biaik, 1988), 28.

4. Shlomo Grodzanski, "Dvora Baron: The Narrated Life" [Hebrew], in Auto-biography of a Reader (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, [1956] 2965), 94.

5. Amalia Kahana-Carmon, "The Song of the Bats in Flights," trans. Naomi Sokoloff and Sonia Grober, in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature , ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidus Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York and Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, [1989] 1992), 237.

6. For a detailed example of this collective biography, reconstructing the social milieu and class background of the future Hebrew writer, the texts he might have covered in yeshiva, his linguistic acumen, etc., see Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose , 7-10.

7. Alan Mintz, "Banished from Their Father's Table": Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 4.

8. Govrin, The First Half , 204.

9. Gershon Shaked, Hebrew Fiction 1880-1970: 1. In the Diaspora [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, 1978), 167.

10. Dvora Baron, "Three Sisters" [Hebrew], Hamelits 29 (1903), reprinted in Govrin, The First Half , 360-363.

11. Govrin, The First Half , 101.

12. Dvora Baron, "In the Beginning" [Hebrew], in Stories (Tel Aviv: Davar, 1927).

13. Ibid., 7.

14. Ibid., 8.

15. Ibid., 7.

16. "The First Day" [Hebrew] appeared in Stories as the third story of the collection, after "In the Beginning" and "Burial."

17. Dvora Baron, "The First Day," in Stories , 30.

18. Ibid., 27.

19. Critics, for instance, often note the irony implicit in Tevye's "mistranslations" of Hebrew texts. Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish , 35, sees the Hebrew-Yiddish ironic relationship as a general characteristic of their intertextual connection.

20. Dvora Baron, "Family" [Hebrew], in What Once Was (Tel Aviv: Davar Press, 1939), 26.

21. Ibid. The Hebrew highlights Batya's appropriation of masculine power in the term mezuyenet (armed), the root of which is zayin —weapon.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 34.

24. Ibid., 31.

25. Ibid., 34.

26. Ibid.

27. Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? 125.

28. Gordon, Songs of Thought, Parables, Ballads , 167-168.

29. Dvora Baron, "Agunah" [Hebrew], in Stories .

30. Ibid., 221.

31. "A time is coming—declares my Lord God—when I will send a famine upon the land: not a hunger for bread or a thirst for water, but for hearing the words of the Lord" (Amos 8:11). Amos's prophecy is among the best known of the comparisons of bread and "the words of the Lord."

32. "Agunah," 224.

33. Sh. Niger, "Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader," 124, describes the Yiddish women's Bible, the Tsenerene , as the "agadah" (the homiletic or narrative material) to the traditional texts' "halakha" (the legal material).

34. This is not to suggest that women's texts (i.e., religious books written either by or for women) were free of allegoric commentary. Certainly, the Tsenerene is a pastiche of midrashic quotation. Moreover, masculine textual practice often overlapped with and contributed to the familiar women's Bibles and tkhines. Nevertheless, femininely marked textual hermeneutics tended to keep closer to the literal level of the narrative, giving additional details about situations and characters or supplying the moral to be learned from these situations (especially as they concern women) rather than suggesting allegorical interpretations.

35. Sh. Y. Agnon, "Agunot" [Hebrew] (1908), 100.

36. Marc Bernstein, in an unpublished paper presented at the NAPH conference, 1 June 1992, entitled "Midrash and Marginality: The 'Agunot' of Dvora Baron and S. Y. Agnon," compares the two stories in the following way:

Baron rejects [Agnon's] universalization that for her trivializes and appropriates the specific experience of female marginality. For Baron, within the exile of the Jewish people, there is a further internal exile of women that reflects the inequity of the power relationship between the sexes. Aginut and exile have nothing to do with romantic notions of potential mates wandering in search of each other; instead, these conditions are inscribed in the social position of women.

37. Dvora Baron, "Burial" [Hebrew], Hachaver (13-15 March 1908), reprinted in Govrin, The First Half , 426.

38. Govrin, The First Half , 11.

39. By the Way , 9-10.

40. Zrubavel, "With Mendele Moykher Sforim," in Leaves of Life [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Perets Press, 1960), 228-232. Reprinted in The Mendele Book [Yiddish], 427, and excerpted in Govrin, The First Half , 77.

41. "Material toward a Literary Biograph," 7.

42. In By the Way , 209-222, Barukh Ben-Yehuda, a participant in the Zionist, Hebrew-speaking youth group Baron led in Mariampol in 1907, describes the overheated political atmosphere of the town and the divisions between the Yiddish-speaking Bundists and the smaller group determined to learn Hebrew and realize the Zionist dream. Other sources confirm the typicality of this description.

43. "Kadisha" appeared in Hachaver: A Daily Newspaper for Youth and All Jewish People , 1:72 (Vilna, 1908); "Kaddish" in Der Yidisher Arbeter: A Weekly , 7:15 (Lvov, 1910); "Sister" in Ha'olam , 4:31 (Vilna, 1910); "Burial" in Hachaver , 1:95 (Vilna, 1908); "An Only Daughter" in Ney yor: A Literary Collection for the Coming Holidays (New York, 1909); the Hebrew "Grandma Henya" in Ha'olam , 3:33 (Vilna, 1909); and the Yiddish "Grandma Henya" in Yugend: A Literary Collection , no. 1 (Stanislavy, 1910). For this and all other publication information, see the bibliographical notes in Govrin, The First Half , 313-325.

44. Govrin, The First Half , 510.

45. Ibid., 654.

46. Ibid., 466.

47. Ibid., 459.

48. Ibid., 467.

49. Ibid., 660.

50. "Kadish," in Govrin, The First Half , 669.

51. "Kadisha," in Govrin, The First Half , 419.

1. See Jack Fellman, The Revival of a Classical Tongue: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Modern Hebrew Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1973). Although Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose , does not explicitly discuss Ben-Yehuda's role in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, his study of the rise of Hebrew prose presents various ways in which Hebrew prose discovered or invented Hebrew style, idiom, and vocabulary for its own purposes—before, during, and after Ben-Yehuda's work. Alter traces these capacities to an educational system that could provide the basic tools for the creation of a realism "without vernacular," but that helped lay the groundwork for the vernacular revival.

2. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 84.

3. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment [Hebrew], ed. Re'uven Sivan (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978), 129-130.

4. Ibid., 9-10.

5. Of course, the phrase "the father of the Hebrew revival" is the English rather than the Hebrew term for Ben-Yehuda's role in reviving Hebrew. In Hebrew, he is called by the quasi-divine name of "mechaye hasafah," the "reviver" of the language. Nevertheless, references to Ben-Yehuda's paternal role are ubiquitous in his own and in other writings on his contribution to the revival.

6. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment , 83.

7. Ibid., 26.

8. Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founder and Sons (Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 97. Elon's account draws from Ben-Yehuda's memoirs as well as those of his friends and acquaintances. A synopsis of these narratives can be found in Fellman, The Revival , 35-38.

9. Elon, The Israelis , 110.

10. Chemda Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yehuda: His Life and Project [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ben-Yehuda Press, 1940), 13. The story is also recounted in Robert St.John, Tongue of the Prophets: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (New York: Doubleday, 1952), 94. St.-John derives his material from English translations of Eliezer and Chemda Ben-Yehuda's memoirs as well as from personal interviews with surviving members of the Ben-Yehuda family, including Chemda.

11. Chemda Ben-Yehuda, Ben-Yehuda , 12.

12. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment , 131.

13. Ibid., 57.

14. Fellman, The Revival , 58. Fellman reports Professor Rivlin's impressions of the Ben-Yehuda household, as relayed in a personal conversation between Rivlin and Fellman.

15. Itamar Ben-Avi, With the Dawn of Our Homeland: Memoirs of the First Hebrew Child [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Organization for the Publication of the Writings of Itamar Ben-Avi, 1961), 11.

16. Itamar Ben-Avi, Dawn of Our Homeland , 14.

17. Avrom Golomb, "People and Language: Jewish Nationality and Yiddish Language" [Yiddish], in Yearbook of the New Jewish School in Mexico, I. L. Perets (1962). Reprinted in Never Say Die , 152.

18. Itamar Ben-Avi, "The Hebrew Tongue on Women's Lips," 1928, pamphlet (doc. A 43/104, Central Zionist Archives), 1.

19. For a collection of essays on women's contributions to the settling of Palestine, the Hebrew revival, and the labor movement, see Deborah S. Bernstein, ed., Pioneers and Homemakers: Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

20. For a discussion of Chemda Ben-Yehuda's life and work, see Nurit Govrin, Honey from a Rock [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Misrad habitachon, 1989), 45-52.

21. Nechama Feinstein-Pukhachevski, "74 Questions of the Daughters" [1889], in Govrin, The First Half , 132-133.

22. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, "On Women and Hebrew" [Hebrew]; reprinted in Govrin, Honey from a Rock , 53.

23. It was not until the twenties that a generation of Hebrew-speaking women arose who had not encountered Hebrew from the wrong side of the mechitsa, as it were, but who had learned it as another language. The women poets of the Third Aliya were, in fact, successful at turning the Hebrew literary idiom into the flexible expressive instrument, outside of what Alter has called the "echo chamber" of Hebrew literary tradition. Poets like Esther Raab, arguably the first native Hebrew poet, and Rachel, who wrote a Hebrew as simple and distilled as the Russian Acmeist poets who were her influences, enacted the Hebrew modernist revolution Shlonsky called for but was unable to fully bring to fruition in his own work (his manifesto against allusion is, perhaps with conscious irony, itself a "tissue of quotations"), nor did he truly recognize it when he saw it. Nevertheless, the new generation of Hebrew women poets was never accepted as fully into the canon as the Yiddish women poets who arose during the same decade. See Michael Gluzman, "Suppressed Modernisms: Marginality, Politics, Canon Formation" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 37-100.

24. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar, The Person as He-She Was [Hebrew], ed. Michal Hagiti (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, [1962] 1989), quoted from a 1931 entry in Katznelson-Shazar's diary, pp. 329-330.

25. Y. Avineri, "On Ze'ev Jabotinsky," in Ze'ev Jabotinsky: On the Twentieth Anniversary of His Death [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hamashbir Hamercazi Press, 1961), 316-328.

26. Zev Jabotinsky [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Hebrew Language Academy, 1970), 7.

27. Zrubavel, "We Accuse and Demand Responsibility" [Yiddish], in Journal of the League for the Rights of Yiddish in the Land of Israel (1936), 17-18, quoted in Never Say Die , 297-312. Zrubavel, a left-wing Labor Zionist who continued to champion Yiddish while living in Palestine, fought this and other similar anti-Yiddish policies.

28. Alter Druyanov, The Book of Jokes and Witticisms [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Dvir Press, [1945] 1991), joke no. 2663.

29. Ben-Yehuda, The Dream and Its Fulfillment , 205.

30. Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution , 163.

31. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the letter of 6 Adar 1927, Jabotinsky's Letters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Merkaz Press, 1972).

32. For an analysis of Israeli Hebrew speech patterns, see Tamar Katriel, Talking Straight: Dugri Speech in Israeli Sabra Culture (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

33. Itamar Even-Zohar quotes from Druyanov's collection Jokes and Witticisms (Hebrew), in "Language Conflict and National Identity," in Nationalism and Modernity: A Mediterranean Perspective , ed. Joseph Alpher (Haifa: University of Haifa, 1986), 132-132.

34. Yehoash, Ketuvim (1 May 1929).

35. Even-Zohar, "Language Conflict and National Identity," 132.

36. Yeshurun Keshet, "The Works of Dvora Baron" [Hebrew], in Dvora Baron: A Selection of Critical Essays on Her Work , ed. Ada Pagis (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Press, 1974), 120.

37. This incident is discussed in Arye Pilovski, Between Yes and No: Yiddish and Yiddish Literature in Erets-Israel, 1907-1948 [Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: World Council for Yiddish and Jewish Culture, 1986), 213-215.

38. Pilovski, Between Yes and No , 214, cites a letter written originally to the Hebrew daily Do'ar hayom and reprinted in the Yiddish journal Literarishe bleter in which L. Chayn-Shimoni described the incident as a "pogrom."

39. Cited in Pilovski, Between Yes and No , 213.

40. Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 19.

41. Max Nordau, "Muskeljudentum," Juedische Turnzeitung (June 1903), reprinted as "Muscular Judaism," trans. J. Hessing, in The Jew in the Modern World , ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 435.

42. Elon, The Israelis , 120.

43. liana Pardes, "The Poetic Strength of a Matronym," in Gender and Text in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature , ed. Naomi B. Sokoloff, Anne Lapidos Lerner, and Anita Norich (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 42-42.

44. For more on Bat-Chama, see Dan Miron's Founding Mothers, Stepsisters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, 1991), 13, 38-42.

45. Working Women's Word [Hebrew], ed. Rachel Katznelson-Shazar (TelAviv: Mo'etset hapo'alot, 1930), i-iii.

46. Chayim Nagid, "An Interview with the Poet Avot Yeshurun" [Hebrew], Yediyot Achronot (11 October 1974).

47. Isaac Leyb Peretz, "Introductory Remarks" [Yiddish], in The First Yiddish Language Conference (Vilna, 1931), 66.

48. Sholem Ash, "Resolution" [Yiddish], in The First Yiddish Language Conference , 82.

49. Katznelson-Shazar, "Language Wanderings," 192. This passage does not appear in the Yiddish translation.

50. Ibid., 192-193.

51. Amos Elon, Herzl (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), 245.

52. Yankev Glatshteyn, "There Where the Cedars" [Yiddish], in Credos (New York: Verlag Yiddish Leben, 1929), 72.

53. Janet Hadda, Yankev Glatshteyn (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 140-141.

54. Achad Ha'am, "The Way of the Spirit" [Hebrew], At a Crossroad , vol. 2 (Dvir: Tel Aviv, [1898] 1961), 111.

55. "A Reception for Ash and Hirshbein" [Hebrew], Ketuvim (18 May 1927), 1.

56. Avraham Shlonsky, "On 'Peace'" [Hebrew], Ketuvim (18 May 1927), 1.

57. See the chapter entitled "Zionism as an Erotic Revolution," in David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

58. Avraham Shlonsky, "Freshness" [Hebrew] (1923), reprinted in The Successors of Symbolism in Poetry , ed. Benjamin Hrushovski (Jerusalem: Akademon, 1973), 153.

59. Avraham Shlonsky, "Poesy" [Hebrew], "Hump of the World" (1922), reprinted in The Successors of Symbolism in Poetry , 154.

60. Zohar Shavit, Literary Life in Palestine: 1910-1933 [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hame'uchad Press, 1982), 176-177.

61. Uri-Tsvi Greenberg, The Complete Works [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 82.

62. Ibid., 85.

63. Uri-Tsvi Greenberg, To the Ninety Nine [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sadan Press, 1928), 15.

64. Ibid., 20.

65. Katznelson-Shazar, "Language Wanderings," 235-236.