Читать книгу The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century - Wiener Leo - Страница 3

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A SUGGESTION to write the present book reached me in the spring of 1898. At that time my library contained several hundreds of volumes of the best Judeo-German (Yiddish) literature, which had been brought together by dint of continued attention and, frequently, by mere chance, for the transitoriness of its works, the absence of any and all bibliographies, the almost absolute absence of a guide into its literature, and the whimsicalness of its book trade made a systematic selection of such a library a difficult problem to solve. Not satisfied with the meagre details which could be gleaned from internal testimonies in the works of the Judeo-German writers, I resolved to visit the Slavic countries for the sake of gathering data, both literary and biographical, from which anything like a trustworthy history of its literature could be constructed. A recital of my journey will serve as a means of orientation to the future investigator in this or related fields, and will at the same time indicate my obligations to the men and the books that made my sketch possible.

From Liverpool, my place of landing, I proceeded at once to Oxford, where I familiarized myself with the superb Oppenheim collection of Judeo-German books of the older period, stored in the Bodleian Library; it does not contain, however, anything bearing on the nineteenth century. In London the British Museum furnished me with a few modern works which are now difficult to procure, especially the periodical Kolmewasser and Warschauer Jüdische Zeitung. Unfortunately my time was limited, and I was unable to make thorough bibliographical notes from these rare publications; besides, I then hoped to be able to discover sets of them in Russia. In this I was disappointed—hence the meagreness of my references to them. The Rosenthaliana in Amsterdam and the Imperial Library in Berlin added nothing material to my information. Warsaw was my first objective point as regards facts and books. The latter I obtained in large numbers by rummaging the bookstores of Scheinfinkel and Morgenstern. In a dark and damp cellar, in which Morgenstern kept part of his store, many rare books were picked up. In Warsaw I received many valuable data from Perez, Dienesohn, Spektor, Freid, Levinsohn, both as to the activity which they themselves have developed and as to what they knew of some of their confrères. In Bialystok I called on the venerable poet, Gottlober; he is very advanced in years, being above ninety, is blind, and no longer in possession of his mental faculties, but his daughter gave me some interesting information about her father. Wilna presented nothing noteworthy, except that in a store a few early prints were found.

In St. Petersburg I had hoped to spend usefully a week investigating the rich collections of Judeo-German in the Asiatic Museum and the Imperial Library. The museum was, however, closed for the summer, and the restrictions placed on the investigator in the library made it impossible to inspect even one-tenth of the three or four thousand books contained there. When about to abandon that part of my work the assistant librarian, Professor Harkavy, under whose charge the collection is, most generously presented me with one thousand volumes out of his own private library. In Kiev I had a long conference with S. Rabinowitsch and with A. Schulmann; the latter informed me that he is now at work on a history of Judeo-German literature previous to the nineteenth century; the specimen of his work which he published a few years ago in the Jüdische Volksbibliothēk gives hope that it will entirely supersede the feeble productions of M. Grünbaum. In Odessa I learned many important facts from conversations with S. J. Abramowitsch, J. J. Linetzki, J. J. Lerner, P. Samostschin, and depleted the bookstores, especially that of Rivkin, of their rarer books. Jassy in Roumania and Lemberg in Galicia offered little of interest, but in Cracow Faust's bookstore furnished some needed data by its excellent choice of modern works.

Thus I succeeded in seeing nearly all the living writers of any note, and in purchasing or inspecting books in all the larger stores and libraries that contained such material. In spite of all that, the present work is of necessity fragmentary; it is to be hoped that by coöperation of several men it will be possible to save whatever matter there may still be in existence from oblivion ere it be too late. The greatest difficulty I encountered in the pursuit of my work was the identification of pseudonyms and the settlement of bibliographical data. As many of the first as could be ascertained, in one way or other, are given in an appendix; but the bibliography has remained quite imperfect in spite of my efforts to get at facts. A complete bibliography can probably never be written, on account of the peculiar conditions prevailing in the Imperial Library, from which by theft and otherwise many books have disappeared; but even under these conditions it would not be a hard matter to furnish four or five thousand names of works for this century. This task must be left to some one resident in St. Petersburg who can get access to the libraries.

This history being intended for the general public, and not for the linguistic scholar, there was no choice left for the transliteration of Judeo-German words but to give it in the modified orthography of the German language; for uniformity's sake such words occurring in the body of the English text are left in their German form. All Hebrew and Slavic words are given phonetically as heard in the mouths of Lithuanian Jews; that dialect was chosen as being least distant from the literary German; for the same reason the texts in the Chrestomathy are normalized in the same variety of the vernacular. The consonants are read as in German, and ž is like French j. The vowels are nearly all short, so that ü, ie, i are equal to German i; similarly ä, ö, eh, ee are like German short e. The German long e is represented by ē, oe, ae, and in Slavic and Hebrew words also by ee. Ei and eu are pronounced like German ei in mein, while ēi is equal to German ee; ā and o are German short o; au sounds more like German ou, and äu and ō resemble German öi; aü is equal to German ai.

The collection of data on the writers in America has been even more difficult than in Russia, and has been crowned with less success. Most of the periodicals published here have been of an ephemeral nature, and the newspapers, of which there have been more than forty at one time or other, can no longer be procured; and yet they have contained the bulk of the literary productions written in this country. It is to be hoped that those who have been active in creating a Judeo-German literature will set about to write down their reminiscences from which at a later day a just picture may be given of the ferment which preceded the absorption of the Russian Jews by the American nation.

The purpose of this work will be attained if it throws some light on the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.

Cambridge, Mass.,

December, 1898.