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Violating the Canon: Reading Der Nister with Vasilii Grossman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Harriet Murav
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Abstract

'Violating the Canon” makes the case for an alternative Jewish and literary space in the context of Soviet war literature by comparing works by Vasilii Grossman, Il'ia Erenburg, and the Yiddish author Der Nister. In this article, Harriet Murav distinguishes the question of literary value from the question of identity and separates out the problem of determining the typicality or representativeness of a work from the problem of engaging the complexity of its meanings. Jewish literature from the Soviet Union ought to be recovered from the constraints that subordinate it to Cold War-era sociological and political constraints. Mikhail Bakhtin, Werner Sollors, and Michael Warner provide approaches that allow access to more fluid and open-ended readings.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 642 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

I am grateful to the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois, to thejohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for having supported the larger study of Jewish literature in the Soviet Union from which this is drawn, to the two anonymous readers at Slavic Review, whose comments helped me improve this article, to the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for its support of the 2006 summer workshop in Russian-Jewish Studies, and to its participants, to whom I presented an earlier version of this work.

1. For a discussion of the problem of the neglect of literature written in “minor” languages, see Kundera, Milan, “Die Weltliteratur,” The New Yorker (8 January 2007): 33–34 Google Scholar.

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3. See, for example, Boyarin and Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences; Nochlin, Linda and Garb, Tamar, eds., The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (London, 1996)Google Scholar, which does include a discussion of the art of El Lissitzky; and Boyarin, Daniel, Itzkovitz, Daniel, and Pellegrini, Ann, eds., Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

4. See Estraikh, Gennady, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, 2005)Google Scholar; Krutikov, Mikhail, “Soviet Yiddish Literature of the 1960s-1980s and Its Russian Translations,” in Estraikh, Gennady and Krutikov, Mikhail, eds., Yiddish in the Contemporary World: Paper of the First Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish (Oxford, 1999), 72–91 Google Scholar; Shneer, David, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Eng., 2004)Google Scholar; Shternshis, Anna, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Bloomington, 2006)Google Scholar; Veidlinger, Jeffrey, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar.

5. See Grossman, Vasilii, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, trans. Beevor, Antony and Vinogradova, Liuba (London, 2005)Google Scholar. For a study of Grossman that offers a far-ranging account of his works and their time, see Garrard, John and Garrard, Carol, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. Robert Chandler's revised translation of Life and Fate holds out the hope that this author will receive more attention from literary scholars: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York, 2006).

6. See Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford, 2003), 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Burton's work, in contrast, emphasizes the critical historiographic role that narrative fiction and memoir literature can play in enlarging the sphere of what counts as archival material.

7. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin, 1981), 315 Google Scholar.

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11. Warner, , “Publics and Counterpublics,” 52 Google Scholar.

12. For discussions of Jewish literature, see, for example, Wirth-Nesher, Hannah, ed., What Is Jewish Literature? (Philadelphia, 1994)Google Scholar; Wisse, Ruth R., The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; and Kramer, Michael, “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,” Prooftexts 21, no. 3 (2001): 287–321 Google Scholar.

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14. Litvakov, Moshe, “Afn literarishn avnt vegn Markishes tsvey naye verk,” Der ernes, 30 May 1929 Google Scholar.

15. For more on Litvakov, see Estraikh, , In Harness, 57, 130, 69Google Scholar. The end of the 1920s also saw a campaign against Der Nister and the coining of a term that was meant to be pejorative, nisterizm, as a shorthand for the author's symbolist style. Bechtel, Delphine, Der Nister's Work, 1907-1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (New York, 1990), 18–21 Google Scholar

16. Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Nahman's importance is especially evident in The Family Mashber, in which the hero speaks of die renewal of die material world and human flesh through the teachings of the Hasidic leader. The second volume is dedicated to the author's daughter, who died during the siege of Leningrad. For an overview of Der Nister, see Shmeruk, Khone, ed., A shpigl oyfa shteyn (Jerusalem, 1964), 737-41Google Scholar. For an analysis of Der Nister's early symbolist writing, see Bechtel, Der Nister's Work, 1907-1929. For an essay that includes some discussion of Nister's war stories, see Sholom Cholawski, “The Holocaust and the Armed Struggle in Belorussia as Reflected in Soviet Literature and Works by Emigres in the West,“ in Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy, 214-29. One of Der Nister's stories about the German destruction of the Jews, “Meyer Landshaft,” appears in English in Joachim Neugroschel, The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (New York, 1989), 551-68

18. Nister, Der, “Heshl Ansheles (Vegn eynem a fal inem itstikin okupirtn Poyln),” in Heymland: Literarisher zamlbukh (Moscow, 1943), 33 Google Scholar.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. ibid.

22. Ibid., 37.

23. The article is also included in Shmeruk, , ed., A shpigl oyfa shteyn, 218-19Google Scholar.

24. Erenberg, Il'ia, “Opravdanie nenavisti,” Voina (Moscow, 1943), 6 Google Scholar. Originally published in Krasnaia zvezda, 1942.

25. Ibid., 7.

26. Ibid., 8.

27. Nister, Der, “Has,” Eynikayt, 29 June 1944, 3 Google Scholar.

28. Ibid.

29. See Nister, Der, “Vidervuks,” Yidishe kultur, nos. 6-7 (1946)Google Scholar, and Nister, Der, Vidervuks (Moscow, 1969)Google Scholar. The 1969 edition is abbreviated. Also translated as “New Growth,“ the tide looks back to a Yiddish literary movement of 1922 of the same name. See Estraikh, , In Harness, 111-12Google Scholar.

30. Nister, , ‘Vidervuks,” 46 Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 45.

32. Ibid., 46.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 46-47.

35. Lukasz Hirzowicz writes that the novel “includes considerable material on the Jews and the Holocaust.” Hirzowicz, Lukasz, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mirror,” in Dobroszycki, and Gurock, , eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 48 Google Scholar.

36. Grossman, Vasilii, Zhizn’ i sud'ba, ed. Markish, Shimon and Etkind, E. G. (Lausanne, 1980), 11 Google Scholar.

37. Ibid., 40.

38. Cited in Redlich, Shimon, ed., War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committeein the USSR (Oxford, 1995), 181-82Google Scholar.

39. “Bud’ ty prokliat, i semia tvoe, i dom tvoi, i put’ tvoi.” Erenburg, Il'ia, Buria (Moscow, 1960), 239 Google Scholar.

40. See, for example, Nakhimovsky's argument that “Grossman does not ask whether it was worthwhile for a Jew to freely identify with other Jews, to continue or reestablish a group identity not totally bound up with the Holocaust or Soviet state anti-Semitism.” She finds that for Grossman “beyond the Holocaust there is very little.” Nakhimovsky, Alice Stone, Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity: Jabotinsky, Babel, Grossman, Galich, Roziner, Markish (Baltimore, 1992), 151 Google Scholar. Shimon Markish, writing about Life and Fate, says that he would not call Grossman a Russian Jewish writer, because the novel is not organized around Jewish themes and because for Grossman there is nothing positive about being Jewish; for Grossman, ‘Judaism is not a civilization.” Markish prefers to describe him as “a Russian writer with a Jewish fate.” Shimon Markish, Russian Jewish Literature after the Second World War and before Perestroika; available from http://www.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/01_markish.pdf (last consulted 23 May 2008).

41. Grossman, Vasilii, Za pravoe delo (Moscow, 1956), 152 Google Scholar.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 10.

44. Simonov, Konstantin, Zhivye i mertvye (Moscow, 1960), 27 Google Scholar.

45. Nakhimovsky, , Russian-Jewish Literature and Identity, 128 Google Scholar.

46. Grossman, , Za pravoe delo, 259 Google Scholar.

47. The literary use of a blank space is significant in Holocaust literature. For a discussion of the ellipsis in Primo Levi, see Druker, Jonathan, “The Shadowed Violence of Culture: Fascism and the Figure of Ulysses in Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz,” Clio 33, no. 2 (2004): 143-52Google Scholar. Aharon Appelfeld uses a blank page between the two books of his novel The Age of Wonders to signify the Holocaust. See Schwartz, Yigal, Aharon Appelfeld: From Individual Lament to Tribal Eternity, trans. Green, Jeffrey M. (Hanover, 2001)Google Scholar.

48. Shimon Markish discusses one such instance in his essay on Grossman. Markish points out that the cadences of Grossman's “Ukraine without Jews,” particularly in die repetition of the phrase “cruelly killed” (zlodeiski ubit), calls to mind Jeremiah, the Book of Job, and the Jewish prayerbook. Markish, Shimon, “Primer Vasilia Grossmana,” in Grossman, Vasilii, Na evreiskie temy (Jerusalem, 1985), 391 Google Scholar. There is another exception, which Markish does not discuss, found in Grossman's essay “The Murder of Jews in Berdichev,“ which was written for The Black Book, ed. Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, trans. John Glad and James S. Levine (New York, 1981). Grossman's language calls to mind the curses in Deuteronomy: “your life shall hang in doubt before you; night and day you shall be in dread, and have no assurance of your life” (Deut. 28:66).

49. Grossman, , Za pravoe delo, 479 Google Scholar.

50. Erenburg, , “Opravdanie nenavisti,” 142 Google Scholar.