The Reception of Leonid Andreev in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature[1]

At the beginning of the twentieth century Jewish literature was being written in both Hebrew and Yiddish, sometimes by the same writer. This was the heyday of Yiddish journalism, theater and literature; it was no longer a literature for the masses, because the Jewish intelligentsia was reading and writing in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Were Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, then, identical twin sisters? Did they express the same tastes, the same preferences, and the same poetics?  Differences in taste regarding the Russian writer Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) can tell us about their different characters.

Although both Yiddish and Hebrew writers and readers emphasized national independence, Russian literature was still their main influence and source of literary models. However, in the first decade of the twentieth century even mentioning the Russian influence on either Hebrew or Yiddish literature was a great offense. At that time every poet wanted to be a national poet (משורר לאומי , narodny poet in Russian), a title which in 1902 was first granted to Haim Nahman Bialik by Yosef Klauzner.[1] During the nineteenth^-century this important title was the only possible synonym of “poet laureate” in Russia.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the attitude of Jewish writers and critics to national poetry was changing: the criteria for good literature became more modernist. Not national, but universal, individual, and mystical experiences came in vogue, together with the early modernism.  In spite of the fact that this very turn was influenced by Russian early modernism, also known as The Silver Age, now, even more than before, Russian influence was an accusation leveled at bad Jewish literature.

 This is one of the reasons why research about the Russian influences on modern Jewish literature and thought has been neglected for years.[2] Literary criticism tended to assume the influence of the major Russian writers: Gogol (on S. Y Abramovitsh, “Mendele Moykher Sforim”), Dostoevsky (on Y. H. Brenner), Chekhov (on Uri Nissan Gnessin).  For reasons that will be discussed later, however, the interest of the Jewish intelligentsia in European literature sometimes focused on writers whose name is almost forgotten today.

No less than 27 books and booklets of Andreev’s stories and dramas in Yiddish translation were published in Warsaw, Minsk, Vilna, Kiev, New York and London between 1906 and 1924.[3] During the four-year period between 1906 and 1910, ten of Andreev’s works, including four dramas, appeared in Yiddish.[4] Six titles were published during the next decade, including Andreev’s collected works in 4 volumes, consisting of 27 stories and 4 dramas.[5] Eleven additional titles were published in the first half of the 1920s.[6] This list does not include publications in journals and periodicals.[7] Gorky's memoirs on Andreev were also published in Yiddish translation both in Literarishe Bleter and in Haynt.[8]

The translators include the leading Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshtein (1889-1951), Sara Reyzn (1885-1974, Avraham and Zalman Reyzn’s sister), Moyshe Katz (1885-1960), who translated the four-volume collection of Andreev's stories. Surprisingly, another translator was the well-known Hebrew writer Yosef Hayyim Brenner (1881-1921): while he was in London, translated Andreev’s story “Marselieza” into Yiddish; it was published in Warsaw in 1907. This is Brenner’s only translation from Russian into Yiddish, though he did write essays in Yiddish and also translated Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment into Hebrew.

The list of translations includes quite a few of Andreev's plays. In certain instances the play was translated for a specific theatrical performance.[9] In fact, many of Andreev’s dramas were performed in Yiddish in Vilna, Kovno, Riga, Kiev, Warsaw, Lodge, and New York. Already in 1907 Andreev’s play “Life of a Man” was performed by Ester Kaminska’s “Fareynikte truppe.” In 1910 Andreev’s “Anatheema” and “The Days of Our Life” were performed in New York. Maurice Schwarz’s Yiddish Art Theater in New York performed Andreev’s “Believe Your Wife” in 1916. Other plays were performed in Lodz (1918), Kiev (1920), Warsaw (1923, 1926), Riga (late 1920s), and Kaunas (Kovno, early 1930s).[10] Several of Andreev’s stories, especially “The Seven that Were Hanged,” a story about anti-Czarist terrorists in prison waiting for their deaths, were adapted for the theater.

Yiddish journalism reviewed Andreev’s plays on Jewish themes even before they were performed in Yiddish, and sometimes even before they were performed in Russian. Andreev’s first play “To the Stars” was first published in 1906 in Znanie edited by Gorky. In the same year it was first performed in Vienna and in May 1907 it was first performed in Russia. In September 6 (19) 1906 the Vilna Folkstsaytung published an article under the title “Vegn Leonid Andreev's drame ‘Tsu di Shtern,’” signed B. Isaak (Pseudonym of Israel Sosses). Without mentioning where he had seen the play, the writer described in detail the plot of this symbolistic play, emphasizing the place of the positive Jewish character and the importance of the play's political message.

Andreev’s play “The Days of Our Life” was first published in 1908 in the Russian Znanie, and then it was performed as a play in St. Petersburg on November 6 1908 and in the “Alexandrina” theater in Warsaw at the beginning of 1909. In January 1909 the monthly Unzer Leben published a long review of “The Days of Our Life” signed ב-ן.[11] The writer says that “the play is absorbed with that same skepticism which is well know to us from Andreev’s ‘V Tumane’ ("In the Mist,” first published in 1902). He points out Andreev’s influence on the Jewish-Russian writer Yushkevich, especially on his play “V Gorode” (In the City). The 1910 performance of “Anafema” in Berlin received a 5 page review in the Yiddish monthly Tsukunft, where the writer explained Andreev’s philosophy and his views on the Jewish problem. He liked Andreev’s view of the Jewish hero as “The Great Cosmopolitan,” and praised the “realistic impression in spite of the play’s symbolistic form.”[12] Enthusiastic reviews followed the performances of Andreev’s plays by the “Vilner Truppe,” also in Warsaw and Chernovitz. Such reviews from 1918, 1919, 1923, 1926 and 1927 show that Andreev’s plays were a permanent part of the group’s repertoire. The praises of the leading critic Nachman Mayzel are among the signs of Andreev's canonization in the modern Yiddish context..[13] One of the critics found similarities between the hero of Andreev’s “The One He Who Gets Slapped”and Khonen, the hero of S. Anski’s classic Yiddish play “Der dibek”[14]

Less enthusiastic was the critic Ber Karlinski (who signed his reviews by the Lithuanian name B. Karlinius). He wrote that the unprofessional and vulgar performance of Andreev by the Vilner Truppe, as well as the bad translation into Yiddish, do not do justice to Andreev’s “The Heir” of Edgar Poe and Dostoevsky.”[15] He also criticizes the bad translation and the vulgar performance.

Andreev was a constant theme in Yiddish journalism during the 1920s, where we can find not only many articles on theater performances (six in 1926, three of which are reviews of Andreev’s “Der gedank,” as directed by Zigmunt Turkov), but also long monographic essays and biographical notes devoted to Andreev. Gorky's memoirs on Andreev in Yiddish translation appeared in book form in 1928.[16]

Yiddish literary critics and scholars found traces of Andreev’s influence in Yiddish literature: Nachman Mayzel speaks of Andreev’s influence on Sholem Asch and Dovid Bergelson, while Zalman Reyzn found Andreev in Peretz Hirshbein’s dramas.[17] Sholem Aleichem did not take part in the admiration for Andreev.[18]

Why was Andreev so attractive for Yiddish readers and theater spectators? I can think of three explanations: the first is his contemporary popularity as a writer and especially as a playwright in Russia and in other European countires. During 1906 -1917 his plays were performed in Russia and abroad with great success. In 1909 Aleksander Blok wrote - not as a compliment - that Leonid Andreev was the most “readable” writer in Russia.[19] At that time Y. H. Brenner mentioned Andreev in one breath with Chekhov and Gorky, speaking of the enthusiasm for the performances of his plays in London.[20] Andreev was marginalized in Soviet Russia because he attacked Bolshevism and was forced to escape from Russia to Finland in 1918, where he died in 1919. In 1919 he published a manifesto under the title S.O.S., where he demanded the intervention of the West, especially the USA, against Bolshevism.[21] In the 1920s his writings were banned in Soviet Russia, and only in 1996 were his collected works published again in Moscow, in 6 volumes. This can also explain his marginality in the West, where translations began to appear only in the late 1950s.[22]

The second explanation for the neglect of Andreev’s work is his interest in Judaism and the Jewish problem in Russia, together with his heretical stance toward Christianity. Andreev did not take part in the neo-Christian tendencies of leading Russian writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Merezhkovsky, Blok, Biely, and V. Ivanov. In his stories and plays he criticized the Christian hypocrisy in Russian society and expressed doubts about Christian values. In his first play “K zvezdam” (To the Stars, 1906) and in his story “Ranenny” (Wounded, 1916) Jewish characters are more positive and more touching than non-Jews. In the story “Iudah Iskariot” (1907,) and in the play “Anathema” (1909) Jewish suffering is greater and more “Christian” than the suffering of Jesus. As a rule pro-Jewish attitude of European writers (not only Russian, but also Polish, German and English) contributed to their popularity in the Jewish press.[23] Andreev positive attitude to Jewish suffering was esceptional in Russian literature. Andreev also was active in defending Jewish civil rights. In 1911 he was one of the first Christian writers and intellectuals to sign “an open letter to the Russian society” protesting the Mendel Beilis blood libel accusation. The protest was published in the Russian-Jewish monthly Novy Voskhod.[24] In 1914 Andreev wrote an article under the title “Pervaia stupen’ (O evreiskom voprose),” in which he describes antisemitism as a shameful hump on Russia’s back. The article opens with a citation from Bialik’s “On the Slaughter” (written after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom) in V. Jabotinsky’s translation. The publication of Andreev’s essay in the newspapers Birzhevye Vedomosti and Odesskie Novosti was prohibited by the censor, but it appeared as a booklet in 1915 in Odessa and in Moscow.[25] In the same year Andreev, together with Gorky and Sologub, founded the “Russkoe obshestvo dlia izuchenia zhizni evreev” (The Russian Society for the Study of Jewish Life), whose first activity was a meeting, during which Gorki, Andreev and Sologub gave speeches against antisemitism. Andreev spoke not only about the suffering and humiliation of the Jews in Russia, but also of his personal feeling of gratitude to the Jewish people, because of the greatness of Jewish tradition and culture.[26] Subsequently a protest against antisemitism in Russia, signed by a long list of writers and artists, was published in the newspapers Utroe Rossii (1.3.1915) and Birzhevye Vedomosti, as well as in the Jewish-Russian Novy Voskhod (no. 9 1915, p. 20) and - in Hebrew translation - in Hatsfira (17.3.1915, p. 2). Andreev’s  essay on the Jewish problem, “Pervaia stupen’ (The first step), and his story “Ranenny” (Wounded) were included in Shchit (The Shield), a pro-Jewish anthology of literature and essays edited by M. Gorkii, F. Sologub, and Andreev; it was first published in St. Petersburg (1915), and in two additional editions in Moscow (1916). In 1917 Yosef Klauzner praised Andreev and Gorky’s activity for the Jews in the Hebrew periodical Hashiloah. Klauzsner wrote that Hebrew writers should follow the example of Gorky and Andreev: instead of producing “art for art’s sake” they should take an active part in changing reality.[27] Even in Finland Andreev received delegations from Jews (such as Leib Yoffe) seeking support against antisemitism in Russia.[28]

Why did Andreev become so pro-Jewish? V. Levitina states that his interest in the Jewish question began in 1904, after his acquaintance with Chirikov's play "The Jews.”[29] No less important is the fact that his second wife was Jewish, a fact which is not mentioned by any of his biographers.[30]  The third explanation relates to Andreev’s thematics and style. On the one hand, Andreev introduced non-realistic settings; on the other hand, his innovations included his use of “terrible,” vulgar or pornographic details. Many of Andreev’s short stories and dramas symbolically express the shock of confrontation with the monstrous face of human nature, society, orthodox Christianity, nature itself, and the characters’ own beliefs and ideals. Such traumatic moments of disillusion with humanism and romanticism were understood by Jews even better than by non-Jews in Russia between 1905 and 1917.

Andreev’s style, a mixture of realism, symbolism and proto-expressionism, was part of the European neo-romantic Moderne, which rejected the social and the national role of literature in order to write “art for art’s sake.” Russian early modernist literature was elitist, in the symbolist tradition of art in an ivory tower. Andreev, in contrast, wrote stories and dramas that combined symbolism and a political protest against the cruelty of the establishment. He preferred the abnormal cry or moment of ecstasy over the polished aesthetic form or the impressionistic nuance. This style was more attractive for the broad Jewish audience at the time than the symbolists’ sophisticated aestheticism.

Andreev's reception in Hebrew literature was much less enthusiastic than in Yiddish. The first echo was heard already in October 1904: the monthly Hador published a 12-page review of Andreev’s story “Zhizn’ Vassilia Piveiskogo,” which appeared in Gorki’s Znanie a few months earlier.[31] The story deals with the tense and repressed emotions of a seemingly hard-hearted Russian priest and his daughter, who commits suicide. In the two first pages of this review, Eliahu Rochlin praises Andreev’s talent for psychological insight and explains his philosophical and moral views. The rest of the article is an enthusiastic paraphrase of the story itself.

Fifteen years passed before the appearance of the next Andreev's translation into Hebrew: His story “Petka na dache” in Hebrew translation was published in a youth magazine in Palestine. The translator, Yaakov Fichman, a well-known poet, editor and critic, also wrote an article on Andreev, published in 1920, in which he describes both the strong impression Andreev made on his generation and his later disillusionment with Andreev. The reason for this disillusionment was Andreev’s “inability to free himself from the literary idea and to fill his work with free contents.” Fichman concludes his essay by saying that “The small influence Andreev had on our literature was not for the best.  It is preferable for us to rid ourselves completely of his literary pathos.... Andreev abandoned true art, whose steps are soft and hushed. We shall not go that way.”[32] A year later Andreev’s long story “The Christians,” in which Andreev mocks the hypocritical Christian bourgoisie, translated into Hebrew by Israel Eliahu Handelsalz, appeared in Warsaw.[33]

    Which writers did Fichman have in mind when he mentioned Andreev’s influence on Hebrew literature? I can think of two: Uri Nissan Gnessin and Yosef Hayyim Brenner. Gnessin’s letter of 1904 testifies to his enthusiasm for Andreev’s “Zhizn’ Vasilia Piveiskogo.”(The Life of Vasily Piveisky)   He wrote that it “should have been written by one of our people,” and commented that “Andreev's little finger is bigger than all our waists together.”[34] Traces of Andreev’s story “Zhizn’ Vasilia Piveiskogo” and of his story “Molchanie” (Silence, 1900) may be found in Gnessin’s story “Seuda mafseket” (The meal before the fast, 1904), which describes the emotionally charged relationship between father and daughter on the eve of Yom Kippur.[35] Moreover, Andreev’s famous story “Bezdna” (A Chasm, 1902)[36] influenced Gnessin’s short story “Baganim” (In the Gardens, 1909), which was written by Gnessin in both Hebrew and Yiddish.[37] “Bezdna” is a story about a pair of romantic teenagers walking together in the evening into the forest, talking --just talking--about love. In their way, while the sun is setting, they meet a couple of whores and then they meet a group of hooligans, who attack the girl, rape her in the presence of the boy and make off. The shocked boy approaches the fainted girl and--for the first time--makes love to her unfeeling body.

Gnessin’s “Baganim” describes the psychological and sexual trauma of a young Jew, Efraim, who comes back home to seek redemption in Nature,[38] where he spent his youth. In the gardens he meets a Jew who is a real farmer, and he asks him for milk, feeling that this will save him. He finds out, however, that this “natural” man – this Jewish “man of nature” - is a brutal monster, who rapes his imbecile daughter.  Later, when he unwillingly testifies to the incest, he finds himself sexually aroused, as if taking part in the terrible act. It was not Andreev, however, but Chekhov and Baudelaire, whom Gnessin chose to translate into Hebrew.

Brenner mentions Andreev a few times in his criticism and letters. In 1908, one year after the publication of his translation of Andreev’s “Marselieza,” he mentioned Andreev, together with Gorki and Chekhov, as the respected representatives of contemporary Russian literature.[39] However, two years later he condemned Andreev for his “unpleasant and therefore anti-artistic loud primitive scepticism-pessimism,” and traces his bad influence on contemporary Hebrew literature.[40]  Elsewhere Brenner condemned the "primitive and vociferous scepticism-pessimism…of Andreev's fashion in Russian literature, traces of which can be seen in our literature as well.”[41] It is ironical that Brenner himself was blamed for his primitive style and his vociferous and lacrymatory rhetoric.[42]

In 1909 when Brenner was already in Palestine and edited the periodical Revivim he rejected Gershon Hanoch’s proposal to translate two of Andreev’s stories into Hebrew. He wrote to the translator that “We do not need this thing even a little bit; it was troublesome enough in its own time, land, and language (דיה לצרה זו בשעתה, במקומה ובשפתה).”[43] Brenner’s criticism of Andreev seems to echo accusations directed by Hebrew critics against Brenner himself. And in fact, no writer in modern Hebrew literature is stylistically closer to Andreev than Brenner. Andreev’s “Marslieza” was Brenner’s only translation into Yiddish. He translated into Hebrew Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”

    Three of Andreev’s plays--"Days of Our Life,” "Ocean," and "The One Who Gets Slapped"--were performed in 1923 by a small group of actors, "Hovevei ha-bima ha-ivrit,” who founded the first theater in Tel-Aviv.[44] The group performed each play just twice, once in Tel Aviv and once in Jerusalem, sometimes traveling to Cairo to raise more money. The rehearsals and performances took place in the Tel Aviv Eden Hall, whose owner demanded the production of two new plays each month, so that in 1923 the group performed 37 different plays--all of them translated, mainly from Yiddish, Russian, and Polish.  Avigdor Ha-me’iri, a prominent Hebrew poet and prose writer at that time, wrote in his review of “Ocean” that the play raises a “monumental problem”:  that “culture is altogether one big lie.” He noted, however, that “the Hebrew public did not understand even one word of this.” If at least the owners of the theater had provided a short resume of the play in the program, then the public would not have had to sit the entire time breaking their heads to achieve a minimal understanding of this symbolic play, whose characters and contents are in any case so far removed from us.”[45] It is difficult to understand why “Ocean” was chosen as the first of Andreev’s plays to be performed on the Hebrew stage. It seems that the theater group learned its lesson and turned next to the more accessible “Days of our Life”.  The Hebrew translation of the play was published separately.[46] This play achieved greater success, although here too the editor of Doar hayom commented: “It is a pity that so much talent and energy were invested in a play whose contents are so strange to the majority of the Jerusalem public.”[47] No other plays by Andreev were performed on the Hebrew and Israeli stage until the 1990s, and even then they were performed only by the Nissan Nativ School of Theater in Tel-Aviv, not by major theaters. One collection of 12 of Andreev’s stories was translated into Hebrew by K. A. Bertini and published in 1984.

The difference between the enthusiastic reception of Andreev in Yiddish and the unenthusiastic reception  in Hebrew is clear, even if we take into consideration that the Yiddish public was bigger than the Hebrew one at that time.  It is true that Yiddish readers needed translations from Russian more than Hebrew readers, because most Hebrew readers could also read Russian. Unfortunately, a fuller picture of contemporary Yiddish and Hebrew translations from Russian and other European languages, would be  needed for making conclusions here. In any event, the approach to translations from Russian into Hebrew, on the one hand, and into Yiddish, on the other hand, was different. Przsybszevsky, for example, who was well known to Hebrew writers, was widely translated into Yiddish, but hardly at all into Hebrew, while Vladimir Solovyov's poetry was translated into Hebrew, but not into Yiddish. [48] The question now is: why?

I think the answer is quite simple: Yiddish literature at that time, although it was an atypical, marginal literature in Europe, had become a more "normal" literature than Hebrew literature, which at that time was written and read by the intellectual and ideological elite. Yiddish literature, which in the nineteenth century was mostly intended for the masses, although it was sometimes  a high-brow, sophisticated literature , was now intended for the middle-class, to the growing mass of Yiddish theater's spectators, in and beyond the Pale.[49]

Yiddish readership and theater public at that time included the middle-class bourgeoisie who sent their children to Russian gymnasia and universities, the readers of the quickly developing Yiddish journalism, consumers of fashionable literature and theater. Yiddish writers such as Sholem Asch, the brothers Singer, and Yosef Perle wrote for this audience; others such as H. D. Nomberg, Uri Zvi Greenberg, D. Bergelson, and Peretz Markish wrote for the elite.

Hebrew-speaking culture, on the other hand, was a small counterculture that was struggling for “a Jewish revolution of the spirit.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Hebrew writers were jealous of the successful Yiddish literature and press, and they were consumed by a feeling of failure.

The immense popularity of Mapu’s Hebrew novels (especially his Ahavat Tsion, which is full of sentimental and sensational intrigues), or Ben-Avigdor’s Sifrei Agora (a series of popular books in Hebrew for the masses), or Bialik’s folk songs and children’s songs may lead us to forget that in order to write in Hebrew, which for no one was a real native tongue in the nineteenth century, one had to be a Don Quixote--a spiritual aristocrat.  Hebrew writers did consider themselves responsible for the creation of a spiritual and moral new Jewish aristocracy. This responsibility allowed them to admire Dostoevsky and Solovyov, even Oscar Wilde and Edgar Alan Poe, but not Andreev or Przybyszevsky, who were too close to the taste of “the half-baked intelligentsia.” What attracted the audience--Andreev's macabre pessimism--seemed to them too colorful, too pornographic, and too vulgar.

The dream to build a new Jewish spiritual aristocracy – not only Jews with muscles – was part of the Zionist vision of the New Jew, which is being mocked now by post-Zionist scholars. We can mock it, but if we do not take it into consideration, many important aspects of Jewish intellectual history will remain unexplained.  

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NOTES