Salvage Poetics and the “Inner World” of East European Jewry: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Deployment of Hassidic Tales in his Elegy to East European Jewish Life

• In Event: Hassidic Literature, Media, and Secular Modernity

Abstract

Through an analysis of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s deployment of Hassidic tales in his elegy to East European Jewish life, “The East European Era in Jewish History” (1945), and its expansion, The Earth is the Lord’s (1949), this paper considers the notion of “salvage poetics,” or the transformation of primary, pre-Holocaust East European literary sources into artifacts to aid in the construction of a folk ethnographic understanding of the world destroyed in the war. While generally read as a valorization and idealization of the culture of the traditional Jewish house of study, these two texts never quote directly from classical Jewish literature. Rather, Heschel quotes mainly from Hassidic tales. In so doing, I argue, he attempts to construct a bridge between his American Jewish audience and the pious East European Jewish community he depicts. Hassidic tales, to Heschel, represent modernity insofar as they are a literary product of the 19th century, in contrast to the arsenal of classical Jewish texts such as the Talmud and the Torah that serve, by his account, as the core of East European Jewish culture. Therefore, the portrait that he paints in “The East European Era in Jewish History” and in The Earth Is the Lord’s is of an “inner world” constituted by traditional Jewish texts but illustrated and disseminated through Hassidic tales. For American Jews in the immediate post-Holocaust era, the distinct modernity of Hassidic texts served to “salvage” the lost scholarly world of traditional Judaism by virtue of their modernity and their accessibility for a secularizing and monolingual English speaking American Jewish audience.

Author

• Sheila Elana Jelen, University of Kentucky