Shtetlspeak: The Triumph of the Dialogical in Zalman Schneour’s Shklov

• In Event: Popular Yiddish Prose

Abstract

The creators of Yiddish prose fiction in the nineteenth century were in essential agreement that shtetlspeak was monolithic. How could the shtetl produce individuated speech if there was no room for the individual? Whether it was Yisroel Aksenfeld’s Lohoyopole, Abramovitsh’s Kaptsansk and Tuneyadevke, Peretz’s Ciechanowka, or Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke, the shtetl spoke with one voice. To be sure, the speech of women was different from that of men, the merchant classes spoke differently from the hoi polloi, and Peretz threw hasidic speech into the mix to distinguish between the material and spiritual domains. But it wasn’t until the next generation had discovered Nietzsche that the shtetl came to be viewed as a breeding ground for subterranean forces that could no longer be repressed. Enter Berdyczewski and Schneour, the Young Turks of the Hebrew Renaissance.
While Berdyczewski’s shtetl imaginary was narrated by a learned and subversive Hebrew chronicler far removed in time and space, Schneour’s Yiddish storyteller was a native son awash in the sights, sounds, smells, recipes, cries, spells, taunts, slogans, chants, and speech that memory could scarcely contain. What opened the floodgate was the Soviet seizure of power. Henceforth, Shklov belonged to the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. If once the task of shtetl fiction had been to challenge the hegemony imposed from within, the political and economic hegemony imposed by the Soviet state apparatus made it imperative to rescue the usable past. The medium of choice was the free press, the preserve of Yiddish old and new.
This paper will focus on the representation of shtetlspeak in Schneour’s three most celebrated collections of autobiographical tales—Shklover yidn (1929), Feter Zhame (1930) and Shklover kinder (1951), which first appeared, simultaneously, in the Warsaw Moment and the New York daily Forverts, turning Schneour into the second most widely read Yiddish author, after Sholem Asch. By weaving in and out of the consciousness of his child protagonists, the narrator made them the ideal conduit for the speech of all classes, ethnicities, and ideologies. The narrator, meanwhile, by using poetic similes drawn both from folk speech and observable reality, turned the warp and woof of the child’s lived experience into a dialogical playground. Subtly tracking the changing political realities of the Twenties and Thirties, finally, was the generational, spiritual and ideological divide that Scheneour retrojected into his reimagined Shklov, which he deftly dramatized through dialogical vignettes. From decade to decade, these became ever more binary, polemical, satirical and disparate. Never before and never again would one extended shtetl family generate as many distinct and vital Yiddish voices.

Author

• David G. Roskies, The Jewish Theological Seminary