Of Fish, Frogs, and Boyhood: Leaky Pedagogy in Abraham Golomb’s VI FUN A FISH IZ A FROSH GEVORN (How a Fish Becomes a Frog)

• In Event: Drowning, Leaking, Flowing: Images of the Aquatic in Jewish Literature

Abstract

In her contribution to the 2016 volume CHILDREN AND YIDDISH LITERATURE (Estraikh, Hoge, and Krutikov eds.), Miriam Udel documents a thread of religiosity in stories for children written by secularist Yiddishists—stories which employ the folkloric mode to explore a dialectical tension between the particularly Judaic and the universally humanist strains of Jewish nationalism. As Udel’s work demonstrates, this border between tradition and modernity is rarely secure. In this paper, I will explore another text with similarly porous boundaries, taking the form of a memoir rather than a folktale. Abraham Golomb’s VI FUN A FISH IZ A FROSH GEVORN (HOW A FISH BECOMES A FROG) was published under the Bialystok Kultur Lige’s “Natural Science Stories” series. Beyond just a memoir, the book is thus also part pedagogical exercise in narrating biology for young readers. Golomb writes water as a space of both origin (of life and of knowledge) and transgression (of tradition and of patriarchal authority). Bringing VI FUN A FISH into conversation with Golomb's own later concept of INTEGRALE YIDISHKAYT (integral Jewishness)—a holistic approach Jewish cultural and religious practice—I will argue that Golomb’s aquatic narrative reveals a pedagogical project of juvenile enlightenment which operates under the model of a leak rather than a radical break or a dialectical struggle over contradiction. Through a close reading of the role that the shtetl pond and its fluid presence plays in the text, I will analyze how the narrative pedagogy that Golomb practices seeps through the boundary—which he constructs as leaky—between traditional, hierarchical religious education, and modern, participant-driven scientific education on a textual and meta-textual level. VI FUN A FISH is itself leaky. It mixes across disciplinary and formal boundaries to produce an idiosyncratic yet informative case study with which I will contribute to the scholarly discussion of the modernizing and secularizing dynamics of pedagogical literature in the early twentieth century Yiddish-speaking world—a dynamic which is, moreover, relevant to our still leaky boundaries between secularity, religiosity, universality, and particularity in contemporary YIDISHKAYT.

Author

• Caleb Sher, University of Toronto