The Artful Dodge: the Yiddish Shnorrer in German Literature

• In Event: New Perspectives on the Shnorrer, the Nebbish, and the Schlemiel

Abstract

When the Jewish folk figure of the shnorrer made an appearance in German letters, it was at a moment of transition in European Jewry. After the influx of Yiddish-speaking, poorer Jews from Eastern Europe to German-speaking cities like Vienna and Berlin, as the historian Shulamit Volkov has noted, “all Jews were implicated in the deeds and misdeeds of the shnorrer from the East, […] and the hard-won respectability and solid citizenship of the local German Jews was thus in serious danger of discredit.” In my paper, I will argue, however, that it is precisely because the figure of the maligned shnorrer was so heavily identified with Eastern European Yiddish language and culture that his entry into German letters happened rather artfully. This is because it occurred at the precise moment when Yiddish letters had become a modern literature with a self-critical edge and a modernizing impulse. To show this, I will use one of the first examples of the shnorrer in a German novel, in Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten (1904), by Viennese Jewish author, Karl Emil Franzos. Its two main characters, an irreverent apokorsus come Galician shnorrer named Mendele and his son Sender are variations on characters from the writing of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, the great satirist and “national poet” of a newly emerging, vibrant Yiddish literature.

Through an analysis of Franzos’ rendering of the shnorrer, I will show how the satirical Yiddish culture the shnorrer represents has all the qualities for modernity: de-territoriality, mobility, adaptability and a ready ability (through diglossia with Hebrew) to both understand and critique tradition. In contrast, German literature and the German language are represented in the novel as a culture made small by its delimited territory and long-forgotten Enlightenment principles. Franzos’ characterization of the shnorrer Mendele and his Yiddish cultural milieu as potential “modernizers” of German letters at the turn of the century has been overlooked in previous scholarship on his work, which has focused almost exclusively on his defense of German literature and his staunchly Reformist stance toward Jewish culture in the East.

author

• Ashley Passmore, Texas A&M