Envy; Or, Yiddish In America

(On Labor & Poetry)

by Cynthia Ozick

Understand me, Hannah—that our treasure-tongue is derived from strangers means nothing. 90 per cent German roots, 10 per cent Slavic: irrelevant. The Hebrew take for granted without percentages. We are a people who have known how to forge the language of need out of the language of necessity. Our reputation among ourselves as a nation of scholars is mostly empty. In actuality we are a mob of working people, laborers, hewers of wood, believe me. Leivik, our chief poet, was a house painter. Today all pharmacists, lawyers, accountants, haberdashers, but tickle the lawyer and you'll see his grandfather sawed wood for a living. That's how it is with us. Nowadays the Jew is forgetful, everybody with a profession, every Jewish boy a professor—justice seems less urgent. Most don't realize this quiet time is only another Interim. Always, like in a terrible Wagnerian storm, we have our interludes of rest. So now. Once we were slaves, now we are free men, remember the bread of affliction. But listen. Whoever cries Justice! is a liberated slave. Whoever honors Work is a liberated slave. They accuse Yiddish literature of sentimentality in this connection. Very good, true. True, so be it! A dwarf at a sewing machine can afford a little loosening of the heart. I return to Leivik. He could hang wallpaper. I once lived in a room he papered—yellow vines. Rutgers Street that was. A good job, no bubbles, no peeling. This from a poet of very morbid tendencies. Mani Leib fixed shoes. Moishe Leib Halpern was a waiter, once in a while a handyman. I could tell you the names of twenty poets of very pure expression who were operators, pressers, cutters. In addition to fixing shoes Mani Leib was also a laundryman. I beg you not to think I'm preaching Socialism. To my mind politics is dung. What I mean is something else: Work is Work, and Thought is Thought. Politics tries to mix these up, Socialism especially. The language of a hard-pressed people works under the laws of purity, dividing the Commanded from the Profane. I remember one of my old teachers. He used to take attendance every day and he gave his occupation to the taxing council as "attendance-taker"—so that he wouldn't be getting paid for teaching Torah. This with five pupils, all living in his house and fed by his wife! Call it splitting a hair if you want, but it's the hair of a head that distinguished between the necessary and the merely needed. People who believe that Yiddish is, as they like to say, "richly intermixed," and that in Yiddishkeit the presence of the Covenant, of Godliness, inhabits humble things and humble words, are under a delusion or a deception. The slave knows exactly when he belongs to God and when to the oppressor. The liberated slave who is not forgetful and can remember when he himself was an artifact, knows exactly the difference between God and an artifact. A language also knows whom it is serving at each moment. I am feeling very cold right now. Of course you see that when I say liberated I mean self-liberated. Moses not Lincoln, not Franz Josef. Yiddish is the language of auto-emancipation. Theodor Herzl wrote in German but the message spread in mamaloshen—my God cold. Naturally the important thing is to stick to what you learned as a slave including language, and not to speak their language, otherwise you will become like them, acquiring their confusion between God and artifact and consequently their taste for making slaves, both of themselves and others.

SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia. “Envy; Or, Yiddish In America,” in: The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), pp. 85-86.

Jacob Glatstein

According to Alex Foreman:

Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971) was the model for Edelstein. See his translations of poems by Jacob Glatstein.

Glatstein, Jacob. “Der Marsh Tsu Di Goyim” (The March to the Gentiles), Inzikh, no. 14, 1935. Hard to find, never anthologized, never translated.

Owing to the politics of the time and of literary modernism, Glatstein expresses hostility to ‘World Literature’.

Some links:

Jacob Glatstein: American Author and Literary Critic

Jacob Glatstein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jacob Glatstein on Yiddish Poetry After the Holocaust (1955, audio, in Yiddish with subtitles).

Glatstein finds Yiddish poetry facing a dilemma, criticizes world poetry.

See also: Garrett, Leah. "Cynthia Ozick's "Envy": A Reconsideration," Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 24 (ReVisioning American Jewish Literature: Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow), 2005, pp. 60-81.

Cynthia Ozick on "Envy; Or, Yiddish In America" (The Writer Jokes in Hell, with Esperanto, Ro, & Volapük)

�World Literature�: A Bibliography

Offsite:

“What Happened to the Baby?” by Cynthia Ozick
(The Atlantic, Fiction Issue 2006)