An Argument: On Expanding Our Literature

I hear it said: On the contrary, inasmuch as the things most essential for the life of a people have been forcibly taken from our people’s soul, and we stand miraculously in midair like the mem and the samekh in the Tablets,¹ it is clear that our literature needs to be only Jewish and to deal only with questions of our survival, because if there is no Israel, where will its literature come from? To this, we only need to counter: if there is no literature, where will Israel come from? That is to say, if we do not care first of all for this treasured spiritual library scattered across the diaspora, our last surviving remnant from all of the principles of every nation, we will be completely scattered and go astray because our paths are already broken. A different spirit has started to blossom in the hearts of our new generation, the children; they seek their fulfillment from another source, from outside [of Judaism], and when they are sated with each nation’s culture—in its own language—while not finding anything appealing within Judaism for themselves, they fall away one by one . . .

You think that you can heal the ruined and wandering state of our spirit through Judaism alone; but, you do not take to heart that by this very thing, by restricting our literature to Judaism alone, you are bringing about this ruined state with your own hands.

“Once we close ourselves off in the name of Judaism, we infer that there is ‘no-Judaism,’ that the life outside consists of other and different things than those within; and by this act of rending, by which we tear life apart into two domains, ours and what is not ours, we expand the inner chasm that is in the hearts of our youths, who even without this, now experience perpetual war in their hearts between the beauty of Japheth and the tents of Shem.”²

“This idea,” I add, “to simultaneously make ourselves both human beings and Jews is possible only if we do not divide our life into two parts, placing Judaism on the one side and our humanity on the other, reading Ha-Shiloaḥ for Jewish matters and Vestnik Evropy³ for general human matters” (from my open letter [Berdyczewski is quoting here and in the previous paragraph from an earlier essay.]).

I think it is clear, that for me, it is not the title [of the newspaper] that matters; and that it did not occur to me to present the literature published in that Russian journal as the “ideal universal literature,” as the writer who signs with three asterisks attributes to me in his “Letters on Literature” (Ha-Tsefirah, No. 26),⁴ by which he is only seeking a pretext.

The asterisked-author asks in amazement: “Is it possible that universal human questions should occupy the Jewish reader and capture his heart, at a time that solutions have not yet been found to the question of his survival?” (Ibid.) And we patiently respond, “Precisely at the same place that the Jewish reader seeks solutions to the question of his survival and existence, he will also seek after universal human questions, for they too occupy him all the more, inasmuch as he is a living, feeling person, and on their account, he is forced to go over the Vestnik Evropy or the Russkaia mysl’,⁵ etc.” [ . . . ]

Stealthily, in a whisper, the asterisked-author concludes his “Letters on Literature” with this judicial decision: “Truly, it is well that literature relies on its own resources; a Jewish literature that wants to live should only endure if it is sustained and nourished, primarily and fundamentally, from the original spirit of its people.”

Another one of our great writers confesses: “For them, for many of our children, who due to their education and manner of life have no literature available to them yet—it is necessary for us to create a Jewish literature, to enable them to understand the light in the Torah in all its greatness and splendor, the excellent attributes of the Jews that are rooted in and attached to the national spirit and the Torah” (“The Order of Discussion Reversed,” Aḥiasaf, No. 11).

And they [critics] do not want to take to heart that words said in a whisper will not avail them in approaching our literature—they who find it necessary to administer a watered-down ointment against those strong winds that have shaken the whole building from the foundation to the rafters. They deceive themselves: they do not see that the people who have cut down the glorious lush canopy and its ancient roots [in Jewish tradition], will not stop destroying the [saplings of] contemporary Jewish literature, which is based only upon the meagerest scraps from the Jewish past.