One Literature in Two Languages

Bal-Makhshoves (Man of Thoughts) was the pen name under which Israel Isidor Elyashev became the first serious Yiddish-language literary critic in the first decade of the twentieth century. Although his wealthy Kovno family was stringently religious, Elyashev was afforded the opportunity to study at a Swiss gymnasium and German universities, where he earned a medical degree. During his time in Berlin, he also embraced Zionism, to which he remained committed even as he then embarked on a career as a pioneer of Yiddish literary criticism (he would later translate Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland into Yiddish). Moving to Warsaw at the turn of the century, he began to write Yiddish feuilletons and criticism for the Zionist Yiddish literary journal Der yud. Writing for a variety of journals thereafter, he found his metier as a literary critic writing about both the new Hebrew and the new Yiddish literature. Shot through with romantic nationalist assumptions about literature as the effusion of a nation’s collective spirit, his work did not always prove lasting, but it was doubly pioneering both as the first serious literary criticism in the Yiddish language and the first serious critical engagement with the rapidly developing Yiddish literary scene. Tellingly, Bal-Makhshoves was the first critic to recognize Sholem Aleichem’s genius. Increasingly pessimistic about the future of Yiddish literature, he also resisted the growing tendency toward polarization between opposing Hebraist and Yiddishist camps, insisting on the vital national importance and value of both literatures; this outlook was most famously expressed in his essay “One Literature in Two Languages,” begun shortly before World War I but completed in 1918.