Freeing the Shtetl from the Ghetto Prism: Sholem Asch and Dovid Bergelson in German Translation

Summary

Introduction

THE HISTORY OF TENSIONS between German and East European Jews is well-known. Many studies have dealt with the subject in one capacity or another, and it is well established in popular opinion as well. One expression of these tensions was the attitude in Germany toward the Yiddish language, something conveyed, among other things, in the ways works of Yiddish literature were transmitted to German-speaking audiences. Early attempts at such transmission and translation tended, as a matter or course and without further reflection, to rewrite the shtetl as “ghetto,” presenting it as such even when other words might show up for the term in a given translation. Hence, while the translation by Stefania Goldenring of a volume of stories by Sholem Asch (1880–1957) published in 1907 renders “shtetl” as “Städtchen,” that usage is subordinated to the volume's title Bilder aus dem Ghetto. This problem went beyond just one volume. In a series of treatments and reviews written for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums Ludwig Geiger, the renowned German literary historian and sometime editor of the popular liberal journal, subsumed the works of Yiddish writers like I. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem as well as Sholem Asch under the genre Ghettoliteratur. Although it was a “venerated genre” in the Allgemeine Zeitung, as Hans Otto Horch notes, the Ghettoliteratur designation did not prevent Geiger from contrasting a Yiddish writer like Asch with the more esteemed English writer Israel Zangwill, and concluding: “bei Asch ist alles fremd, die Welt in der er lebt und die er beschreibt, ist eine, die wir nicht kennen und in der uns, wenn wir in sie träten, der Atem verschlägt” (with Asch, everything is foreign, the world in which he lives and which he describes, is one that we do not know and which, were we to enter it, would take our breath would be taken away). Still, one also finds attempts to challenge this image of the shtetl as ghetto and its implications for mediating Yiddish culture. Those attempts found expression in other translations from Yiddish and in other reviews of the translations and critical assessments of Yiddish writing more generally.