Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction by Ilan Stavans

Author:Ilan Stavans [Stavans, Ilan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190076993
Google: 2Sc9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-02T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The ingathering

In Hebrew, the word kinnus means “ingathering.” In the introduction to the anthology of classical rabbinical literature, Sefer Ha-Haggadah, Chaim Nachman Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, its editors, celebrated the concept of aggadah, storytelling, as “the classic expression of the spirit of the Jewish people.” Everything one needs to know is ciphered in that literature. Bialik talked about “the ingathering,” the capacity for the reader to wander, in an unimpeded way, in pursuit of myths through the various diasporas. Bialik had an even larger project in mind, though: to survey all literatures in the Jewish diaspora.He called it kinnus. Jewish storytelling, in this context, was miscellaneous in nature; it was, as I mentioned in the introduction, also centerless. This is all clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century: there are Jewish writers in almost every country on the globe. Their individual exploration fits into the national context while belonging to the larger aterritorial Jewish tradition.

Space allows me to concentrate on only a few examples. Some are connected to specific countries. Others are about the tension between the religious and secular worlds. One place to start is Argentina. At the end of the nineteenth century, as Jews were migrating to the United States, they sailed toward Buenos Aires. Theodor Herzl, in his disquisitions of Zionism, toyed with different possible locations for the Jewish state; Argentina was one of them. But it was not the hope to create a new Jewish homeland in the Pampas that attracted Yiddish-speaking dwellers. The reason was more practical: land was cheap in South America and the Argentinian government was intent on welcoming European immigrants (Italians, Russians, Jews), in the hope they would ultimately “civilize” a geography not densely populated.

The father of Latin American Jewish literature is Alberto Gerchunoff, who arrived from Russia as a little boy in one of the settlements specifically acquired by philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, whose mission it was to lift Jewish masses of the Pale out of poverty. He invested in resettling large numbers of people in comunas like Moisés Ville, villages that, in their organization, resembled the shtetls of the Old Country. In 1910, to celebrate the first centennial anniversary of Argentina’s independence, Gerchunoff published a series of vignettes called The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas. It is a lucid, lyrical exploration of life in the countryside. He had recently switched from Yiddish to Spanish. The book was a gift to his newly adopted homeland, which he described as un país de advenimiento, a land of advent. At the time, Argentina was indeed a promising new democracy that recently had overcome a tyrannical regime. Gerchunoff’s view was idealistic: he believed the age of pogroms his family had experienced in Europe was being replaced by a new sense of freedom. Alas, the feeling was short-lived. In 1919, a violent outburst in Buenos Aires called La Semana Trágica (“the tragic week”) that resembled a pogrom resulted in almost a hundred dead and scores of Jewish businesses destroyed. Coming to terms with the tragedy, Gerchunoff quickly became disillusioned.

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