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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2008
In 1940, just before the Germans entered Paris, Haim Sloves, an Eastern European Jewish intellectual, finished writing a play in Yiddish, Homens mapole, or The Downfall of Haman. It was an act of resistance, as Haman, the great enemy of the Jews, was a transparent reference to Hitler, but within and beyond that, it continued a project that had absorbed many Eastern European Jews since the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbinic tradition, they felt, was dying. It was urgent to discover a new source of inspiration for the Jewish people. In 1944–45, when Sloves and other Jewish survivors returned to Paris, where they had immigrated years before the war, the task of rebuilding seemed more urgent still. To continue to search for a new, secular mode of expression was intimately tied to the very revival of the Jewish people. Between 1945 and 1949, Homens mapole, considerably shortened and somewhat modified, played to resounding acclaim not only in Paris but also in several cities across three continents.
1. Documentation is most abundant for the chief site of its success, Paris, in the years 1946–49, but there is also evidence for its performance in New York, Los Angeles, Wroclaw, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires. The last city was host to it in 1957, when the Parisian director moved to Argentina. Archival material is available at the YIVO library in New York and at the Medem library in Paris. Sloves, in “Ha-tarbut ha-yehudit be-Ẓarfat,” Frei Yisroel, August 10, 1952, also claimed that Homens mapole was performed in Romania and South Africa. We did not have access to any archival material on those performances.
2. For Peretz's own writings, see The Three Great Classics of Modern Yiddish Literature, vol. 3, Selected Works of I. L. Peretz, ed. Marvin Zuckerman and Marion Herbst (Malibu, CA: Pangloss Press, 1996); Sloves himself devoted an essay to Peretz, “Der Brenendiker dorn,” in his collection In un arum (New York: Yidish Kultur Farband, 1970). See also Ruth R. Wisse, I. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); and Roskies, David G., A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
3. We are inspired primarily by Bolle's, Kees essay “Secularization as a Problem in the Study of Religion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12, no. 3 (1970): 242–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and, more recently, by Lefort's, Claude essay “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 214–55Google Scholar. More recently still, Monot, Jean-Claude, La Querelle de la sécularisation (Paris: Vrin, 2002)Google Scholar, traces the uses of the term “secularization” in modern philosophical and sociological inquiries, noting the tension between a prior view that posited a clean rupture and a more recent view that sees continuity despite the rupture. The question remains whether that continuity is merely structural or more fundamental.
4. See Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Anidjar, Gil, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. He helped found the Yidish Kultur Farband, which included a publishing house and a literary magazine, Yidishe kultur, founded in 1938, that, for many decades, was one of the chief organs for the dissemination of works in Yiddish sympathetic to the communist cause published outside the Soviet Union. It operated from New York. He also helped organize a large Congress for Yiddish Culture in 1937 and a Congress on Jewish Culture in Europe in 1948. He was the keynote speaker at both. He helped found the journal Oyfsnay and a publishing house of the same name in Paris in 1947, and in 1958, he became the editor of Domaine yidich, a journal of Yiddish literature in French translation.
6. See Aronowicz, Annette, “Haim Sloves, the Jewish People, and a Jewish Communist's Allegiances,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 1 (2002): 95–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7. Six of Sloves's Yiddish plays were published in book form, five of which were performed onstage as well. He wrote many essays about Yiddish literature and theater, some of which were published in one book as In un arum. He also wrote one of the first studies of the failed Soviet attempt to create a Jewish state in the Siberian province of Birobidjan, Sovetishe yidishe melukehshkayt (Paris: Haim Sloves, 1979). His final work, published three years before his death, was a memoir about the intersection of his communist and Jewish commitments, A Shlikhes keyn moskve (New York: Yidish Kultur Farband, 1985). More specifically, it detailed his fight to restore Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union after it was suppressed, from 1948 onward. In it, he translated the memoranda he had written to the French Communist Party secretary, Maurice Thorez, and his successor, Waldeck Rochet, from the original French into Yiddish.
8. For Sloves's description of how he joined the communist cause and, more generally, of his youth in Bialystok, see “Vegn zikh un vegn mein shafn,” in In un arum, 299–311.
9. See Midrash Esther Rabba for a compilation of rabbinic readings of the book of Esther. Levinas, Emmanuel, in Nine Talmudic Readings by Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1990), 39Google Scholar, comments on the significance in Tractate Shabbat 88b of the rabbis' reading of Esther 9:27 as the acceptance of the commandments.
10. Sloves, Haim, Homens mapole (Paris: Oyfsnay, 1949), 65–66.Google Scholar
11. Ibid., 66.
12. Ibid., 100.
13. Ibid., 56–57.
14. For traditional rabbinic commentaries, see Midrash Esther Rabbah to Esther 3:1; and Walfish, Barry Dov, Esther in Medieval Garb: Jewish Interpretations of the Book of Esther in the Middles Ages (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 122Google Scholar.
15. Sloves, Homens mapole, 56.
16. Ibid., 73.
17. Ibid., 49.
18. Ibid., 30.
19. The Jewish Writings of Steven Schwartzchild, ed. Menahem Kellner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 83.
20. Sloves, “Dos gelekhter fun a yid,” in In un arum, 35–36.
21. Homens mapole, 72.
22. Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodowsky, ed. and trans. Kathryn Hellerstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 32, 525, 536. Unfortunately, I was not able to find this in Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews or Bialik's Book of Legends. I checked back to Hellerstein's footnotes, but in none does she explain the provenance. I have come across this legend before, and it is also used in Moshe Leib Halpern's poetry; see, for example, Halpern, Moyshe Leib, In New York—A Selection, trans. and ed. Hellerstein, Kathryn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1982), 96–97.Google Scholar
23. Sloves, Homens mapole, 47–49. It is possible that this scene was inspired by the contest between hazanim often present in traditional purimshpiln. See Shmeruk, Khone, “Ha-demut ha-komit,” in Maḥazot mikra'iyim be-yidish 1697–1750 (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1979), 52.Google Scholar
24. Sloves, Homens mapole, 94–95.
25. Photograph, Sloves archives, YIVO, box 1, file 17.
26. Homens mapole was not performed by professional actors, although the stage director, the musical director, and set designer for the French performance were professionals. So were the stage directors of all the other performances. The play was almost two hours long, involving approximately thirty to forty actors. This was quite a difference in scale from the makeshift amateur theater of the traditional purimshpiln, and even though it was not literally professional, it had the scale and structure of professional theater.
27. Sloves, , “Dos Yidishe teater avant gard fun kultur front,” Oyfsnay 6–7, nos. 13–14 (July–August 1948): 14Google Scholar, archives of the Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme.
28. Ibid.
29. Trigano, Shmuel, Tradition et modernité dans la pensée juive (Paris: Festival international de la culture juive, 1983), 20Google Scholar. Trigano's reading is confirmed by modern historians of the Hebrew language, for example, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, Based on the Lexicon of William Gesenius, trans. Edward Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 119.
30. Zylbercweig, Zalman, “Purim shpiler,” in Leksikon fun yidishn teater (New York: Zylbercweig, 1959), 3:1653.Google Scholar
31. Sloves, Homens mapole, 9–11.
32. Ibid., 75.
33. Steinlauf, Michael C., “Jewish Theater in Poland,” Polin: Journal of Polish Jewish History 16 (November 2003): 85Google Scholar. He says that five Yiddish theaters in Warsaw were offering shund in the early 1930s at the same time the only Yiddish art theater closed down. This was a phenomenon repeated in most centers of Jewish population, most especially in the United States. See Sandrow, Nahma, Vagabond Stars (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 110Google Scholar: “Shund is the sort of art that most cultures and most people like best.”
34. Sloves, “Dos yidishe teater avant gard fun kultur front,” Oyfsnay 5–7, nos. 13–14 (July–August 1948): 14; for an evaluation that is very similar in tone, see Sloves, “Der Oysterlisher goral,” in In un arum, 92–94.
35. For the origin and history of purimshpiln, see Zylbercweig, “Purim shpiler,” Leksikon, vol. 3, and “Purim shpiln,” Leksikon, vol. 4 (New York: Elisheva, 1963), 3610–31. See also Shmeruk, Maḥazot mikra'iyim be-yidish, the first half of which is devoted to the history and origin of the purimshpil. In English, see Shatzky, Jacob, “The History of Purim Plays,” in The Purim Anthology, ed. Goodman, Philip (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964)Google Scholar, as well as the articles on Purim in the Encyclopedia Judaica and the Jewish Encyclopedia.
36. “Homens mapole,” Unzer shtime, February 2, 1946; Weinfeld, “Homens mapole,” Parizher shriftn, 86, YIVO, box 1, file 17; “Buen Espectaculo,” Clarin; Rachel Minczes, “Haint di feierlekhe efenung fun ift-sezon tzu der premiere fun Homens mapole,” Tribune, March 31, 1957, YIVO, box 1, file 16; Danek, “Homens mapole,” Oyfsnay (Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme).
37. Oscar Fessler, the director of the French and Belgian productions, had apprenticed in Max Reinhardt's studio and also with Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Alexander Granovsky in the 1920s in Berlin. Zygmunt Turkow, the director of the performances in Buenos Aires and the inspiration for those in Wroclaw, had been one of the founders of VIKT, an interwar Yiddish art theater in Warsaw. He claimed as his influences Piscator and Meyerhold, among others. Benjamin Zemach, the director of the New York and Los Angeles productions, had been one of the founders of Habima, the avant-garde Hebrew-language theater in the Soviet Union, until the late 1920s. Evgenii Vakhtangov had directed that theater for a few years.
38. On the translation of Meyerhold's works into French, see Hubert, Marie-Claude, Les grandes théories du théâtre (Paris: Armand Collin, 1998), 241.Google Scholar She claims that although he was translated late, his theories had become known much earlier. On the dates of Brecht's reception in France, see Hill, Victoria William, Bertolt Brecht and Postwar French Drama (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1978), 1–3.Google Scholar
39. M. Litwin, “Vi azoy mir hobn tzugegreit dem spektakl,” Naye prese, YIVO, box 1, file 17.
40. For Fessler's comments, see note 37 herein; for Vakhtangov's view of theater, see Slonim, Marc, Russian Theater from the Empire to the Soviets (New York: World Publishing, 1961), 265Google Scholar.
41. Veidlinger, Jeffrey, Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 21.Google Scholar
42. Ibid., 35.
43. One of the most important theorists of this position was, of course, Bertolt Brecht, but the idea that theater had revolutionary potential was widely shared. On Brecht, see Willet, John, ed. and trans., Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964)Google Scholar; and Dukore, Bernard F., Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 847–51Google Scholar. On various other modernist outlooks—Meyerhold, Piscator, Granovsky—see Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1850–1990, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Veidlinger, Moscow State Yiddish Theater, 19–54.
44. Sloves, Homens mapole, 5–6; and Sloves's letters to Nokhem Buchwald of April 20, 1948, June 10, 1948, YIVO, box 3, file 55.
45. Sloves, “Unzer teater foter,” in In un arum, 60–61; Sloves's letter to Buchwald of April 20, 1948, YIVO, box 3, file 55; and “A Tragishe stire,” in In un arum, 80; “Der Oysterlisher goral,” ibid., 95.
46. Sloves, Homens mapole, 6.
47. Many reviews mention the influence of the commedia dell'arte on the play. See M. Litwin, “Vi azoy mir hobn tsugegreit dem spektakl ‘Homens mapole,’” Naye prese, YIVO, box 1, file 17; Dvorzhenski, “A Dialog,” Unzer vort, ibid; French program notes, ibid; Y. Weinfeld, “Homens mapole,” Parizher Shrifn, 85, ibid; “Buen Especatulo in El teatro Ift,” Clarin, June 11, 1957, 10, YIVO, box 1, file 16; Katovitsky, “‘Homens mapole’ fun Haim Sloves,” Landsmanshaftn, ibid; “Homens mapole in nidershlezin yidishn teater,” Dos Naie leben, YIVO, box 1, file 21; and Zylbercweig, “Artef,” in Leksikon fun yidishn teater (Mexico City: Elisheva, 1969), 6:5876. For references to it as European theater, see Danek, N., “‘Homens mapole’ in Parizher yidishe kunst teater,” Oifsnai 3 (March 1947): 16Google Scholar, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme; and “‘Homens mapole’—A Velen lebn,” Naye prese, YIVO, box I, file 17.
48. One only has to read Theodor Herzl to see how much of European culture he wanted to transplant to the new Jewish society. He conceived of the Jewish presence in Palestine “as a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” See Herzl's, The Jewish State (New York: American Zionist Emergency Council, 1946), 96, 135, 145–46Google Scholar.
49. Opening statement in Oyfsnay 1 (January 1947): 1, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme.
50. “Der Feierlekhe derefenung-zitsung,” Oyfsnay 6–7, nos. 13–14 (July–August 1948): 4, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme.
51. Yudin, A., “Einheit in boi un kamf,” Oyfsnay 6–7, nos. 13–14 (July–August 1948): 14Google Scholar, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme.
52. Sloves, Homens mapole, 14.
53. Sloves, “Dos Vort fun eropeishn yudentum,” Oyfsnay 3, no. 10 (1948): 4, Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaisme.
54. Ibid.
55. This is the position he argued again and again in his many attempts to convince Soviet officials to reinstate Yiddish culture. See Annette Aronowicz, “Haim Sloves, the Jewish People, and a Jewish Communist's Allegiances,” 113.
56. Dubnow, Simon, Nationalism and History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1958), 358.Google Scholar
57. The connection between the Jews and Europe is, in a sense, everywhere in Levinas's work, as one of the ways he understood his task was as a translator of the Jewish notion of the universal into the philosophical language of the West, in order to challenge its hegemony from within. For some specific references to this connection, see Levinas, , “La traduction de l'écriture,” in Israel, judaisme et l'Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 361, 368Google Scholar, where he identifies Europe with the universal. He also speaks of the special affinity of Christianity and Judaism in the face of the rising third world in Difficile Liberté (Albin Michel, 1976), 10.
58. Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, ed. and trans. Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 101.
59. Sloves, “Historishe yidishkayt bai Y. Opatoshu,” in In un arum, 222.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., 226–27.
62. Ibid., 228.
63. Ibid., 226.
64. Ibid., 228.
65. Sloves, , Baruch fun Amsterdam (New York: Yidish Kultur Farband, 1956)Google Scholar. For a discussion of what it means to be a secular Jew in the play, see Aronowicz, Annette, “Spinoza Among the Jewish Communists,” Modern Judaism 24, no. 1 (February 2004): 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66. In Baruch, 80, Spinoza asks the rabbi whether there can be any contradiction between mentschlikhkayt and yidishkayt. In this context, he is asking rhetorically whether concern for all of mankind can be in contradiction with concern for the Jews. He says the rabbi himself had taught him this connection (ibid., 54).
67. In an essay that he wrote in 1960 titled “Secularism and the Thought of Israel,” Levinas argues that the secular political space made possible by modernity is a fulfillment of the Jewish tradition's notion of justice: “The idea of a society putting religion between parentheses in the name of religion itself is concretized in the idea of the foreigner, the ‘ger’” (in Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004], 114). “The idea that human society stands on relations independent of religion in the ecclesiastical or clerical sense of the term is carried by the Jewish religion itself” (ibid., 124). Sloves would never have formulated matters in the same language, but he certainly fully shared the sense that a secularized Europe, in which one could stand in a public space neither Jewish nor Christian, and the Jewish tradition, implied one another.
68. Steinlauf, Michael makes a related point in “Fear of Purim: Y. L. Perets and the Canonization of Yiddish Theater,” Jewish Social Studies 1, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 56Google Scholar: “For what does it finally mean for a Jew to act, to play someone else, if not to let the Ultimate Other, the non-Jew, inside?”
