In the Mirror of Mere-Khaye
Presentation at YIDDISH NEW YORK
Isabelle Rozenbaumas
December 26th 2019
This book is the outcome of what was a long process of writings, in the plural. Moishe took up his pen in 1994. The text that I read for the first time in the summer of 1997, in Berkeley, was written in Yiddish. It already had – except for chapter divisions – the shape of the text published in French by La Cause des Livres and in English by SUP.
Waiting for me to translate it in French, my father wrote his own French translation from Yiddish in a language that I call tate-loshn and that I discussed in another presentation, years ago. The title was “Double fidelity and double betrayal”. Only after me being unsatisfied with my first thirty (too elegant) pages of translation did we engage in a tate-daughter translation of this double canonic original… into French.
Around fifteen years later, it was translated by Jonathan Layton, well before we knew it was to be published by Syracuse University Press. My father passed away in November 2016. I was lucky that he had the systematic idea to record his complete manuscript on four 90 minutes cassettes which are now archived and digitized and consultable at the YIVO sound archives thanks to his granddaughter, Eléonore Biezunski. As my father was not anymore at my side, only after quite a long process of checking against these recordings was I assured that the French version had nothing left out of the nuances the voice of my father indicates (like the his allusive dray pintelekh…) It obliged me to track back all we added together in the French version and make sure nothing was lost, and that the English version was faithful to all the canonic originals. Jonathan Layton had then won his place in oylem aba, in the world to come.
What I had recognized from the first was the thought, the substantiality and seriousness of a story told by a man who had taken on history with a capital H. We will come back later to the acute awareness without self-conceit of Moishe and where that all came from. He was aware to have been through cataclysmic events of mythological dimension.
The multilingual gilgul of Moishe's text reflects the place and function Yiddish has had in our family, not only in the French relatively stable context of our immigrant life (and in my case a second American context) but also the central place of Yiddish in the multilingual context of interwar Lithuania, during the vicissitudes of the war itself and under the Soviet regime.
VAYBTAYTSH
The linguistic history of my family belies the general statement that women were less educated than men and therefore used to access the biblical and liturgical text in Yiddish translation, in vaybtaytsh.
My grand-mother Mere-Khaye grew up in the shtetl of Gorzd (Lit. Gargždai) – one of the first Jewish settlement in Lithuania. In this minuscule shtetl that Sholem Aleichem would characterized as “big as a yawn”, there was an Esperanto club that is documented with a photograph in he Washington's Holocaust Museum. I didn’t know this photograph when I chose to include in my film a Bielorussian heroe, Alexander Austraukh, explaining that compared to the “mathematical miracle” of Esperanto Yiddish was “a feminine miracle”.
Mere-Khaye was known as a pious women, praying in Hebrew and probably writing it, able to read and speak German (Gordz was in the beeline of the Prussian border), conversing in Lithuanian with her neighbors, and of course speaking, reading and surely writing our vernacular Yiddish. I don’t exactly know how and when she was schooled and educated. She was born around 1895. These facts I know not only from my father but also from my mother Rosa Portnoi who knew her from her Shul in Telz where she used to attend on Shabbes and which Mere-Khaye attended once my father’s family moved after his mother had married my grandfather Yitskhak Rozenbaum, and their home in Endreyave had burned down.
It seems that languages where a woman’s skill in this vinkl world, this corner of the world, because my mother Rosa Portnoi was able to speak seven languages. A fierce student at the Telzer Gymnasium Yavne where the language of instruction was Hebrew, she was fluent in this language (yes, with all the dikduk) and in Lithuanian (yes with all the complicated declensions), she lamented that she had missed English because Latin replaced it in the curriculum of the school (I found out in the archives it was a correct information, and that it happened in 1931, two years before my mother entered the gymnasium). Rosa also learned and was able to converse in German, adopted Russian during and after the war by way of sovietization, and made a systematic effort to acquire a correct French after immigrating to the country in 1957. And have I mentioned that – once I began to study it – she never let me make a mistake in Yiddish without interrupting to correct me. The most epic demonstration of her language skills occurred when an Italian friend, a mathematician from Bari, invited at my parents' table heard her recite – she had an uncommon memory – verses in Latin and exclaimed: “But it's Catullus!” How did the erotic poet arrive in my mother’s kosher mouth in the very tsnyesdiker gymnasium Yavne ? That is a mystery that I have never clarified.
This heymish multilingual climate is the reason I did not want to establish a glossary and included only a few footnotes when the context or some apposition or commentary didn’t shed enough light on the meaning of a Yiddish or Russian expression. The intertextuality of our multilingual jokes and incessant commentary is the colorful fabric of the book, as it was of our lives.
UNDER MANY STARS AND THE PROTECTION OF METIS
[[This colorful fabric brings me to a book written about Ulysses and its Odyssey, by an Italian author, Pietro Citati, La mente colorata, the colored mind.]]
Moishe’s memories were full of very small details where the figure of his mother plays a soothing role but also a very channeling one. Calm, discipline, anticipation and spirituality were her North Star and defining qualities. As a child, Moishe was hyper active and fidgety and a little master of many tricks and inventions. It is not only because of his wanderings at the beginning of the war or his journey home through the battlefields that this book was titled Odyssey of an Apple Thief. As we understand from his narrative full of humour, being born on May 1st was foundational to a life of labour and craft. Unlike his older brother Yosef, he wasn’t built for long hours of zitsfleysh, what you are sitting on when you dive into studying our sacred books. I will not comment on his first romance with a red hair and freckled meydele in his first heyder at Endreyave, a little girl who was a reflection of his own red hair complexion. He didn’t persist as a Narcisse.
The description of his early schooling in a Telzer heyder introduces us to the dark frightening figure of a melamed, a brutal teacher of another era with a primitive pedagogy: “What could a child do, faced with this man straight out of mythology?” What he could do? He could and did … throw a candle in the brick stove, creating a cloud that forced an evacuation of the room. [Athena did no less when casting a midst to protect Ulysses when landing in his Phocean island.] Moishe also understood how electricity worked and caused short circuits, with the same outcome. He disrupted and thwarted the rules and stopped the ruler of the locally abusive Zeus. When denounced by a mother whose child was treated unfairly by Moishe on the football field, Mere-Khaye would say: “Meyshele, all this fighting is non-sense. You have to live in peace with your fellows.” And Moishe promised.
I will not dwell upon the lovely and detailed description of Jewish life in a typical – maybe not so – shtetl in Lithuania, as I will not enter upon the details of my father’s reaction to my grandfather’s misconduct and later departure from the country toward greener pastures when Moishe was not yet ten years old, and his mother was pregnant with a fourth child, a boy that my grandfather would never get to know.
Apprenticeship to a photographer, again an abusive balebos, the hardships of a young laborer working late into the night, his solitude as the child who was “chosen" by his mother to bring money into the home: all had a decisive influence on how he dealt with the world in peacetime and in the flames of war. At one point – by this time he had already become an experienced tailor – Moishe discusses the condition of happiness for a working class teenager, breyt-geber, the bred-winner of his family, abandoned by the father. It is at the same time heartening and heartbreaking. [[And it opens of course on the subject of relation with Jewish and non Jewish partners, in his case, girls.]]
My late teacher, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, was a major scholar of the Ancient Greek world, of Greek tragedy, and in the field of historiography. As his loyal student, assistant and disciple, I have to introduce you here to a colorful Hellenistic feminine and maternal figure, the Greek Metis, goddess and concept for a specific form of ‘cunning intelligence’ as evoked in Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s opus ‘Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society’. In their words:
Metis is a type of intelligence and thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. It applies to situations which are shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic (p. 3).
I will not follow all the way Amber Jacobs' post-structuralist neo-feminist analyzes based on Luce Iragaray, Helene Cixous and Judith Buttler. But I agree when she noticed that Detienne and Vernant “demonstrate that this form of cunning intelligence was very much alive and an important aspect of Greek culture and society – but has been systematically marginalized and overlooked by modern Greek/Classics scholars and philosophers because of the dominant legacy of the Platonic metaphysical tradition that condemned and banished metis as an unreliable corrupter of the Truth. Vernant and Detienne present us with the essential features of metis, its modus operandi, its terminology and associations. [[They trace the concept back to its origins in the fields of hunting and fishing. ]] Metis, the ‘many faceted’ intelligence, belongs to the duplicitous world of traps and devices: the knot, the net, the weave, the rope, the mesh, the bait, the noose and the snare. [[Vernant and Detienne identify the fox and the octopus as creatures most richly endowed with metis and use them as models to describe the full scope of cunning intelligence that extends far beyond the world of fishing and hunting – and can be found in allusions and associations across ten centuries that separate Homer from Oppian.]] Metis is an intelligence always ‘ready to pounce’ an action based upon a ‘many faceted knowledge’ using trick, deceit and vigilance. Metis is an action generated by "weighty condensed thought informed by experience"; it seems impulsive but is not at all. Metis ‘foresees the unforeseeable’ {{?}}– seizes opportunity and is forever on the alert. Metis is ‘multiple, many colored and shifting’ – it belongs to ‘the world of appearance and becoming’ – polymorphous, pliable, fluid – it can never be pinned down or seized. [[Like the octopus ‘it assumes every form without being imprisoned in any’ .]] Metis functions through inversion and reversal; it pertains to all that is pliable, slippery and twisted, oblique, elusive and ambiguous.
And if I tell you that, in Hesiode’s theogony Zeus absorbed Metis, his first wife, "for fear that she might bring forth something stronger than his thunderbolt”, while she was already pregnant with Athena, will it make clear that what I have in mind, is the non-gendered intelligence and power that results from this absorption? Non-gendered because bi-gendered. And if I tell you that a specific episode where my father at age six or seven – burning with fever – was able to convince a storekeeper to sell him a pair of skates with metallic blades, and the way Mere-Khaye dealt with her disobedient child and the not very scrupulous store keeper, has prepared my father to survive in a reconnaissance – intelligence – unit, will you believe me? This very sophisticated intelligence unit turnover ten times its personnel. Moishe was able to join its ranks, totally illegally, after being wounded, by letting the hierarchy of a less prestigious reconnaissance unit where he was serving believe that he had been recruited by the new one, and the new one believe that he was sent.
I could go all the way through the book to analyze exile and war peregrinations, the walking, the biking, the boating, the walking again with a bundle on the shoulder, selling the watch and selling the bike, being robbed and being rescued with a piece of bread and a glass of milk by the generous Russian peasants. I could pursue with digging holes in the snow, building igloos, hiding in trees all nights long, observing the positions of the enemy, trying to bring back a wounded camarade across the lines. I could recall the after war swimming between two waters in the cogs of the Soviet regime, being a gifted student and propagandist of Marxist-Leninist school and a cadre of the fabric union, facing corruption, getting hands dirty in the smartest and most human way, saving his dignity and escaping again using stratagems and the interstices of the power iron control over the camarades of the Party. Big Brother was watching you.
In each of this occurrence we would find Métis at work:
- Using Dolos, cunning intelligence, over strength, deceit if necessary. Polytropos, he carries thousand tricks and pranks. But he also has the technical gift of construction and conception. After all Ulysses is the one who built the Trojan horse. Polymechanos.
- Sharp-eyed, being always on alert, patience and wit, are the recipe for leadership. From the aptitude to control your own impulsiveness, and even wilderness, depends your success. How do you lead a team of schoolmates in the orchard of the Catholic priests seminar and withdraw without losses? There were no military grades in Soviet army reconnaissance units. How are you prepared to you renounce hierarchy when solidarity is a life and death issue ? How do you organize raids on the Uzbeks food reserves in an hospital where you recover from typhus?
- Poikilometes, our Ulysses is variegated, multicolored, ever changing, adapting to unstable situations of hardship, oppression and unpredictable choc on the front lines which he crisscrosses.
- But also charming and engaging. How do you convince a mother with seven daughters – the most daunting exercice – that you are a decent man when you are able to drink your one liter dose of Vodka every day and you demonstrate it in front of the whole mishpokhe?
Finally we will not go through the all book and I will let you the pleasure to play this polymetis treasure hunt across the pages of Odyssey of an Apple Thief. I can only tell you that you will never be disappointed.
Reading Jonathan Layton
THE BI-GENDERED RUSSIAN DOLL
What happened, after all, in this translation adventure, to her father’s daughter? It is not insignificant to write as a translator, let us say a particular translator, the memoirs of one’s author, of the author of one’s days. Double betrayal, double fidelity, these are the lines of force of our relation to history, to our history. Why double? Why not make it simpler? Because our history is not only a continuum of events bound together by chains of causality. It is also the result of the rigorous and patient work of elaborations, of reconstructions, of representations. Nourished by family speech, leaning on my father’s narrative, plunged into my own internal questions, I put my steps in my father’s ones when I made a film with Michel Grosman: a reflection on Yiddish, its flamboyance, its denial, its destructions, its persistence.
But what happened really in the chain of transmission. I could have been satisfied to identify the lisping Litvak Yiddish of my father with Moishe rabeinu’s stammering and draw a parallel between their leadership qualities. I could have been simply a good and loyal Jewish daughter. And not adventure on the ancient Greek field of battle. But something was missing of the variegated multitude of our people. I tend to think that – not unlike the generations of Titans, Gods and semi-humans of Hesiod’s Theogony – we are the vehicle for the generations that precede us and follow us. When we engage in producing a new human being we are at least 32 (let’s speak only of the four last generations) 32 in the bed or … the test tube.
Through my film, through my father’s book, I was reaching out to Mere-Khaye, murdered only 12 years before I was born. Her thoughtful and clever, quiet and wise education made my life and that of my brother possible. Raising her sons, enduring her husband’s philandering and departure, asking Moishe to undertake his escape without her has given life to me. This disloyal Olympian grandfather who undertook his own self salvaging Odyssey, he amassed hundreds of Yiddish books in Paris, that were lost by his third family.
Darning, patching, mending this history allowed me to take up the thread that bound me, not in the abstract to earlier generations, but in a very concrete way to Mere-Haye in particular, to Tsivie and Aaron in particular, to Yitshak, to Haye-Dvoyre, to Hassye-Rivke and to Baruch in particular, so that in the end they inhabit me without haunting me. We are the polychromatic iridescent fabric of past generations.
