In this it has a similar ending to “On the Other Side of the Bridge” (1910) by the mainstream Realist and Naturalist Yoysef Opatoshu (1917: 148, 1966: 89). Moreover, the story concludes with an ironic caress: the child narrator is rocked to sleep by a lullaby, seemingly far from the anxiety of his surroundings. Thus, “Expectation” ( Dervartung/ Tsipiya) may well be conventionally linear, with a beginning, middle and end, with the type characters of an overworked and overwrought father and a caring, very maternal mother as seen by a seven-year-old child (like the unhappily ending “Stories for Jewish Children” by Sholem Aleichem). However, in Peri’s opinion, Birshteyn was much more “sophisticated” (personal communication, 5 Nov. There are two mothers, the second a classic worrier, and a pair of Nineteenth Century juvenile and ingénue lovebirds who travel throughout Romania as members of a theatrical troupe (like that of Avrom Goldfaden?) managed by a populist clown (1999: 6, 20, 21, 37). There were, likewise, shtetl (‘Jewish village’) characters: in Sholem Aleichem’s Blonzende shteren (“Wandering Stars”), for example, there are two fathers, one rich and one poor, one robust and despotic and one bedraggled and weak (suggesting that the social polarizations of Sholem Aleichem, in contrast to Birshteyn, may well have been “ petit bourgeois,” see Roskies 1995: 374/ n.10). Bitakhon, also meaning “security”) that God would command day out of the darkness. By this he could have been thinking of the “soul” (or personality) of Yiddish, in which the “transmigration” was easier and more natural since mame-loshen (the Ashkenazic or European “mother tongue”) already contained and retained a host of Hebrew expressions.īrenner had even translated Sholem Aleichem (1889-1916) a close contemporary from the Ukraine, and found himself struggling with the formulation of Tevye’s folk proverbs, tenderness and sense of Jewish fate in a language of realizable hope, not just of passive “trust” (Yid. In addition, well before him, Haim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934), Israel’s “National Poet,” had styled such linguistic polyvalence a “tragic phenomena” to which the “reincarnation” of Autotranslation was the painful and necessary solution: “The soul must be transferred from one body to another” (Chaver 2004: 118). Avraham Shlonsky, a trend-setting Hebrew poet in the literary bohemia of “Little Tel Aviv,” had even called the co-existence of the two languages “this catastrophe of bilingualism…We want Israeli breathing to be entirely Hebrew, with both lungs” (emphasis in original, cited in Chaver 2004: 106).
META MEANING HEBREW WINDOWS
Likewise, Birshteyn, a Yiddish writer (and thus, to some extent, a committed Yiddishist), first arrived in Israel from Australia at this time (1950), in a country newly drunken and wobbly with Independence (1948), and met what must have seemed like a second Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazis shattered the windows of Jewish stores. Also, it is unsettling to revisit the actual scene of the Israeli humiliation of Yiddish, when it was a despised, even “foreign” (and thus non-Jewish!) language when the Bursteins, stars of the New York Yiddish stage, could tour Israel in the 1950’s only to find “Zionist hooligans breaking the theatre windows and the government imposing a special tax on their show, because it was in Yiddish and not in Hebrew…” (“Obituary of Lillian Lux,” Economist 2005, p.86). It is surprising, then, to learn that the story was originally conceived and published in Yiddish (in A mantel fun a prints, 1969 – “The Coat of a Prince”).
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