Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Collection Daniel W. Dietrich II, The Daniel W. Dietrich Trust local traditions through linguistic, technological,
territorial, and social dislocations and inno-
vations. This anticipatory character, itself a
consequence of modernity’s belatedness in the
peripheral context, demonstrates the signifi-
cance of the periphery to the center: one can
never identify a center without recognizing
how it differs from and relates to the margins.
As a critique of modernity, the history
of modernism begins in Jewish-language
literature at least three-quarters of a century
before what most Anglo-American critics
have identified as the origins of metropolitan
modernism, with the 1815 publication of Reb
Nakhman of Breslov’s collection of tales Seyfer
sipurey mayses (roughly, “the Holy Book of sto-
ries”). Reb Nakhman’s stories, told in the last
four years of his brief life (1772–1810), are the
first autonomously and originally conceived
fictional narratives to be published in Yiddish,
as well as Hebrew, in Eastern Europe. Well
known for their fantastic plots, their fragmen-
tary narrative structures, and the deliberate
obscurity of Reb Nakhman’s motivations in
telling them, these tales connect personal crises
in Reb Nakhman’s redemptive project as a
religious leader of Eastern European Jews with
a scathing social critique of the politics among
Barnett Newman. Black Fire 1, 1961. his religious rivals, the interaction of Jews and
Oil on exposed canvas, 114 x 84 inches (289.5 x 213.4 cm). non-Jews, and the lures of a belatedly burgeon-
ing modernity encroaching on traditional
Jewish life at the moment that its autonomous
social structures were overtaken with their an-
nexation by the Austrian and Russian empires
at the end of the 18th century.
When subsequent Jewish-language
writers such as Mendele Moykher-Sforim
(writing in both Yiddish and Hebrew), Sholem
Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz (both of whom wrote
primarily in Yiddish), Yosef Chaim Brenner, and
Shmuel Yosef Agnon (who both wrote primarily
in modern Hebrew) harness these grievances
through a comparable anxiety toward language,
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literary structure, and the historical location of enlightenment subordinates and domesticates
their culture between its origins in Jewish tra- myth to the same extent that “enlightened”
dition and its participation in global modernity, civilization dominates and marginalizes the
they provide a model for the formal and politi- cultures it subordinates. Implicit in the epic
cal prerequisites of modernism that derives struggle of man against nature, though explicit
from social history as well as narrative form. in later tragedies such as Euripedes’ Medea, is
Modernism in this formulation is the process the conflict between Greek and Barbarian; from
by which modernity becomes self-conscious a “mastery” of nature, Greek civilization moves
of itself, which occurs in peripheral cultures inevitably to the domination of other groups
through the persistence and resistance of a of people, a process duplicated in every other
traditional discourse in an era of crisis. Because imperial culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno
of the belatedness of modernity in the Eastern suggest, enlightenment’s repression of myth
European context, these writers articulate an creates a psychic wound that modernity inflicts
anticipatory modernism that critiques the on others as well as the self. The task of resist-
discontents of modernization. Where literary ing the internalization of this violence, awaken-
modernism in its conventional, impressionistic ing from the nightmare of history by mobilizing
definition develops in a metropolitan culture the discourse of myth politically, is the work
at a moment of departure from a dying or lost of modernism, and Jewish-language modernists
tradition, in peripheral cultures this phenom- stand at the vanguard of this struggle.
enon anticipates the metropolitan canon
suggested readings
because the tradition refuses to submit to a
Conventional (Exemplary) Descriptions of Modernism
regime of forgetting necessary for the “business” Peter Gay. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. (New York:
of modernization to proceed. Norton 2007; 2010).
One essential yet complicating concept Irving Howe. “The Idea of the Modern” (1967),
in the formation of Jewish-language literature’s Selected Writings, 1950–1990. (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1990). 140 –166.
anticipatory modernism is secularization —
as distinct from secularity. Though modernist Toward a New Definition
Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The
Jewish literatures are not secular insofar as they
Experience of Modernity. (New York: Penguin, 1982; 1988).
never lose contact with the rhetoric, symbol
Marc Caplan. How Strange the Change: Language,
system, and cosmology of traditional Judaism, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.
they play an integral role in the social and (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, forthcoming).
intellectual modernization program of nearly Jacques Derrida. Monolingualism of the Other: or, the
every ideological movement available to Eastern Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. (Stanford:
European Jewry. Jewish modernism reconciles Stanford University Press 1996; 1998).
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