The Polyphony of Fishke der Krumer

There can be no better time to reread the most protean and puzzling of Abramovitsh’s novels than in 2017, the 100th anniversary of his death. So doing, I wish to revisit the scholarly debate that it has engendered and to advance my own, ongoing exploration of “Jewspeak,” the evolution of speech in modern Yiddish writing. Two critical insights will inform my presentation: (1) M. Mezheritsky’s observation that the novel be read as a dialectically structured series of monologues, each endowed with a different style and sensibility (1927:127). (2) Focusing exclusively on the voice and character of Mendele, Jeffrey Fleck reads the novel as a species of skaz, the illusion of oral speech as performed by a lower-class character. He considers “Mendele” as “a series of voices attached to a proper name that neither add up, reveal psychological depth, nor reward efforts to find human analogies” (1983:181). The purpose of my paper is demonstrate exactly how this “narrative multiplicity” is realized through the Yiddish speech of its characters, both major and minor, male and female, learned and humble, merchant and pauper, criminal and law-abiding. I propose that in Fishke der krumer as nowhere else, Abramovitsh achieved the polyphony that for Mikhail Bakhtin, the great theoretician of prosaics, represented the acme of the modern novel.