Fishke der Krumer

This paper will interrogate a small but dramatic moment in the history of Hebrew literature. In 1903 H. N. Bialik translated several chapters from Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Yiddish masterpiece Fishke der Krumer. Soon Abramovitsh himself took over the project and in 1906 published his own translation. Abramovitsh kept most of Bialik’s work but also significantly revised it. This paper argues that Bialik’s text and Abramovitsh’s revisions of it expose two different approaches towards the totalizing gesture: while Bialik sees fragmentation as a predicament to be solved Abramovitsh finds it to be an endangered asset.

Zionist national politics, as well as Hebrew literature, were a project of ingathering: the fragmented Jewish existence was to be ingathered in artistic and political action that would represent the totality of Jewish experience. The alterity of the Jew, exemplified in diasporic multilingualism was to be replaced by the strangeness of the foreigner, who does belong somewhere and therefore is recognizable by the politics of nation state. In this context two different political notions are visible: one advocates for the mobility and recognition found in a complex kind of universality, while the other views any universalizing or totalizing gesture as potentially harmful.

Bialik’s version of Fishke der Krumer celebrates the transformation of the Jewish subject into clear, universal and total Hebrew subject. Abramovitsh’s translation offers a text that resists the totality of the national language and draws its power from the fragmentation of the text, thus questioning the axiomatic theoretical and political conventions of the time.