MOYSHE-LEYB
KHASHKES (MOSES LÖB CHASHKES, DANTSIG) (September 27, 1848-December 15, 1906)[1]
He was born in Vilna (or in Bikhov),
Byelorussia. He studied in various
yeshivas, including the Volozhin Yeshiva, before becoming a follower of the
Jewish Enlightenment and going to Zhitomir (in the 1860s), where he attended
rabbinical school (then under the influence of Khayim-Zelig Slonimski). He soon left the school, studied for a longer
period of time in the 1870s, and established himself as a writer. He later lived in Moscow, from where he was
banished by decree in 1892, then in Riga, in Warsaw (in 1890s), and in St.
Petersburg. Khashkes wrote in several
languages, although he began in Hebrew.
He contributed (poems and articles) to the Hebrew-language press in the
1860s and published the following works in Hebrew: Nite naamanim (Seeds of the faithful), poems and essays (Warsaw,
1869), 56 pp.; Haperaḥim
(The flowers) (Odessa, 1869), 80 pp.; Nevel
vekhinor (Harp and lyre), poetry (Odessa, 1871), 64 pp.; Tsipor deror (Sparrow), poems and
satires from Jewish life (Odessa, 1872), 46 pp.; Kol hator (Voice of the times), poetry and a story about social
life of Jews in Russia (St. Petersburg, 1975), 136 pp.; Maḥat bevasar heḥai (A needle in flesh), satirical poems
depicting the life of people at a low social stratum (St. Petersburg, 1877),
136 pp.; Sefer hayomi (The daily
book), diary of a Jewish author in Russia over the years 1880-1881, in verse
(St. Petersburg, 1881), 192 pp.—of an autobiographical character; Kol shire moshe ḥashkes
(Collected poems of Moyshe Ḥashkes),
part 1 (Warsaw, 1896), 106 pp.; Demaot
atsurot, shirim (Tears restrained, poems), including poems that he had
written earlier in Russian (St. Petersburg, 1906), 263 pp., appearing shortly
after the author’s death.
In Yiddish Khashkes wrote in verse
and prose for: Kol mevaser (Herald), Kol laam (The people’s voice), Yudishes folksblat (Jewish people’s
newspaper), Hoyz-fraynd (House
friend), Varshaver yudisher
familyen-kalendar (Warsaw Jewish family calendar), and others, using his
own name or the pseudonyms “Khashke di vilnerke” (Khashke the girl from Vilna)
or Moyshe ben Yankev Dantsig. In book
form he published in Yiddish (according to Zalmen Reyzen’s Leksikon): Al haadorim
(To the crowd), “a call to all devoted Jewish children” (Pressburg, 1863), 43
pp.—according to Kh. D. Fridberg’s Bet
eked sefarim (List of books), the author of this work was Hillel
Likhtenshteyn; Seyfer al haadorim
hasheyni (To the crowd, two), the second call “to all Jewish
children”—“this book was written so that the Jew should know himself and that his
children should be rescued from Gentile practices” (Lvov, 1869), 92 pp. (this
follows Reyzen’s Leksikon, though in Bet eked sefarim the author’s name is
given as Rabbi Moyshe Soyfer); Der Litvak
(The Lithuanian), “a variety of Yiddish poems, serious ones, also satirical
ones, one of them entitled ‘Der Litvak,’ properly characterized by Moyshe ben
Yankev Dantsig” (Odessa: M. A. Belinson, 1869), 48 pp.; Di litvetshke (The Lithuanian woman), “a variety of Yiddish poems,
one of them entitled ‘Di litvetshke’” (Odessa: L. Nitshe, 1879), 42 pp.; Odeser voyle yunger oder tsen mayl fun odes
brent der gehenem (Happy Odessan youth, but hell is burning [only] ten
miles from Odessa), from “Paltiel Langhandiker and Yirakhmiel Fingerklepke,”
part 1 (Odessa, 1871), 64 pp. (the full novel, entitled Odeser voyle yunger, appeared anonymously in Odessa in 1872); Lider funem hertsen (Poems from the
heart), written by Moyshe ben Yankev Khashkes using the cover “Khashke di
Vilnerke” (Cracow: Yoysef Fisher, 1888), 48 pp.; and Di yudene (The older Jewish woman), stories; among others. Khashkes poems (for the most part of a
wedding entertainer’s sort, à Elyokim Tsunzer, but without the
talent) contained a bit of social satire as well as ethnic pathos—depending on
the time and change in mood, something shared by many Enlightenment writers in
Yiddish between the mid-1860s and late 1880s.
When in “Di litvetshke,” for example, Khashkes sarcastically ridiculed
the rabbis who “raise wedding canopies over cemeteries,” while Jews “collapse
like sheaves” from “hunger, cholera, and other troubles,” he was thinking of
religious Jewish elementary schools in the late 1880s: “the crowded, filthy
classrooms with old, greasy texts,” if “no higher in education, in learning, in
teaching, then in feelings, in dignity” (from his Lider funem hertsen). Of
considerable more literary quality was his novel Odeser voyle yunger, which was written following the example of the
very popular Russian novel of the time, Peterburgskye
trushchoby (The slums of St. Petersburg) by Vsevolod Krestovsky. Depictions of the underworld was a current
style at the time in literature, and Khashkes attempted in Yiddish to describe
the poor saloonkeepers and roadhouse owners, “cellars and slums,” thieves and
“belt-tailors” (N. Oyslender provides a detailed analysis of the novel in his
work on “Mendeles forgeyers” [Mendele’s predecessors], in the anthology Mendele un zayn tsayt [Mendele and his
times]). Khashkes’s books in Russian
were: Kurtina muchenichestba evreev
(The flower-bed of martyrdom of the Jews) (St. Petersburg, 1879); a translation
from the fifth volume of Heinrich Graetz’s history (Moscow, 1880); a
translation of M. J. Schleiden’s Die
Romantik des Martyriums bei den Juden im Mittelalter (The romance of
martyrdom among the Jews in the middle ages) as Stradaniya︡, bi︠e︡dstviya︡ i zashchitniki evreev (Sufferings,
calamities, and protectors of the Jews) (St. Petersburg, 1882)[2]; a translation of
Ellenberg’s Leiden der Jüden
(Suffering of the Jews); Stikhi i mysli
(Verse and thought), poetry and ideas (St. Petersburg, 1888), 71 pp.; Stikhotvorenii︠a︡ (Poems) (Moscow,
1892), 293 pp.; Abarbanel’ (Abarbanel), a drama in four
acts (Vilna, 1897), 54 pp., translated from Russian into Hebrew by Y. L. Gamzu
in 1893 (see the review in Voskhod
[Sunrise] 12 [1894], pp. 23-25); Evreiskii
litovets, Yohan Shvabski (Jewish Lithuanian, Johan Shvabsky), a drama in
five acts (third printing in 1897).
Khashkes
lived his last years in St. Petersburg and supported himself by selling his
religious texts. Shoyel Ginzburg, the
first editor of the St. Petersburg-based Fraynd
(Friend), described Khashkes’s way of life at that time as: he was “a literary
beggar of the new, stylish sort. Always
well dressed, with a top hat on his head, he used to walk around the hotels, searching
for Jews by their family names, intruding upon them in their rooms, and selling
them his treatises. He was travel about
the warm bathhouses and spas and look for clients. He would demands, threaten, and not leave
until receiving a ruble or two.”
Ginzburg also recounted that Khashkes had a poor reputation in Jewish
literary circles at the time in St. Petersburg and that after his death the
Yiddish press dedicated not a single obituary to him. He died in St. Petersburg after a long
illness without seeing his final book—Demaot atsurot which appeared in print just after his passing. His books are now rare.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1, with
a bibliography; Z. Zilbertsvayg, Leksikon fun idishn teater (Handbook of
the Yiddish theater), vol. 1; Jewish
Encyclopedia, vol. 3, p. 679, with a bibliography; Encyclopaedia Judaica (in German), vol. 5, pp.
350-51, with a bibliography; S. Wininger, Grosse Jüdische National Biographie (Great Jewish national
biography) (Czernowitz, 1925), vol. 1, p. 541, with a bibliography; Sh.
Ginzburg, in Forverts (New York)
(August 16, 1931); Z. Reyzen, in Yivo-bleter
(Vilna) 13 (1938), pp. 606, 616; N. Oyslender, in Mendele un zayn tsayt (Mendele and his time), ed. Arn Gurshteyn
(Moscow, 1940), pp. 148-56; Dr. Y. Shatski, in Yivo-bleter (New York) 23 (1944), p. 133; Sh.
Shreberk, Zikhroynes (Memoirs) (Tel
Aviv, 1955), p. 138.
Yitskhok Kharlash
[1] The dates of Khashkes’s birth and death differ
according to different encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. Compared with the dates of his published
books and the events in his life, the dates given above appear to be the
correct ones.
[2] Translator’s note. Other sources give this as a
translation by Khashkes of a work by Heinrich Ellenberg and Kurtina muchenichestba evreev as
Khashkes’s translation of Schleiden’s work.
No comments:
Post a Comment