AVROM-BER GOTLOBER (AVRAHAM BER GOTTLOBER)
(January 14, 1811-April 12, 1899)
He was born in Starokonstantinov, Volhynia, Ukraine, where his father
Khayim Gotlob was a cantor. For a short
time he studied in a religious elementary school, later with an itinerant
teacher and other teachers under his father’s supervision. The young Gotlober also sang and even planned
to become a cantor himself in a reformed synagogue. Following the customs of that time, Gotlober
was shortly after his bar mitzvah married to a girl twelve years old from the
town of Chernihiv (Chernigov), and he was provided with room-and-board at the
home of his father-in-law, a zealous Hassid.
Under his influence, Gotlober also became a Hassid, a Chabadnik, and
studied Kabalah. When Tsar Nikolai I’s
decree concerning military service for teenagers was announced (August 1827),
he and his father took off for Tarnopol, Galicia. There he met Yosef Perl, and under his
influence he began to take up Jewish Enlightenment ideas. Meanwhile, his father passed away, and he
returned to his father-in-law. He lived
happily with his wife who bore him a son.
As he had become an early follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, the
Hassidim together with his father-in-law raised a huge storm, reported him to
the rebbe, and compelled him to divorce his wife and abandon his child. Gotlober wanted to go abroad to study, and
his relatives made a second match for him in marriage—this time with the
daughter of an early Zionist. Unable to
live with his second wife, he quickly departed.
In the interim, his three-year-old son died, and Gotlober, embittered
and furious, set out on a stubborn struggle against Hassidism and became the
“fiery missionary of the Enlightenment ideal” (Alexander Tsederbaum). In 1830 he was in the town of Bar, staying
with a fellow enlightened Jew, and he was introduced to Mendl Lefin’s writings
in both Hebrew and Yiddish. This
afforded him a stimulus to try his out own efforts in the Yiddish
language. He left for Odessa, and from
there to Kishinev, Dubosar, Dubno, and other cities; along the way he came to
know enlightened figures, survived by teaching, worked as a resident tutor, and
earnestly studied the German language, translated Schiller into Hebrew and
Yiddish, composed amusing couplets in Yiddish, wrote melodies for them himself,
and—like one of those “sociable people” of times past—sang them by himself for
listeners. In 1832 he met R. Yitskhok
Ber Levenzon in Kremenets, who made a great
impression on him. He married for the
third time (in Berdichev), and then settled in Dubno, where followers of the
Enlightenment in the city formed a group around him. He had by this point written poetry in Yiddish,
but the great majority of that work is now lost. In 1837 he visited Zamość and there met Dr.
Shloyme Etinger, who read aloud for him his comedy Serkele. Impressed by this work, Gotlober in 1838
wrote his own three-act comedy, Der dektukh, oder tsvey khupes in eyn nakht
(The bridal veil, or two weddings in one night), which for a long period of
time—just like his other writings in Yiddish—circulated in manuscript and
finally in 1876, in a corrupted text, was published in Warsaw. In 1830s and 1840s, Gotlober wrote frequently
in Yiddish, although his attachment to the language was full of
contradictions. On the one hand, the
enlightened Jew in him despised this “language without a literature, without a
grammar, without logic” (from a letter of his to a well-known lady), and on the
other hand, the man of the people and writer for the people in him understood
that “one can only help our people and heal their wounds when one speaks to them
in their language” (from a letter to Yehoshua Shternberg). In 1841, during the period in which Max
Lilienthal had begun his mission to assist the Russian government by opening
schools for Jewish children, Gotlober traveled through Jewish towns,
campaigning for Lilienthal’s ideas. After
the failure of Lilienthal’s plans, Gotlober left his family in Dubno and went
to Zhitomir to prepare to take the examinations for a teacher. When he passed these examinations in 1851, he
was appointed a school teacher, first in Kamenets-Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi), later (1855) in Starokonstantinov, and in 1865, as an expression of
appreciation for his highly successful pedagogical work, he was appointed a
teacher in the Zhitomir rabbinical school.
The next seven or eight years were the happiest of his life. This was the radiant period of the
Enlightenment in Russia, and Gotlober was one of the most important spokesmen in
this period. Like many other
Enlightenment leaders, he also defended the Russification policies of the
Tsarist government concerning Jews. In
his political and social views of the time, he was just as conflicted as he was
in his relationship to Yiddish. On the
one hand, a reactionary, an opponent of every sort of revolution (see his
Hebrew poem, “Al hashana hayotset shenat tr”ḥ” [From the outgoing year to
1848]; and his pamphlet Igeret tsaar baale ḥayim [Letter on the
prevention of cruelty to living things]) (Zhitomir, 1868), 34 pp. On the other hand, he was a courageous fighter,
with humor, against the rich ringleaders (Der gilgl [The metamorphosis]
of 1871 and other works in Yiddish).
Over the
course of three decades—from 1840s to the 1870s—Gotlober wrote his best Yiddish
work, all of which was first published much later. Much of this had been lost together with his
poetry collection Feldblumen (Flowers of the field), but in the late
1920s and early 1930s, Yiddish researchers in Soviet Russia discovered a great
portion of them. In chronological order,
Gotlober’s Yiddish works were composed as follows: Dos shtrayml mitn
kapelyush (The Hassidic fur-edged hat and fancy lady’s hat), 1841; Der
seim oder di groyse asife in vald (The Sejm or the large assembly in the
forest) and Ven di khayes hobn oysgeklibn dem leyb far a meylekh (When
the animals selected the lion for king), a satirical fable in poetic form, 1842
(initially published in Zhitomir in 1863); Der binde yisroelik, a highly
popular poem, 1843 (initially published in Hayoets [The advisor],
Bucharest, 1876); Gzeyre daytshen (Decree of the Germans), 1845; Dos
groyse kints oder dos bisele mints (The big child or small change), 1945
(published serially in his later work, Der gilgl, and in fuller form in
the anthology Tsaytshrift (Periodical writings) 5 [Minsk, 1931]); in the
very same issue of Tsyatshrift was also published for the first time
Gotlober’s poem Di deputatn (The deputies), his didactic poem Di
farkerte velt (The reversed world), his poems Rav itsik (R. Itsik)
and Mayn lid (My poem), and two variants of Ish khosid (Hassidic
man), which had first been published in Sholem-Aleykhem’s Yudishe
folks-biblyotek (Jewish people’s library) 2 (1889). In volume 1 of Di historishe shriftn fun
yivo (Historical writings from YIVO) (Warsaw, 1929), Gotlober’s poem Der
yud in kiev (The Jew in Kiev) was published for the first time—it had also
been in the lost collection of poetry.
All of these works were known to have been written in the late
1840s. In 1863 (when this was actually
written is unknown), his major work Dos lid funem kugl (The song of the
pudding) appeared in Odessa—it was a parody of Schiller’s “Das Lied von der
Glocke” (The Song of the Bell). In 1871 Kol
mevaser (The herald) published his well-known, perhaps best known, work, Der
gilgl, humoristishe ertseylung, aroysgegebn fun dem gabes eynikl (The
metamorphosis, a humorous story, published by the synagogue warden’s grandson);
it appeared later in book form in Warsaw (1896), 110 pp. This was an early imitation of Yitskhok
Erter’s Hatsofe levet yisrael (Watchman at the house of Israel), a sharp
social satire on certain aspects of Jewish ways of life. In 1873 the Zhitomir rabbinical school closed
down, and Gotlober returned to Dubno where a son-in-law of his lived. The following year, he set out once again
into the world to collect subscriptions for his Hebrew translation of Lessing’s
Nathan der Weise (Nathan the wise), rendered: Natan haḥakham. He visited numerous cities in Galicia, and he
came to Vienna as well, where Perets Smolenskin helped him published the
book. Back in Dubno in 1876 he founded
the journal Haboker or (Good morning), which until 1878 came out in
Lemberg and thereafter was transferred to Warsaw. The pogroms of the 1880s elicited a crisis in
Gotlober’s mood. In place of the
Enlightenment’s earlier loyalty to the government, Ḥibat-tsiyon (Love of
Zion, early Zionists) emerged, and in his newer poems he called on older
writers to: “Go to school,” in Yidishes folksblat (Jewish people’s
newspaper) 10 (St. Petersburg, 1882)—to go to Palestine (Di mame mit di
kinder, der yudisher veker [The mother with her children, the Jewish
alarm]) (Odessa, 1882); and he beat his chest “Al ḥet” (For the sin of…) for
his earlier call for Russification and assimilation. With Haboker or discontinued after
this, in 1886 Gotlober lived for a short time in Dubno and in Rovno, and then
he moved to his daughter and son-in-law in Bialystok. The last, very valuable, and very interesting
work by him in Yiddish was Zikhroynes vegn yudishe shrayber (Memoirs of
Jewish writers), published in Sholem-Aleykhem’s Yudishe folks-biblyotek,
vol. 1 (Kiev, 1888).
In his final
years, he became blind, and he died at the age of eighty-eight. Gotlober’s personal reminiscences, and all
the materials about his life and activities, which were of enormous value for
the history of Jewish culture and literature in the nineteenth century, were
translated and adapted by Ayzik (Isaac) Fridkin in his book Avrom-ber
gotlober un zayn epokhe (Avrom-Ber Gotlober and his epoch) (Vilna: Kletskin,
1925), 380 pp. An edition of his
collected works in Yiddish, prepared by Zalmen Reyzen and Ayzik Fridkin, was
published as the second volume of Avrom-ber gotlober un zayn epokhe in
Vilna by the same publishing house in 1927, 257 pp. Memoirs about Gotlober were written by Y. Ḥ.
Zagorodski, in Sefer hashana (Yearbook) (1900), and by his student, L. Feygin,
in the Bialystok serial Dos naye lebn (The new life) 14 (1925). Gotlober’s manuscripts have been preserved by
Dr. Israel Tsinberg.
Sources:
Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon, vol. 1 (with bibliography); Z. Zilbertsvayg, Teater-leksikon,
vol. 1 (with bibliography); Nokhum Shtif, Di eltere yidishe literatur
(Older
Yiddish literature) (Kiev, 1929), pp. 119-42; Z. Skudetski, in Tsaytshrift
5 (Minsk, 1931); Maks Erik and A. Rozentsvayg, Di yidishe literatur in XIX
yorhundert Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century) (Kiev-Kharkov,
1935); Dr. Y. Tsinberg, Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn (The
history of Jewish literature), vol. 8, book 2 (Vilna, 1936), pp. 202-15; Y.
Riminik, in the anthology Mendele un zayn tsayt (Mendele and his times)
(Moscow, 1940), pp. 221-25; Shmuel Niger, Dertseylers un romanistn (Storytellers and novelists) (New York, 1946), pp. 60-63;
Dr. Y. Klausner, Historiya
shel hasifrut haivrit haḥadasha
(History of modern Hebrew literature), vol. 5 (Jerusalem, 1948), pp. 121-33,
331-89, 396; Sh. Lastik, Di yidishe literatur biz di klasiker (Jewish
literature until the classics) (Warsaw, 1950), pp. 200-5; A. Tsaylin, in Yivo-bleter
36 (New York, 1952); Dr. Y. Shatski, Geshikhte fun yidn in varshe
(History of Jews in Warsaw), vol. 3 (New York, 1953), pp. 279-81, 311; Dov
Sadan, Kaarat egozim (A bowl of nuts) (Tel Aviv, 1952), see index; Y.
Likhtnboym, in the anthology Hasipur haivri (The Hebrew story) (Tel
Aviv, 1955), p. 516; Kh. Sh. Kazdan, Fun kheyder un shkoles biz tsisho
(From religious and secular primary schools to Tsisho) (Mexico, 1956), see
index; A. Dimov, in Tsukunft (New York) (April 1957); A. A. Roback, The
Story of Yiddish Literature (New York, 1940), p. 88.
Yitskhok Kharlash
No comments:
Post a Comment