Letteratura yiddish-russa

After concluding his studies in pedagogy, he published his first book, Gedanken un motivn lider in proze (Thoughts and Motives - Poems in Prose) at the age of 23. It was a collection of short texts on philosophical and speculative arguments, written under the pseudonym “Der Nister” (The hidden one), a name which he continued to use for his entire literary career and which became almost a second identity. This bizarre pseudonym, of distinct mystic connotation, recalls the Chassidic legend of the Thirtysix Justs who, hidden from the world and from themselves, are a justification and basis of the existence of the world itself. From 1907 to 1920 Nister published a series of works which touch various registers of a vast and complex experimentation, developing, in the years 1914-1928, an idiosyncratic vein -- that is the symbolic narrative which he brought to a level of great complexity.
The twenties marked the pinnacle of the literary production and maturity of the author. Expatriated in 1920, as were a great part of the Russian and Jewish intellighenzia, Nister moved to Berlin where he published his symbolic narratives in an edition in two volumes which came out respectively in 1922 and 1923, entitled Gedakht (Meditation). This collection was published again in the Soviet Union in 1929, three years after the author’s reentry, in a version slightly different from the original. A third volume of symbolic narratives, already foreseen by Nister in the Berlin edition came out in Kiev in 1929 and entitiled Fun mayne giter (Of my possessions). The two collections constitute the highest peak and also the summary of his symbolic production. Nister elaborated a complex network of metaphors which recall, as in an infinite labyrinth of mirrors, the recurrent themes of Chassidic mysticism and, in particular, to the symbolic narrations of the Chassidic rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, to the figures of German Romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffman, to the fairy tales, the verses, the sing-songs of childhood.
The hypnotic rhythm of the long phrases, a style which was often unusual for the continual inversion of subject and predicate - not common in current Yiddish - and his predilection for the conjunction “un” (and) which he uses repeatedly as though the literary text were a liturgical path, giving his tales an archaic and, at the same time, suggestive and enigmatic touch. Personal experiences and literary interests interweave in the figures of eternal travelers, anonymous heroes of stories played in Kafkian spaces. The all internal debate of these tireless explorers of existence becomes in the end the desperate sum of the overwhelming, increasing pressure of the regime on the individual and artistic liberty to the Jewish intellectuals. Nister, himself, victim of the Soviet censorship, was violently attacked in 1929 after the publication in the newspaper Di royte velt (The Red World) of his last symbolic story Unter a ployt (Under the fence). The defamatory campaign led by Moyshe Litvakov, the president at the time of the union of writers of the Yiddish language and guardian of the Soviet “orthodoxy” in the literary field, took on extremely aggressive tones. As in many other cases, among which the previous attack on Dovid Bergelson and on Leib Kvitko, these sort of summary trials in the literary enclave of the Yiddish language, was the product of a situation of elevated internal disintegration, worsened by mechanisms of self-censorship and by a strong outside pressure exerted by the controlling bodies of the party. Nister was forced to abandon the symbolism from which the works of the best years were created. The passage to a new style that would still allow him to write was a difficult process, a thankless chore. In a letter written in the thirties to his brother Motl in Paris, Nister says “For one like me, who has worked so hard to perfect his own way of writing, passing from symbolism to realism is very difficult. It’s not a matter of technique -- it’s about being reborn, about turning one’s own soul inside out, like a sock.”
The thirties were years of survival in the shadow of a power increasingly ill-disposed towards the Jewish citizens. Nister writes reports on travel and translates in Yiddish works by Boris Pilniak, Lew Tolstoi, Victor Hugo, A Razumovski, Jack London and A. S. Turgheniev. One of the constant veins in his literary production, the stories in verse (mayzelekh) for children, which he began writing as early as 1915-16, once again become a means of support. Nister publishes four collections in the thirties. The draft of the novel Di mishpokhe Mashber (The Mashber Family) is from the same period.
This family saga, an affresco of the nineteenth-century Jewish Berditschev, appeared in Moscow, almost by chance, in a volume in 1939. Nister, according to witnesses of the time, received a proposal to publish his novel, after years of interdiction for having helped a Soviet bureaucrat in difficulty in the street of Kharkov. The Mashber Family, whose second volume followed two years later, was unanimously acclaimed by the critics of the time. The success of that great realist epic did not actually last long. The limited edition of the two volumes sold out quickly and the expansion of the world conflict made a second edition impossible. The novel was never reprinted in the Soviet Union. The third volume of the novel, to which Nister makes reference in one of his letters, was never found.
During World War II, Nister was an active member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. His personal commitment as a writer also manifested itself in the short stories written between 1940 and 1945, which appeared for the first time in Moscow in 1943, in a collection entitiled Khurbones (destruction, holocaust).
These short stories, which the author himself calls Faln (Cases), using an ascetic and neutral terminology, are rather reports of “real happenings”, events experienced by people he knew during the first years of Nazi occupation in Poland. The characters are only slightly protected by having different names. [In Italian - Prologo di un sterminio. Racconti yiddish dalla Polonia occupata Marsilio, Venezia 2000.]
Nachman Mayzel, friend, mentor and editor, writes on the subject in the preface of the posthumous volume Dertseylung und eseyen (Tales and Essays, New York, 1957) which is a collection of Nister’s stories on the years of war: “....Der Nister did not invent the characters described by him in the dramatic and tragic ’cases’. He simply used examples from his circle of acquaintances and described them in those terrible situations. When the stories came to our journal, I wrote a letter to Der Nister and I told him that in those characters described in his stories, in those characters who entered Hitler’s hell, I recognized common friends and acquaintances (I had also recognized my father and my sister in the story Meyer Landschaft). He answered: ‘Yes, it is so. You are right.’”
Nister had not meant to write literary texts but, rather, testimonial understandings. In this case, his narration is a form of ethical commitment, as he had formulated many years before in a brief passage of a symbolic story, in which he referred to narration as a “speaking for those who can’t speak”. This latter function of writing, to which he also explicitly refers in the open letter to Dovid Bergelson, is the ultimate possible and acceptable function of literature in a world in which humanity seems to have lost even itself.

Daniela M. Kromer