with a question: Is Yiddish literature a modern literature?

New translations and editions of Yiddish works indicate renewed interest in Yiddish literature, though it remains unclear why a literature written in a language that has long been considered dead (not quite true) should suddenly enjoy a resuscitation and place in the modern canon (if such a thing exists).

In A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, David Roskies cites Nachman of Bratslav as the first modern Yiddish writer. The work of the Yiddish fabulists who follow reveal their debt to Nachman's tales, some more apparently than others. But what's intriguing is that Nachman—a grandson of the founder of Hasidism (the Ba'al Shem Tov), a man raised in the Hasidic court of his uncle, complete with all the royal trappings that Hasidic courts had by then acquired, an anti-rationalist, who purportedly engaged with rationalist thinkers only to argue against the Enlightenment—should be read and taught as the first Yiddish modernist.

In this paper, I will show that Nachman's process, the literary techniques and structural devices he uses, reveal a deeply skeptical, even destructive, impulse at work beneath the surface of the tales and that this aesthetic is what identifies him as distinctively modern. One way I define modern in this context is simple: that Nachman's modernism anticipates those who came after him; in other words, he got there first.

Nachman matters in different ways to different contemporary scholars. Arthur Green writes that Nachman achieves something rare: “the creation of myth.” Joseph Weiss refers to the tales as “mythological autobiography.” Bratslav Hasidim believe that the tales bear the coded messianic messages that had become too dangerous to proclaim directly. For literary analysts, the complicated interweaving of such disparate sources as the mystical kabbalah, midrash, creation myths, Ukrainian folk material, theological mysteries of the universe and of God highlight the positive eclecticism at work in these tales. More to the point, the way the tales use ancient mythic pasts with the simultaneous present (panchronism), in themselves astonishing acts of conflation which place on the same level the religious and the folk, the mystical and the secular, the sacred and the profane, or the high and the low, reveals an unexpected irreverence, especially because the author was a Hasidic rabbi of the eighteenth century. There are traces of similar impulses in earlier Jewish literature but it is Nachman's successors rather than his precursors who best demonstrate his modernity. Three examples will make this case. I will show the footprint of Nachman in Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges.

We know that Kafka read Nachman's work. The biographical details in Kafka's life that correspond to those in Nachman's—the personal torments, the close friendship with another writer, the request that works be destroyed, and the early death before the age of 40—are suggestive of a deeper connection. Interesting also are the similar ways in which the psychology of a protagonist plays itself out in a story through torments that are circular, nightmarish translations of personal guilt and fears. Indeed Nachman and Kafka were both writers who remembered and documented their own dreams in detail, and used the motif of dream in their fiction. I'll read two parables, one from each writer, to show both at work on the condition of modern life.

Nachman's story of the heart and spring, a parable within “The Seven Beggars,” can be read as an origin myth of time. The world's heart cannot live without the spring, it yearns for it from afar but if it attempts to come closer it will lose sight of the spring and die. And the spring has no time. At the end of every day, when the heart and spring take leave of one another with songs and poems of longing, the True Man of Kindness grants the heart a gift of another day, the heart gives the day to the spring, and the spring has one more day to live.

Kafka's parable of the law and its doorkeeper from The Trial is a kernel or micro-version of the novel itself. Narrated in the cathedral by the priest who is also the prison chaplain, the opening sentence of the parable informs Joseph K. (and the reader) that his condition is common enough to earn a place in the books. “In the writings which preface the Law that particular delusion is described thus,” begins the priest.

A summary of the parable: A man from the country appears before the doorkeeper to the Law and asks to be admitted. The doorkeeper says he can't admit the man at the moment. The man wonders whether if not at the moment, might he be allowed in later. The doorkeeper says it's possible. The man sits down to wait, and continues to wait for life. Just before he dies, he asks why in so many years, no one else ever arrived to ask for admittance. The doorkeeper reveals that this door was intended only for him.

Set aside the fact that this parable has the paradoxical markings of a Hasidic one, which may indeed be its source. After the narration, Joseph K and the priest discuss the various commentaries and interpretations (a Midrashic touch), one of which refers to the man's superiority to the doorkeeper because he is a free man; he chooses to wait of his own free will, whereas the doorkeeper is a bondsman. He must remain at the door until the man dies.

This question of free will resonates in other literary takes on the subject—The Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov , Chaim Grade's My Quarrel with Hersh Raseyner—and takes us back to Nachman, indirectly, via Maimonedes. In the spirit of Ivan Karamazov, I'll begin by noting what sort of cruel and limited free will this is that keeps the man waiting at the door for the rest of his life. The doorkeeper's “it is possible,” provides the strand of hope that hooks and enslaves the man. Just before death, he sees “a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law.” Is this revelation or epiphany—to use a literary term borrowed from religion— the man's reward, or is it only confirmation of what he thought all along, that the law was well-worth the wait, even if admittance was never gained? And the final revelation that the door was intended only for him is just more punishment. The man will die regretting not having risked everything and forced his way in because what after all would he really have risked? Only this life of waiting.

“There he sits waiting for days and years.” Time passing makes itself felt in this parable about free will; it gives the story its pathos—the law will continue; the man who longs for it will not because man is a finite being. As Nachman said, “God gave man everything—except time.”

Asked how free will can coexist with absolute knowledge, Maimonedes explained that the question poses a problem only for the finite human mind. For an infinite being, time doesn't exist. God knows what choices man will make and yet this knowledge doesn't conflict with our concept of free will. Since Creation is a continuous act man retains his free will in every newly created moment. God is always in the process of creating and knowing, therefore everything yet nothing is pre-determined.

The longing of the heart for the spring and the longing for the law share one aspect: Both remain unfulfilled; this is the condition of modern life. In Kafka's parable, the law remains mysterious, the illusion of its grandeur maintained to the end, the man dies without ever knowing it. In contrast, in the larger story of The Trial, Joseph K gains entrance to the lower court, finds it dirty, inefficient, and corrupt, comes away a skeptic, with his idealized image of the Court tarnished, and what follows is also death. In Nachman's seemingly more optimistic outlook, this unfulfilled longing doesn't lead to death; it's what keeps the heart and spring, the world, alive. It would seem that Kafka's depiction of the human condition is the darker, hopeless one, emerging from the more skeptical modern sensibility, unless of course escape via death from an ongoing unbearable state of longing is the preferable, more humane end. Even in Nachman it's probably the good deed—the gift of another day which the heart gives to the spring—and not the longing that is redemptive. And the question must be asked: Does the heart really have a choice since its own life depends on the spring's survival? Couldn't it be said that the heart's will to survive forces its hand, which means that the good deed is also driven by a limited, circumscribed free will, with the juxtaposition of the word free alongside the words limited and circumscribed forming an oxymoron?

The fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (like Nachman's) are part fact, part fantasy, a blurring of impressive scholarship and imagination. He shared with Nachman an interest in myth and myth making, a fascination with the mysteries of the universe, a love of complicated linguistic and structural games. Both weave together an eclectic range of subjects, drawing connections across cultures, literatures, languages, and time. “Only connect,” Borges says, quoting E.M. Forster.

The ideas and language of the Kabbalah give Nachman's seemingly simple tale of longing cosmic significance. “And everything has a heart. The world taken as a whole has a heart. And the world's heart is of full stature, with a face, hands, and feet. Now the toenail of that heart is more heart-like than anyone else's heart.” Within Nachman's sentences, the heart goes from a mere heart to become the world's heart, then it is embodied with human features, down to the detail of toenails, and this smallest aspect of the heart is then exalted above all hearts, it becomes the heart of hearts. Since it is the world's heart its survival is of utmost importance. “If the heart would expire, God forbid, the whole world would be annihilated.” Scholars of the Kabbalah (and readers of Yiddish and Hebrew) will note various mystical ideas embedded in the parable, such as the complicated relationship between man and God, the concepts of contraction (tsimtsum) and shattering of the vessels (shevirat ha'kelim).

The sentences that follow describe a tight construct in which one thing depends for its survival on the other, an inter-dependence that is a fragile stacked deck of cards; the fall of one brings the destruction of the whole. Without the heart's intense continued longing, there would be no more time granted therefore no life. “Why doesn't the heart go toward the spring if it so longs for it? Because, as soon as it wants to approach the hill, it can no longer see the peak and cannot look at the spring…and its soul will perish, for it draws all its vitality from looking upon the spring.” Without constant eye-contact, and without the maintained distance, the world would be destroyed. Its existence depends on the heart and the heart depends for its existence on the spring. But “the spring has no time…the only time the spring has is that one day which the heart grants it as a gift. The moment the day is finished, the spring, too, will be without time and it will disappear. And without the spring, the heart, too, will perish.” At the end of every day, knowing that the spring has no more time, the heart and spring sing parting songs of such longing, the True Man of Kindness is inspired to grant the heart another day. “And the heart gives the day to the spring. And again the spring has time.” The True Man of Kindness derives time from true deeds of kindness which the stuttering beggar of “The Seven Beggars” collects. Each deed provides time and with this we've come full circle. The heart's gift of time to the spring is the first good deed of the day, thereby securing the world's survival for another day.

Borges' story, “The Circular Ruins,” quickly creates a sense of paradox and sacred otherness, and it does this also with language and structure. Listen to the first sentence. “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe as it sank into the sacred mud, and yet within days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man had come there from the South, and that his homeland was one of those infinite villages that lie upriver, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the language of the Zend is uncontaminated by Greek and where leprosy is uncommon.” Unanimous night, sacred mud, infinite villages, the uncontaminated language of Zend, uncommon leprosy—are phrases that place the story somewhere above ordinary life. Unanimous and infinite are words we associate with omnipotence. For those familiar with the myth of the Golem, “sacred mud” will suggest the mud used to make a man and human creation is indeed an aspect of the story. The reference to the purity of language enhances the adjective used to describe the man, his taciturnity, in that it places value on economy of language. This is followed by “where leprosy is uncommon,” an allusion to the biblical Miriam's punishment for her unrestrained criticism of her brother, her too-free way with language, which suggests that this man's homeland is noted for its absence of the sin of loshon horo , that it's a kind of Eden before the fall.

The “Circular Ruins,” continues to evoke the Creation story of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve. There are the leaves used as cover, the significance of specifically numbered nights, and the preoccupation with sleep. In the universe of Borges' story, all important work takes place in sleep and dream, a reversal of ordinary life as we know it. Clearly Borges wants to situate this story in the realm of origin myths, but though he uses ancient textual allusions this is a myth for modern times because it has the modern impulse toward breakdown rather than continuity. In this story, unlike Genesis, for example, the creation supplants the Creator; the man who dreams a man must die.

Indeed the first sentence is structured around negation, beginning with “no one saw,” the man is unseen and, since he's taciturn, not much heard, and continues with “yet within days there was no one who did not know,” as opposed to the more standard, admittedly less poetic, possibility: and yet everyone knew, and finally ends on the “uncontaminated” language and “uncommon” leprosy. So much use of the negative points to meaning: By the end of the story, the reader understands that though “The Circular Ruins,” is a creation story, it's one that moves toward destruction.

There is a reason for the “circular,” in the title, which refers to the shape of the site in which the man works. During the destruction of the ruins there is also a “ring” of fire. Both serve to highlight the revolving structure of the story itself: Once the man has successfully dreamed a son and sent him down river to accomplish his mission, he begins to realize that he himself was also merely a dream, and that when the mission is finished, he will no longer be necessary. He dies, and it is time for the son to dream a son, who will become the third man, securing an uncomfortable kind of continuity similar to Nachman's, with destruction always at hand.

Italo Calvino shares with Nachman the use of the fairy tale as a form along with a modernist metafictional curiosity about what goes on in the making of a text. Nachman begins the tale of “The Seven Beggars” with “I will tell you how our people were once joyous,” follows this with a story of a king who abdicates the throne to his son during his lifetime and imparts the strange, kabbalistically allusive advice that the son “be joyous,” after which we enter into a seemingly unrelated story of two lost children, and so on, nesting story within story within story. The reader's expectation that on emerging from the nested stories, the return to the first story of the king and prince will lead to meaning, is spurned; the tale stops abruptly with the sixth beggar; the seventh day and seventh beggar never show. After interrupting the fictional dream several times in the course of the tale, Nachman finally drops it entirely with no explanations, with the significance of joy unexplained, redemption unfulfilled. What is achieved and on display is Nachman's technical mastery: His awareness of the power of language and form and his artful use of a surplus of stories as a means toward meaning.

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler,” is the opening sentence of If on a winter's night… . Calvino's authorial intrusions and interruptions grow ever bolder and more playful until the central framing story becomes a story about the source of stories. From the very beginning he doesn't allow the reader to forget for long that what he is reading is a mere construct. “The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph…Stations are all alike… I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather: that man is called “I” and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only station,” and so on. With the words “the novel begins,” Calvino evokes the most famous beginning, “In the beginning,” making the reader aware not of the story but of the making of story, goes on to destabilize the setting with “steam and smoke that hide,” not the platform or passengers, i.e. the setting or character, but “the sentences and paragraphs,” referring to the type on the page, then moves on to questioning the identity of the slippery narrative I. In the course of the novel Calvino begins and doesn't finish ten stories, defying narrative continuity. Each of the openings, or incipits, as Calvino refers to them, is a story type or genre. There is the classic tale of feuding families, the ranting of a madman, a tale of revolution and double-crossing, a story of a failed heist, a philosophical tale of mirrors, a tale of a mentor and disciple, and so on. Similarly, Nachman's tales include a story of enchantment, a story of primordial events that refer to pre-creation, stories about worlds gone chaotic, one about the ruination of man's five senses, another an origin myth of time, and more, all narrated as boasting tales by beggars turned badkhonim, characters from the story of the outermost larger frame.

At the end of Calvino's novel, the Reader visits the library in search of the continuations of the ten beginnings. He hears instead from other readers about their interrupted reading experiences. The story of the Arabian Nights, prototype of interrupted stories, is evoked, and then the seventh reader says, “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” The number seven—Calvino's seven readers and Nachman's seven beggars—is a convention of the fairy tale; in Nachman it also refers to the seven days of creation.

Calvino ends his story about story making the ancient way, with marriage: In the final chapter Reader and Reader are man and wife, in bed together, reading. “Aren't you tired of reading?” Ludmilla asks. The male Reader answers, “Just a moment. I've almost finished If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino.” “The Seven Beggars,” on the other hand, ends neither with life or death, it simply breaks off. Of course the denial of closure is also meaningful.

Nachman turned to storytelling when he despaired of accomplishing what he'd set out to do via other means. He intended to use the form of the tale as a garbed religious or homiletic lesson, the text as religious teaching. This wasn't what happened. In the spring of 1810, when the first oral delivery of “The Seven Beggars” is thought to have taken place, Nachman left the longest tale of his thirteen tales interrupted, allowing aesthetics rather than didactic intentions to determine the final form. Commenting on Nachman's narrative art, Arnold Band, the translator of Nachman's tales, refers to the abrupt break, parodying Frank Kermode, as “the sense of a non-ending.” Vivian Gornick makes the argument, in her book The End of the Novel of Love, that in a modern world where comebacks and makeovers are everyday, love or marriage as closure leaves the reader with an untruth, with, to continue in the parodic mode, what I might call the nonsense of an ending.

The modernity of Nachman's non-ending takes me back to my opening argument: that reading his tales through these later moderns heightens our awareness of him as a self-conscious, parodic writer with a strong sense of the nature of exilic life, in other words, as the first modern Yiddish writer.

TRUST THE TALE: The Modernity of Nachman of Bratslav
Originally delivered at the MLA conference in San Diego, 2003 .