The traditional opening statements in the debate concerning the beginnings of modern Hebrew literature usually assume the form of claims or accusations of paternity. Claims–if the child is legitimate; accusations–if it is not. I wish to avoid the paternity issue because, as I shall argue, it is essentially groundless and precludes consideration of other perspectives. My strategy shall therefore be an oblique attack from an unexpected quarter using traditional camouflage, I begin with a prooftext.

What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How–Do– You–Do than to place folklore and folk–speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik′s formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian–Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh. Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against the discovery of folklore: the overwhelming antipathy of the Jewish Enlightenment to fantasy, superstition, and folk custom;2 Rabinovitsh's concern for fostering a highbrow literary culture in Yiddish based on the realistic portrayal of poverty, on social satire and stylistic discipline;3 and, perhaps most importantly, the young writer's adulation for the arch-maskil Abramovitsh- Mendele, who embodied this new critical standard.4 When, along with other of his contemporaries, Sholem Aleichem finally overcame these formidable obstacles and negotiated his way back to the folk, readers were so taken by his reinvention of Jewish folklore that they mistook it for the real thing.

In her autobiography, My Great-Grandfather′s Inheritance, the Yiddish poet Kadya Molodowsky (1893/94–1975) recalled her feeling upon publishing her first book of poetry, Kheshvandike nekht (“Nights of Heshvan”) in 1927.

For as long as I have been acquainted with them, the poems in which the above lines occur have held a peculiar fascination for me. With their rhythmic refrains, Glatshteyn′s “Der Rayzeman” (“The Travelman”), Halpern′s “Der Gasnpoyker” (“The Street Drummer”), and Manger′s “Eynzam” (“Lonely”) are lodged in my mind,1 cropping up periodically in almost–and in the case of “Eynzam,” literally–musical form. Yet it is only recently that I have come to see a special connection between these three diverse works. The present article explores this connection. Specifically, I wish to address the function of repetition and show how a much-used poetic device simultaneously points to a psychological realm otherwise easy to ignore.

The examination of binary oppositions (semantic structures of equivalence or opposition) in poetic texts has proved helpful in decoding messages which seem at first to be difficult to comprehend.1 Since the text often creates its own semantic system, which may appear to be ungrammatical (i.e., not in consonance with generally accepted extratextual meanings), the reader may profit considerably by decoding the texts system of oppositions and interpreting their semantic value.

When Aharon Appelfeld emigrated in his early teens to the Land of Israel on the eve of the establishment of the state, he and other Holocaust survivors his age felt ashamed of their experiences of suffering in the war, which seemed to them to be so meaningless and insignificant in comparison to the constructive tasks of nation building that had been undertaken by the yishuv.

In writing a trilogy of novels on the life and times of Nathan Zuckerman, American Jewish Writer, Philip Roth has waded manfully into a tradition even more thickly and brilliantly populated than the one he selected as literary background for The Breast. If the grotesque metamorphosis of David Kepesh into a six–foot, one–hundred–and–fifty–pound female breast compels us to compare Roths novel with some of the great texts of Kafka and Gogol, in Zuckerman Bound Roth invokes the more formidable context of James, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, and Gide (to mention only a few), several of whose artist–portraits are identified in the trilogy and all implied. Roth has said in an interview that the novelty of this particular portrait is that it describes the comedy that an artistic vocation can turn out to be in the U.S.A.1 The comedy pertains not only to the career of Zuckerman himself, a series of zany encounters with writers, readers, and critics, whose responses to one Zuckerman fiction become the action of the next, but also to Roths typical strategy of challenging and recreating any prior tradition or convention, however sacrosanct. The crux of Rothian comedy is to expose, embarrass, and ridicule, to break bonds and boundaries, pieties and platitudes.

Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1 Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2 and Cynthia Ozick's (The Messiah of Stockholm),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.