Scholarly discussions of modern Yiddish literature tend to focus in one way or another on the historical question of when and how Yiddish emerged as a medium for serious literary expression. According to the standard account, Yiddish was a derided vernacular tongue that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a respectable literary language and, by extension, an instrument for the raising of collective, even “national,” Jewish self-awareness. The turning point in this narrative is commonly described as a crisis of faith in the modernizing ethos of the Haskalah. When the recalcitrance of antisemitism exposed the failure of the Haskalah, a new impulse arose among intellectuals and writers to valorize Jewish folk culture and to produce ambitious literary works in the language of daily life. This narrative owes much in spirit to the ideologies of Yiddishist autonomism that came to the fore a century ago, associated with figures such as Chaim Zhitlovsky and Nathan Birnbaum and articulated most clearly at the Czernowitz conference in 1908. And while this rise-of-Yiddish narrative has been adumbrated with a corresponding decline-of-Yiddish postscript, the scholarly consensus remains that for a brief, circumscribed period a vibrant and “autonomous” Yiddish literary culture existed. Centered in eastern Europe and, later, in America, this culture was reinforced by institutions such as the press, secular Yiddish schools, and the Yiddish theater.

Enter Marc Caplan, whose ambitious and fascinating new book offers a rather different approach to the study of Yiddish literature. Caplan focuses on the Yiddish writers Reb Naḥman of Bratslav, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Isaac Meir Dik, S. Y. Abramovitsh, and I. J. Linetzky, and he ranges far afield for his primary sources. Some of the most engaging discussions involve lesser-known works such as Aksenfeld's Dos Sterntikhl and Dik's uncompleted narrative, A Maskils utopye (A Maskil's Utopia). To understand Caplan's project, it must be said that he approaches this material more as a theorist than a cultural historian. While substantially informed by history, Caplan's book is less concerned with diachronic questions about the rise of Yiddish than with synchronic ones: he explores the position and “meaning” of Yiddish literature in relation to canonical European culture—its genres, modes of representing subjectivity, and attitudes toward tradition. Drawing on a range of literary and culture theory as well as on deft close readings, Caplan offers a perspective on modern Yiddish literature that shifts attention away from the rise-and-fall narrative towards questions about the structural relationship between Yiddish writing and other cultural traditions and formations.

For those who might balk at this privileging of theoretical speculation over historical analysis, it should be emphasized that an advantage of Caplan's model is its flexibility. His approach is suggestive rather than dogmatic, provocative rather than reductive. Moreover, and most fundamentally perhaps, he rejects the notion that Yiddish literature should be studied exclusively in the context of Jewish history. Indeed the book develops a sustained set of comparisons between nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Francophone and Anglophone African literature. The above cast of Yiddish authors plays opposite a cast of African writers that includes Amos Tutuola, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, Wole Soyinka, and Ahmadou Karouma. As the absence of the words “Yiddish” or “African” from the book's title indicates, Caplan sees these literatures as examples of certain cultural dynamics that might obtain anywhere. This is a literature that is “belated” with respect to dominant cultural and social trends, but surprisingly “anticipatory” with respect to key aspects of the modernist literary style. From the moment it interacts with the social forces of modernity, it speaks in multiple voices and registers and it combines genres and ideological traditions.

The key concept in Caplan's book—which should be picked up and elaborated by future studies—is that of “peripheral modernism.” This concept serves as an alternative to a host of other prevalent terms, most importantly Deleuze and Guattari's “minor” literature. Among various characteristics of Caplan's “peripheral modernism,” some of the most salient are as follows: it is produced by cultures undergoing some process of political or cultural “dispossession”; it arises among cultures where several different languages are spoken, each with a radically different level of social status; it maintains a stronger continuity with oral culture than canonical modernisms; and it incorporates folklore, not in some nostalgic or romantic way, but in intimate and familiar ways and with a distinctly oppositional force. As Caplan writes, peripheral writers characteristically use “the motifs of folklore to apprehend modernity rather than using the language of modernity…to interpret an ostensibly closed-off past” (26). What distinguishes “peripheral modernists,” then, is that they somehow remain loyal spokespeople for traditional cultures, despite their deep awareness that these cultures have been disfigured by modernizing forces. This is a literature that is “belated” with respect to dominant literary movements; it speaks in multiple voices and registers and bespeaks unresolved and conflicting cultural priorities.

As all of this suggests, Caplan is reading modern Yiddish culture under the sign of colonialism: east European Jews are described as though their historical situation in the nineteenth century were analogous to that of Yoruba and Nigerian cultures in the mid-twentieth. An advantage of this approach is that it enables Caplan to bring to Yiddish literary studies the methods and insights of scholars of colonial and postcolonial literatures. For example, Caplan convincingly shows how the very notion of “tradition” among these Yiddish writers has shifted from what it had been in premodern Jewish culture. Once in a position of authority, “tradition” has been transformed by the peripheral modernist into an “oppositional force in the face of imperial hegemony” (26). In one of the book's most engaging discussions, maskilic literature in Yiddish and the literature of negritude turn out to be responses to a fundamentally similar set of anxieties “provoked by contact with Western, imperial ideologies” (118). Looking beyond the programmatic statements of these respective ideologies, Caplan turns to literary narratives that engage with them, and he discovers similarly ambivalent responses to modernity.

This comparative approach also illuminates a number of surprising points of contact between seemingly divergent literary traditions. By positioning Reb Naḥman alongside the Yoruba English-language novelist Amos Tutuola, Caplan discovers an analogous mode of transforming traditional folk stories: in both cases, there is a turn away from outside action toward a personal, individualistic consciousness. He also discovers striking analogies between the uses of the supernatural and the fantastical in African and Yiddish writers. While drawing such parallels, Caplan never loses sight of the significant differences between these cultures, above all the fact that the Yiddish writers still use a language of “the folk” while the African writers under discussion here use imperial languages, albeit to suit their own ends.

To read Yiddish literature as peripheral, as Caplan insists we do, requires us to abandon the notion that Yiddish ever existed in a condition of genuine cultural autonomy—or indeed that such was ever possible. By definition, the “peripheral” is defined by its relation to other, presumably more “central,” cultural currents. Yet while this move seems to deprive Yiddish of the status that Yiddishist ideologues once sought for it, there may be a programmatic and forward-looking dimension to Caplan's work as well. In his introduction he tells of his personal journey toward Yiddishism, and he makes some insightful observations about the paradoxes of twenty-first century Yiddish scholarship, a pursuit motivated by a search for a “native” language that few scholars actually grew up speaking. Then, in the final pages, he tells us that the “structural character” of the relationship between Yiddish and modernity “seems to have evolved little from the terms in which it was first expressed in the nineteenth century” (249). The challenges of negotiating a relationship between tradition and modernity, the folk and the universal, the diasporic and the national—these are still with us; and the task of the Yiddish scholar, according to this book at least, is not so much to mourn a lost moment of cultural autonomy but to sustain an awareness of the tensions and contradictions that marked this literature from its beginnings.