,״נעמט אַן אַלטן ייִדישן ספֿר, ― נעמט אַ תּנ״ך, דעם ספֿר פֿון אַלע ספֿרים ― װעט איר זעען
אַז אײן לשון איז ניט אַלעמאָל געװען גענוג פֿאַר אונדז.״
Nemt an altn yiddishn seyfer—nemt a tanakh, dem seyfer fun all sforim—vet ir zeyn, az ayn loshen is nit allemol geveyn genug far undz. “Take an old Jewish seyfer,—take a Tanakh, the seyfer of all sforim—and you'll see that one loshn hasn't always been enough for us.” So Shmuel Niger begins his 1941 book Di tsveyshprakhikeyt fun undzer literatur (The Bilingualism of Our Literature). After a brief overview of the multilingual nature of the “Hebrew” Bible and the Talmud, Niger turns to the situation with modern Jewish languages. “But so, too,” he writes, “it is now with loshn-koydesh [the holy tongue; i.e., Hebrew together with Jewish Aramaic] and ivri-taytsh [Judeo-German; i.e., Yiddish]. Ivri-taytsh cleaves to Hebrew, just as it was once with targum-loshn [Jewish Aramaic].” In his own clever mix of Hebraisms and Aramaisms, allusions to the dayenu of the Passover Haggadah, and the linguistic jumble of the very names of Jewish languages, Niger makes it explicitly clear (or confused, as the case may be) just how intimate—indeed, inseparable—the relations are between Jewish languages.
Jordan Finkin's exceptionally detailed and thought-provoking book goes beyond Niger's elegiac paean to Jewish multilingualism and the essential linguistic and literary link between loshn-koydesh and modern Yiddish. With stunning erudition and philological sophistication, Finkin engages with contemporary linguists and the pioneers of Yiddish criticism. By pairing, for example, Niger's polyglot conception of “our literature” and the insistence of Baal-Makhshoves (Isidor Elyashev) on the inextricable unity of a Jewish literature in Yiddish and Hebrew, “two languages—one literature,” in Baal-Makhshoves's phrasing, Finkin describes with technical precision and literary sensitivity what may be understood as “Jewish discourse.” A Rhetorical Conversation delves into an analysis, not of Jewish bi- or multilingualism, but of what might be termed Jewish interlinguality, the complex interconnected use of multiple languages that has been central to Jewish literature. He focuses on the many ways that polyglot rabbinic discourse shaped the development of the modern Yiddish literary idiom.
Even more central to Finkin's book than the classic figures of Yiddish scholarship is Benjamin Harshav, who, in a series of lectures and in The Meaning of Yiddish tantalizingly introduced the formal concept of “Jewish discourse,” characterized precisely by this interlinguality and “the concatenation of an associative chain” in which units of language, but also motifs, thematics, and stylistic choices can “relate to their contextual neighbors in several directions and … are related to a total universe of discourse outside the particular context.”Footnote 1 Picking up on Harshav's broad observation that the foundation of this particular, dialogic, and hyper-loquacious discourse incorporates the patterns of rabbinic discourse (mainly in Hebrew and Aramaic), Finkin attempts to trace out how this incorporation works.
Finkin writes in an exceptional conversational style that, like the discourse it examines, moves from topic to topic in an ever-expanding network of associations. Throughout, Finkin follows a particularly Russian Formalist approach that unites technical linguistic analysis with exceptionally close readings of literature. He begins with the closest possible reading of a typical, yet evocative, syntactic construction, then zooms out to phraseology, Yiddish poetry and prose, and finally to the corpus of individual major writers.
In the first chapter, Finkin analyzes a grammatical feature, which he terms the “tautological infinitive” (for example: גײן גײ איך—geyn, gey ikh—literally [as for] going, I go), which is especially productive in Yiddish. In a way emblematic of Finkin's approach throughout the work, he begins with this extreme close-up of a particular construction that has been explained by various linguists as either a Yiddish calque of biblical Hebrew (of the type “טרף ֹטרַף יוסֵף”—toref taraf Yosef—[literally, a tearing has torn Joseph], Genesis 37:33), an influence of talmudic Aramaic (similar to “מיתב יתבינן, ברוכי לא מברכינן”—meytav yetvinan, brukhe lo' mevarkhinan—[as to sitting we sit, but blessing we do not bless], a condensation of bSukkah 47a), or as an assimilated feature of coterritorial or neighboring languages, such as in the Berliner dialect “Kriegen kriegt er schon” (“as to getting, he will get”). Finkin examines the phenomenon as it appears in the work of modern Yiddish writers and considers what linguistic research over the course of the twentieth century had to say about it. In his review of the scholarly literature, here and throughout, Finkin develops a nuanced way of approaching the complexities of interlinguistic influence as encoded in modern Yiddish literature. He observes that a desire for neatness and simplicity on the part of linguists fails to account most fully for multiple and tangled causes underlying a variety of features of literary language. The limitations of the linguists and literary critics he encounters lead him to propose a new conception of linguistic genetics that accounts for internal (Hebrew and Aramaic) and external (German and Slavic) strata in a global dynamic relationship rather than an influence in an isolated, unidirectional way. This emphasis on multiple causation and dynamism (not unique to, but distinctive of Yiddish) open the way to the next chapters as Finkin goes from the micro-level of Yiddish syntax to analyze wider features of Ashkenazic Jewish discourse.
Finkin then subjects the overall Harshavian concept of Jewish discourse to a linguistically based analysis. In doing this, Finkin displays technical virtuosity by moving from larger theoretical considerations to practical applications of theory in his reading of masterworks of Yiddish poetry from the popular Avrom Reyzen, the high modernist works of Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, to the counter-modernist Yankev Glatshteyn. In each poem, Finkin locates where the discursive Sea of Talmud has shaped the poetic terrain. Other chapters of the book are devoted to stylistic analysis of the Tsene-rene (the popular adaptation of the narrative sections of the Torah ostensibly designed for those who could not access the Hebrew original) and a dissection of meta-discursive elements in the Yiddish and Hebrew versions of Y. L. Peretz's hasidic stories, elements that create a conversational style reflective of talmudic argumentation and conversation.
Since the recent reworking of Dan Miron's Harpaya letsorech negi'ah into From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, published in 2010, a renewed attention has been given to the historical claims of the unity of Jewish literature.Footnote 2 In his extensive new work, Miron devotes considerable critical energy to repudiating the so-called continuity model that asserts a holism in modern literature written by Jews, a model initially advanced by critics such as Niger and Baal-Makhshoves and maintained by some modern critics of “Jewish literature.” In order to propose his concept of “literary contiguity,” Miron rejects such an approach as false, outdated, and part of a certain type of ideological fantasy active at a particular historical moment. Whereas Miron addresses these questions chiefly by engaging literary critics and historians, Finkin's book examines these claims of a Jewish discursive unity by immersing himself in the linguistic features that engage the intertwining, multilingual strata of Jewish culture. Even more than unraveling the grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic characteristics of Jewish discourse, A Rhetorical Conversation explicitly thematizes its features, that, in se, cleverly replicates a traditional (albeit fully secularized) form of textual analysis. Finkin not only demonstrates something about the ways talmudic language and rhetorical practices came to bear on the development of a modern Yiddish literary idiom, but also how talmudic rhetorical strategies and hermeneutics continue to shape the academic approach to Jewish letters.
