SANFORD PINSKER
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free-standing stories about protagonist Ruth Puttermesser into the look
and feel of a novel.
I begin with "Envy; or, Yiddish in America," a story that has lived a
controversial life long after it's appearance in the pages of
Commentary
and then between the hard covers of
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Sto–
ries
(1969).
Understandably, many critics could not help but feel that
the story, poised as it was between eulogies and celebrations about Yid–
dish, was, at bottom, something of a roman
a
clef. After all, Yankel
Ostrover, the fabulously successful-and much celebrated-Yiddish sto–
ryteller, is clearly based on the public facts of
1.
B. Singer's carefully cul–
tivated persona. And as for Hershele Edelshtein, Ostrover's unrelenting
critic, hadn't Ozick based him on Jacob Glatstein, the great Yiddish poet
who made no secret of how incompetent and uncharacteristic he
thought Singer's Yiddish stories were?
Mrs. Glatstein shared her late husband's views and, as keeper of the
flame, never forgave Ozick for what she regarded as a spiteful portrait
and for the damage she felt it did to his public reputation. Admittedly,
the names of character and real-life poet are suspiciously close, and one
cannot easily yank Ozick off the hook by pointing out that she was
probably far more interested in the linguistic play of "Edelshtein" (in its
English translation "refined stone") than she was in making a devastat–
ing point abollt Jacob Glatstein. Ozick, after all, had lovingly translated
many of Glatstein's poems and regards him, despite the egos that her
story presumably bruised, as arguably the greatest poet that the Yiddish
language produced. His fate was to be a major poet in a minor lan–
guage, a writer (as Glatstein himself liked to quip) who had to know the
work of W. H. Auden while also realizing full well that Auden didn't
have to know about him. The Edelshtein in Ozick's story is more accu–
rately seen as a composite drawn from dozens upon dozens of aging,
virtually unknown Yiddish poets. But even this conjecture is, at best,
only half the story, because what one aspect of "Envy" seeks to measure
is a poet well short of Glatstein's greatness and yet much better than
your average Yiddish hack.
At the heart of the story is Edelshtein's poetry rather than his endless
fulminations about the decline and fall of Yiddish. For a satirist of
Ozick's considerable skill, it is relatively easy to create a character who
insists, for example, that so-called Jewish-American writers are ignora–
muses: "What do they know," he rails, "I mean of knowledge ... Yid–
dish! One word here, one word there.
Shickseh
on one page,
putz
on the
other, and that's the whole vocabulary.... They know ten words for,
excuse me, penis, and when it comes to a word for learning, they're
