Jan 08, 2025
1.
As Naomi Seidman points out, A Taytsh Manifesto “speaks to a collectivity in ferment” while at the same time conforming to “the neoliberal economy of the academy” which foregrounds the lone named and legally recognized author. As much as I reach toward a shifting collective of translators and scholars, artists and cultural activists, as much as I want to imagine a multitude of voices all speaking in taytsh, there are forces that compel me, and incentivize me, to take ownership: to countersign my name on a book, on a manifesto, on this text and stake a claim to taytsh. What would the manifesto have looked like had I refused or deferred such an economy of rights, authorship, and ownership?
In geveb itself is one answer to this question. The journal was founded with the explicit goal of not tying the project to individual scholars while striving, in all facets, for collective and democratic work. It is thus something of a tiken (tikkun), though necessarily an imperfect one, that A Taytsh Manifesto be reviewed in a collaborative format and in the pages of In geveb. If the manifesto is to do anything, to make anything, it will be in how others take up its charges, reformulate its conclusions, and object to its provocations. I am less interested in its mechanical application than in its ghostly afterlives. It is these possible flights that humble me.
In this spirit, I will not set out to defend the book, as if defending my name, but rather offer remarks that follow my fellow interlocutors’ khidushem like an echo, an echo that necessarily leads elsewhere.
2.
Walter Benjamin, one ghost among many behind A Taytsh Manifesto, wrote the following in 1916: “Translation is a removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity. The translation of the language of things into that of man is not only a translation of the mute into the sonic. It is also the translation of the nameless into name.” 1 1 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” Selected Writings: Walter Benjamin, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 70. If there is to be vigilance in our work, it must be in the stubborn return to “continua of transformation,” evading abstractions of identity yet determined to not give up on the action of naming.
Certainly, as Tal Hever-Chybowski underscores, Yiddish, as marked by taytsh, does not have exclusive access to the realms of translation. Indeed, all languages are conditioned, if not constituted in Benjaminian terms, by translation—by the transfer of the mute into the sonic. All languages under the mark of modernity, in the throes of globalization, willingly or unwillingly, participate in that migratory gesture that unsettles the recurring desire for home. Even the most ardent nationalists know that their language is constantly exposed to hybrid forces, to transcultural flows, to traces of so many kinds of others.
That being said, it is crucial that one does not give up on the name. The name that marks. This is what I mean by referring to early Yiddish speakers as speaking “a language that was not entirely their own.”
2
2
Saul Noam Zaritt, A Taytsh Manifesto: Yiddish, Translation, and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Fordham University Press, 2023), 1.
One of the questions I want to ask is what does the name “Jew” or “Jewish” do? What happens when one names a language “Yiddish”? What does the name “Taytsh” do? Not what it means or signifies, like a set of numerable characteristics more or less applicable in a given situation. Rather, Benjamin refers to the proper name as that which gestures toward a “knowledge of things.”
3
3
Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” 73.
What does Yiddish know? How does a speaker conditioned by taytsh come to know a critique of cultural ownership? Must this be a Jewish way of speaking, and does this immediately recall, as Hever-Chybowski warns, the anti-Jewish animus contained in such an assumption, that Jews can only speak Jewishly and never Germanly, even in German? What does German know? The (false) notion, belief, exhortation, hope even, that the Jew can only think Jewishly, exposes the precarity, nay, the impossibility, of anyone thinking Germanly.
Benjamin explains that the true and full knowledge of things, as communicated through the proper name, is a divine mode of language, one that since the Fall, remains out of reach, rendering human language always mournful. Benjamin identifies the all-too-human melancholic practice of overnaming, “the overprecision that obtains in the tragic relationship between the languages of human speakers.” 4 4 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man,” 73. There are too many languages, too many ways of approaching the world imprecisely such that one can either drill down so deeply into the supposed purity of “one’s own” language or instead maximally collect all languages toward apparent divine mastery. Both of these are doomed, violent directives. In contrast, by coming to know, almost immediately, that one speaks a language that is not entirely one’s own, even if it is named as Jewish, one has already, eagerly even, entered a melancholic mode, recognizing this undecidable multitude as the only conduit through which one can be known by one’s name.
3.
I recognize that such language practices—dwelling in melancholy fracture—can feel painfully divisive, in that there seems to be no way to speak collectively when a sense of shared language is constantly dissipating. Jonathan Boyarin avers that “the marginal space would certainly implode altogether.” Rivke Margolis similarly laments a “profound rupture” in Yiddish community-making and sees a move toward taytsh as only exacerbating the situation. But where else can we, as Yiddish scholars, begin if not from rupture? This is precisely our responsibility: to name the ruin rather than immediately set to makeshift repairs.
This is not a “reckoning” in the Christian sense. I do not call on sinners to repent in hopes of some future, more perfect Yiddish or Jewish studies. If there are to be new forms of scholarly collectivity, new ways of working-together in queer alignment as Zissel Piazza offers us, then we must not close ranks and presume to heal a private family affair. I submit that we must seek out difference, not mourn it as something to be rendered dead and buried. Taytsh instructs us to sit with the ghosts, who are not and cannot be satisfied, who are always disappointed in us, though we remain, as ever, devoted to them, comforted by them as Avrom Sutzkever reminds us, when he thanks the dead for not forgetting the living. 5 5 On Avrom Sutzkever’s transactions with the dead see my “Letters Without Addresses: Abraham Sutzkever’s Late Style,” In geveb, June 30, 2020, https://ingeveb.org/articles/letters-without-addresses. This is the only comfort, if we are even allowed comfort.
4.
Taytsh has an attraction to trash, or what Jessica Kirzane summarizes as “understudied, undervalued Yiddish writing.” One might see this as a kind of retreat—from the strident rhetoric of the manifesto to the forgotten short story by a nameless author in the foreshortened Monday edition of the daily Yiddish newspaper. There is a risk of fetish, of seizing on one token among many discarded things and making it some grand symbolic thing. This is to be resisted. Instead, in giving this token a name, a question must be asked: What else has been discarded, with varying degrees of violence, in the blind pursuit of the normal, the canonical, the national? Beware the coin flip. Says Seidman: take responsibility for the coin flip.
