Feb 26, 2024
Chaim Einspruch (right, Mikhl Yashinsky) kneeling at a hanukkiah with his hands together in prayer, while a beam of light shines on a worried Gabe (left, Joshua Horowitz).
116 years ago, I. L. Peretz opened the 1908 Czernowitz Conference with a now famous call for the translation of Jewish cultural production into Yiddish: “We propose therefore: the translation of all our substantial cultural products [virklekhe kultur-giter] from our gilded and independent past, above all the Bible [bibl].” 1 1 YIVO, Filologishe sektsye, Di ershte yidishe shprakh konferents: barikhtn, dokumentn, un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908 (Vilne: YIVO Bibliotek, 1931), 77. These translations are to be of quality, as Peretz cautions against “mechanical translations that kill the living word.” 2 2 Ibid., 77. The next morning, on August 31, Sholem Asch gave a speech in response to Peretz, attempting to elucidate how these translations are to be done: “The Tanakh, however, cannot be translated; it must be transpoeticized [ibergedikhtet] and poetically conferred to the people in idiomatic Jewish forms.” 3 3 Ibid., 81. Asch explains that all other peoples have translated the Jewish Tanakh into their modern vernacular languages and thereby cemented themselves into “world culture,” and yet “we (Jews) have not done the same.” What’s at stake in these discussions—if we are to imagine the Czernowitz Conference as something more substantial than an out-of-touch gathering of bourgeois men 4 4 See reports of a banquet on September 1st, where Esther Frumkin is reported to have begun a protest against the entire conference on account of the organizer’s refusal to allow the working classes into the meeting hall. This occurs after Frumkin, the only woman in attendance at the banquet, is snubbed by the opening speaker: YIVO, Filologishe sektsye, Di ershte yidishe shprakh konferents: barikhtn, dokumentn, un opklangen fun der tshernovitser konferents, 1908, 101. —is the question of whether Yiddish is indeed a language like all others, in that it can transcend its particularity and join what Asch deems to be “world culture.”
Saul Zaritt in Jewish American Writing and World Literature (2020) states this problem more explicitly: Yiddish is marked by a transcultural relationship between the dubiously stable concepts of “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” society and is a language “conditioned by a vernacular double bind, a language of uncertain locality embedded in the global politics of European languages.” 5 5 Saul Noam Zaritt, Jewish American Writing and World Literature: Maybe to Millions, Maybe to Nobody, 1st ed., Oxford Studies in American Literary History (Oxford, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 28. In other words, there is an intense history of debate in Yiddish cultural tradition around a central idea: Yiddish is inherently Jewish, but it can also be universal. And I struggle to think of a more paradigmatic example of this contradictory tension than the work of Henry Einspruch, D.D. and the translation of the New Testament into Yiddish.
Playwright Mikhl Yashinsky explores this tension in his impressive new play, Di psure loyt khaim, or The Gospel According to Chaim. Produced by the New Yiddish Rep, Yashinsky’s play marks what may be an important moment in modern Yiddish cultural history: the first original full-length American Yiddish drama to be produced for a general audience in seven decades (i.e. since, at least, the 1950s). 6 6 New Yiddish Rep’s artistic director, David Mandelbaum, explains that Yashinsky’s play is the first of its kind since the 1950s; see Jon Kalish, “A New Play Tells the True Story of a Former Hasid Who Translated the New Testament into Yiddish,” New York Jewish Week, December 21, 2023, https://www.jta.org/2023/12/21.... The drama, which ran a total of 21 performances between December 21, 2023 and January 7, 2024 at the Theater for the New City, is directed by Dmitri Barcomi and stars actors Mikhl Yashinsky, Melissa Weisz, Joshua Horowitz, and Sruli Rosenberg. Yashinsky’s play portrays the contradictory and urgent demands of a small cast of characters in Baltimore who are responding, above all, to the pressure of looming genocide in Europe and simultaneous cultural loss in America. This struggle is narrated through the encounter of a Yiddish printer, Gabe Tsvayg (played by Sruli Rosenberg and Joshua Horowitz), with the enigmatic Dr. Chaim “Henry” Einspruch (Yashinsky), and Gabe’s outspoken, anti-fascist acquaintance, Sadie Meirson (Melissa Weisz).
The play dramatizes the true story of Chaim (or Henry) Einspruch, an Eastern European Jew who “had found for himself the redemptive power of Jesus. Wishing to spread the Good Word to his fellow Jews, he decided to translate the New Testament into his mother tongue [Yiddish].” 7 7 Mikhl Yashinsky, “A Drama Cast in Lead,” Spring 2023. This is a letter written by Yashinsky to theater-goers. After moving to Baltimore and being unable to find a Yiddish printer willing to print his translation, he decides to self-publish his New Testament in 1941, a year of violence and fear in the Jewish world.
Einspruch’s translation, Der bris khadoshe, or The New Covenant, 8 8 Einspruch himself also translates this hebraicized title into a plain Yiddish (der nayer bund), with both translations obfuscating the word “testament.” As Naomi Seidman has pointed out, this is perhaps in an attempt to make his work more palatable to Yiddish-speaking audiences, see Naomi Seidman, “Ven yeshu hot geredt yidish: khayim aynshprukhs bris-khadoshe fun 1941,” Afn Shvel, no. 382–383 (Winter-Spring 2019): 26–30. is fertile ground for some of the questions Yashinsky takes up in his play: the tension between Yiddish as a Jewish language and its capacity as a language to be expansive enough to cover quintessentially non-Jewish themes. As Naomi Seidman has shown, Einspruch’s translation of the New Testament is unique and stands in direct contrast to the deathly “mechanical” translations of centuries past. Whereas older translations of the Christian Gospels into mame-loshn relied very heavily on Martin Luther’s sixteenth century version through borrowings from Luther’s Early New High German, Einspruch’s inspiration is drawn from a distinctly Jewish source: Yehoash’s 1926 translation of the Tanakh. 9 9 Seidman, 26–27. Seidman refers to Einspruch’s Yiddish as “completely Jewish Yiddish” [fulshtendik yidishlekh yidish], which employs more familiar [heymish] constructions as opposed to German Protestant jargon. For example, Einspruch’s Yiddish is littered with Hebrew and Aramaic terms that can be traced to Yehoash’s pioneering style. Even in areas where Einspruch’s translation departs from Yehoash, it is always to convey—as “Jewishly” as possible—the content of the Christian Gospels. 10 10 See Seidman, 29-30, where she elaborates how portions of Yehoash’s choices were “not Jewish enough” for Einspruch’s later style.
The Gospel According to Chaim foregrounds this contradiction—a Jewish translation of the Gospels—to simultaneously challenge a myriad of other contradictions of identity and culture that compose Jewish life. I would argue that Yashinsky’s play is less a play about a Messianic Jewish missionary and more a play about the very limits of Yiddish culture itself. I walked away from Yashinsky’s play with one unsettling question rattling in my mind: How far are we—Yiddish speakers, writers, artists—willing to sacrifice Jewish particularity and accept a universalist vision of Yiddish culture? Is Yiddish attached to a specific religion or a specific culture, or can it be anyone’s language? Gabriel Weinreich z”l, a native Yiddish speaker and a son of Max Weinreich who later became an Episcopalian priest, commented on this same question with the following conclusion: “If I speak German, I certainly don’t feel like a German. If I speak French, I certainly don’t feel like a Frenchman… [but when I speak Yiddish now, it is like] I am a member of an extinct species.” 11 11 Gabriel Weinreich, Gabriel Weinreich’s Oral History, interview by Christa Whitney, Beyond the Books; Yiddish Writers and their descendants, March 27, 2013, 2:07:50-2:09:45, https://www.yiddishbookcenter..... Other languages live comfortably in the mouths of others, whereas Yiddish can feel so attached to a specific time or a specific people, that a Christian speaking Yiddish in the twenty-first century evokes feelings of extinction.
![<p>Chaim Einspruch’s translation of Hebrews as “Der briv tsu di yidn” [The letter to the Jews]. Illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien.<br></p>](https://ingeveb.s3.amazonaws.com/images/2.-der-briv-tsu-di-yidn.png)
Chaim Einspruch’s translation of Hebrews as “Der briv tsu di yidn” [The letter to the Jews]. Illustrations by Ephraim Moses Lilien.
Upon entering the Theater for the New City, the theatergoer is confronted with a surreal imagining of a downtrodden Yiddish printing shop in 1940s Baltimore. The set, designed by Mengyi Liu with lighting by Alex Bartenieff, is bordered by larger-than-life movable type of Yiddish letters that seem to fly and merge as they approach the stage. In this sense, the entire set is suggested to be the metamorphosis of a line of text or movable type come to life. This engages both the literal setting of the play (a Yiddish print shop) and its inherent textuality—after all, the play is inspired directly by the text of Einspruch’s Der bris khadoshe. The humbleness of the printing shop is matched and juxtaposed by the costume design (designed by Gail Cooper Hecht): Gabe, the printer, is given a muted apron, whereas the polemicists of the play, Einspruch and Sadie, are dressed in color or fine clothing. The effect is a reminder to the audience that this Yiddish play portrays both a living Yiddish dialogue and seyfer-loshn: the language of the book, even the language of the Good Book.
The textuality of The Gospel According to Chaim is not limited to its design, however. At many points of the play, the actual text of Einspruch’s translation is projected upstage, and literal portions of other texts are given to members of the audience. Combined with the English supertitles, the viewer is almost overwhelmed with an homage to text and the physicality of language. Whether Sadie’s protest slogans, Einspruch’s business cards, Gabe’s mid-play printing of the title page of Der bris khadoshe, or the subtle quoting of the New Testament, there is no way to emerge from Yashinsky’s play without a higher sensitivity to the literal contours of printed words and images that we often take for granted.
The Gospel According to Chaim is not only textual, but it is also intertextual. Yashinsky’s script is not shy about its many references to Yiddish literature and folklore. The play begins with Gabe (Horowitz/Rosenberg) singing the folksong Ven ikh volt geven a shnayder [If I were a tailor], to which he adds his own verses: “A printer with nothing to print, a merchant with no merchandise…” Already, Yashinsky is gesturing at two main ideas: First, here is a Yiddish printer in Baltimore in 1941—a member of a dying species—who lacks the very things that compose his identity. He receives no business, no one is interested in printing Yiddish, and with the growing reality of Holocaust, his fate almost seems certain. Doomed to no longer set lines of text, Yashinsky inevitably confronts the question of Arn Zeitlin’s tormenting poem “Six Lines”: “Who needs a poem — and in Yiddish at that?” 12 12 Arn Zeitlin, “Six Lines,” trans. Miranda Cooper, Jewish Currents, May 13, 2019, https://jewishcurrents.org/six.... Secondly, the opening underlines what I see to be a central theme of Yashinsky’s play: contradiction and transcendence. There lies a contradiction to identity, especially in the case of a Yiddish printer, that is then transcended by the affirmation of the identity in the first place. “A printer with nothing to print” may sound like an oxymoron, but it is instead an affirming transcendence that allows an identity to exist even in times of peril and tension. A printer without print does not cease to be a printer, and a language without a people does not cease to be a language.
Right at this opening moment of vulnerability and contradiction, Einspruch (Yashinsky) enters the stage as a redeemer or messianic figure. He offers money to Gabe, as the missionary world has financial backing. In other words, he offers Gabe the chance to print Yiddish once again, and therefore give new life to a language teetering on the brink of destruction. Except, Einspruch also offers Jesus, who he truly believes to be the savior and redeemer of his people. The very idea that Jesus should be the solution to a dying Yiddish print industry or, as the play explores, a savior to the terror of the Holocaust, sounds like a shockingly antisemitic line of a Christian missionary. Yet, Yashinsky is able to present this idea as a natural and sympathetic development of Einspruch’s worldview as a Jewish missionary for Jesus. While still offensive and inscrutable to many, Einspruch’s position to Yiddish and the Holocaust is rooted in a deep expression of his attachment to Yiddish and the love and care he poured into his “completely Jewish” translation of the New Testament.
This sympathy is not felt by Gabe’s anti-fascist and secular Jewish friend, Sadie (Weisz). Despite Sadie’s avowedly non-religious point of view, she feels a deep connection to her identity as a Jew and is engaged in the struggle for awareness and resistance to the Holocaust overseas. A major tension point between Sadie and Einspruch is when they are both “proselytizing” in the streets to the Jews of Baltimore: Sadie encouraging them to join demonstrations against genocide, and Einspruch encouraging them to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Both individuals conceive of themselves as helping their fellow Jews, but Einspruch’s perspective is completely unacceptable to Sadie. In a major climatic moment of the play, Sadie points and screams at Einspruch: “Jewish [yidisher] Goy! Heretic!” Again, one is confronted with an underlying contradiction: What is a yidisher goy? How does one inhabit the space of both a Jew and a non-Jew, and more importantly, why does Sadie, who is completely areligious, feel that she has the authority to label Einspruch a “heretic” due to his Christian faith? If Yiddish is particular to Jews, there can be no yidishe goyim. Yet, Sadie feels a readily understandable impulse to control the borders of Jewishness although it seems she is not sure herself where it lies.
Importantly, Yashinsky’s portrayal of Einspruch is not simply sympathetic, nor are the other characters portrayed solely as in opposition to him. On the contrary, Yashinsky successfully allows for the evolution of his characters—although if the play was longer, this could be accomplished more completely. His characters are juxtaposed to Einspruch not only because of their stances on the New Testament, but also because of their experiences of waiting: Einspruch is convinced that the wait for the Messiah is over, while waiting seems to be the most salient condition for the other figures in the play: Gabe’s mother is still in Eastern Europe and he can do nothing but wait for news of her. Meanwhile, Sadie argues that Jews should not simply wait for news from abroad and must instead protest for action. While all these characters wait, Einspruch eventually cracks under the pressure. Einspruch can no longer wait for a printer to help him, or for other Jews to understand his message. This anticipation results in an eruption at Gabe where Einspruch’s hidden contempt for his fellow Jews rises to the surface.
Yashinsky has succeeded in writing a powerful drama that is waiting for more analysis. The Gospel According to Chaim challenges much of what is taken for granted about Yiddish and its relationship to Jewishness, while depicting a completely new viewpoint on the debates that have animated Yiddish cultural life for the past century. With any luck, this is a play that should be staged again and again, and hopefully published as a text of Yiddish literature in its own right.
