The ideal anthology is now, one would think, impossible. Not aiming for the compleat condition as established by the encyclopedia (18th century), biographical dictionary (19th century) or, today, by the googolplex Internet, an anthology’s purpose was, historically speaking, to establish a canon, to assert a primary or mainstream historical narrative that would encompass diffuse and indirect efforts in the literary arts. This hope, revivified early in the 20th century for various commercial or academic (as opposed to scholarly) purposes, was unknown to the Greeks, whose first-century BCE “Anthology” was the unconscious Adam of its race, and so achieved perhaps unintentional posterity. The Anthologia Graeca, as it is now known, otherwise referred to as the Palatine Anthology, was the first volume compiled, by one Meleager of Gadara, under the “Anthology” rubric; the Greek word means “garland,” or “bouquet.”
More than a mere formal progenitor, though, this book’s very making was the model for the Total Library that is the Internet, in that its collocation was made colloquy, a discussion between generations and cultures, with the subsequent efforts of later editors, such as Agathias and Maximus Planudes. What ultimately resulted was an ideal of Grecian art, of Grecian poetry, in its origins and development. What has come down to us, then, is the fictive or fictionalizing idea of a canon, of “the canon” — the Western humanist narrative, it might be called, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, serves us still today.
Here are two volumes, then, almost 1,400 pages, of the work of more than 100 writers of prose and poetry born in and born of Jewish Russia. Some fanatics will read this heady, heavy anthology front to back; others, in armchairs, will choose to flip through in pursuit of biographical curiosity or literary whim. No matter the manner of appreciation, though, the parts of “An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature” seem as great as the whole, are greater — they are, and it is, a wonder.
From Leyba Nevakhovich’s 1803 “The Lament of the Daughter of Judah” (which declares, “The religion professed by the Jews is harmless to any citizenship”) to the present-day, disappointed Americanism of Vladimir Gandelsman, the uncomfortable Israelism of Dina Rubina and the proudly nativist humor of Odessan Mikhail Zhvanetsky, “Two Centuries of Dual Identity,” as the anthology’s subtitle describes, become, in effect, two centuries of triple identities, and more — two centuries of multiform sentimentalities and socializations, and their abjuration, or idealization, on the Russian-language page.
After 1934, and the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Russia’s official literati had reached a definitive consensus: A Jewish writer, they would argue, was a Jew who wrote in only Yiddish or Hebrew, and only a Jew writing only in Russian could rightly be called a Russian writer — and only a Russian writer. The anthologizing of these two volumes condemns such a denunciation of cultic life, and then proceeds, by example, to halfway support it. Democracy — which respects religion, and has trumped communism with a capitalist embrace of myriad affiliation, birthright and calling — has ultimately ruled, and, surprisingly, such ruling has much in common with the liberties taken by an autocracy, or fascist regime: A Jewish writer is whoever wants to be called a Jewish writer, and, as if in a resurrection of Soviet denunciation, any writer whom a culture wants to call a Jewish writer, too. more…
06/07/2007...11:25 am
Neither and Both
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