The nest

The nest in front, first row in the middle, to the left of Chagall

Pinchas Kahanowitsch ( Russian Пинхус Менделевич Каганович ; born November 1, 1884 in Berdychiv , Russian Empire ; today Ukraine ; died June 4, 1950 in a Soviet camp) is considered the most important Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union . He published all of his works under the pseudonym Der Nister (also: Der Nistor; Yiddish: דער נסתּר "the hidden one").

Life

Childhood and youth

Pinchas Kahanowitsch was born into a Hasidic family of merchants. His father was a fishmonger in Astrakhan on the Volga . Through his family, who were close to the Korschewer Hasids, he received a strictly traditional religious education. It was probably his mother as a "progressive" element of his family who aroused his interest in socialist and Zionist ideas. In 1905 he attended the Poalei Tzion Congress.

Pinchas studied pedagogy and began working as a teacher when he was twenty. He pursued this work for many years alongside his literary work.

At the age of 23 he published his first book in Vilnius , like all his works in his native Yiddish: Gedankn un motiwn - lider in prose, a collection of short, mostly philosophical considerations. Even his first work appeared under the pseudonym "The Nister", which he used for all of his other publications throughout his life. The pseudonym refers to the old Hasidic legend of the 36 righteous , who, hidden from the world and from themselves, serve as the justification and basis of the world's existence.

The First World War

To avoid being drafted into the tsarist army, Kahanowitsch left his hometown in 1907 and moved to Zhytomyr . Here he gave private lessons in Hebrew and continued his literary work. He published poems and short stories and met the Yiddish writer IL Peretz , whom Kahanowitsch greatly admired. Peretz recognized his literary talent and encouraged him by helping him to publish his literary prose Hecher fun der erd in Warsaw in 1910.

In 1912 Kahanowitsch married Rochl Silberberg, a young teacher from Zhytomyr. In 1914 their daughter Hodel was born. Kahanowitsch found work in Kiev, which cleared his previously unlawful situation, and officially moved with his family to Kiev .

Between 1912 and 1920 he published a whole series of works of various genres (poems, stories, children's stories) and gradually developed a distinctive, strongly symbolist narrative style that became more and more sophisticated and complex over the years.

The twenties

In 1920 he moved to the model colony in Malakowka near Moscow for a few months , where he worked as a teacher for Jewish orphans, whose parents had mainly fallen victim to the tsarist Jewish pogroms from 1904 to 1906. At that time, Malakowka was a kind of laboratory for new concepts of modern child rearing, at the same time it was experimented with in literature, poetry and painting. Here he met other Jewish artists and intellectuals, among them David Hofstein , Leib Kwitko , Moshe Lifshits and Marc Chagall . Chagall had already illustrated a collection of children's poems by Kahanowitsch , Majßelech in fersn , published in 1918/19.

Kahanowitsch left Malakowka again at the beginning of 1921 and moved with his family to Kaunas in Lithuania. Since he had great difficulty earning a living there, he decided, like many other Russian intellectuals of the time, to leave the Soviet Union and moved to Berlin . From 1922 to 1924 he worked here as a freelancer for the Yiddish magazine Milgroim (pomegranate). In Berlin he also published a two-volume collection of his symbolist stories under the title Gedacht . The book establishes a first, modest literary success. When Milgroim ceased publication in 1924, he and his family moved on to Hamburg , where he worked for the Soviet trade mission for two years.

In 1926 Kahanowitsch returned to the Soviet Union and settled with his family in Kharkiv . The Gedacht Collection was also published in Russia in 1929, albeit with slight changes. In the same year another volume appeared in Kiev with stories that were probably already planned for the Berlin edition, under the title Fun majne giter .

The complicated web of metaphors in his narratives, the themes of which are linked to Hasidic mysticism - especially Kabbalah and the symbolist narratives of Rabbi Nachman von Brazlaw - create a universe of images and similes that are reminiscent of the romantic texts of one ETA Hoffmann , but also remember folk tales, children's poems or counting rhymes. The hypnotic rhythm of his long sentences gives the stories an enigmatic archaic undertone. Last but not least, they also reflect the increasing pressure exerted on Jewish intellectuals by the Soviet regime at that time.

The Nister was also a victim of the increasingly strict Soviet censorship . When the Russian Yiddish newspaper Di rojte welt (The Red World) published his story Under a plojt (Under the Fence) in 1929 , he was heavily criticized for it. The then president of the Russian Association of Yiddish Writers, Moshe Litwakow, initiated a smear campaign, at the end of which The Nister had to renounce literary symbolism . He tried now to write his literary work in the sense of the prevailing Socialist Realism and began to write reports . These collected reports appear in 1934 under the title Hojptschtet (Capitals).

The thirties

In the early 1930s he published almost exclusively as a journalist and translator, u. a. Works by Tolstoy , Victor Hugo or Jack London . His own literary work was limited to four small collections of stories for children. At the same time he began working on his actual main work: Di mixing poche Maschber (The family Maschber and at the same time "The family crisis", Yiddish. Maschber = dt crisis.), A realistic written, the Buddenbrooks comparable family saga on Jewish life in his hometown Berditschew at the end of the 19th century with the three brothers Mosche - a proud businessman who then went bankrupt -, Luzi - a skeptical mystic and benefactor who courageously and defiantly believed in the eternity of the Jewish people, probably a self-portrayal of Kahanowitsch - and age - a philanthropic altruist - as the main actors.

The first volume of the Maschber family was published in Moscow in 1939. The work was almost unanimously praised by the critics, it appeared to be rehabilitated. But the success did not last long: The limited edition of the first volume sold out quickly, the Second World War and the invasion of German troops into the Soviet Union in 1941 made a second edition impossible. The second volume, dedicated to his daughter Hodel, who starved to death during the Leningrad blockade , did not appear in New York until 1948 . The manuscript of a third volume, the completion of which Der Nister mentions in a letter, has been lost to this day. A German translation by the Maschber family was first published in 1990.

The second World War

During the Second World War, Kahanovich was evacuated to Tashkent . Here he wrote stories about the horrors of the persecution of the Jews in the German-occupied Poland, which had been described to him first hand by friends. These collected stories were published in 1943 under the title Churboneß in Moscow, where he had withdrawn, together with his second wife Lena Singalowska, an actress of the then Yiddish Kievan Theater. At the same time, Der Nister , like his fellow Yiddish writers Itzik Feffer , Perez Markisch and Samuel Halkin , was involved in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee headed by Solomon Michoels , the director of the Yiddish State Theater in Moscow, and wrote texts and letters of appeal as calls for help against the National Socialist pogroms. The texts were u. a. also reprinted in US newspapers.

In 1947 he was exiled to Birobidzhan near the Chinese border to report on a self-administered Jewish settlement planned by the Soviet regime in this area. In 1949 he was finally arrested in the course of the extermination of Jewish writers and the destruction of Jewish culture on Soviet soil ordered by the Soviet state apparatus. According to official Soviet sources, Pinchas Kahanowitsch died on June 4, 1950 in a Soviet prison hospital.

In August 2017, his grave was discovered by Israeli and Russian researchers in the village of Abes near Vorkuta . It is now marked by a monument in the shape of a Star of David made from barbed wire .

reception

During the Stalin era , the works of Nister, like all Yiddish literature, were completely hushed up. That only changed in the 1960s. In 1960 his death was officially confirmed for the first time. Little by little , fragments from his works reappeared in the magazine Sowetisch Hejmland, founded in 1961 . In 1969 a collection of his stories from the time after the Second World War was published under the title Widerwuks . The two volumes of the Maschber family were published together in 1974 in the Soviet Union. The Nister was thus gradually rehabilitated without this ever having been officially stated. The reprint of his works was limited to his "realistic" writings.

The Nister appears as a character in the 2006 published novel The World to Come (dt. The upcoming World ) by Dara Horn .

Works (selection)

• Gedankn un motiwn - lider in prose, Wilna 1907
• Hecher fun der Erd ("Higher from the Earth"), Warsaw 1910
• Singing and praying, Kiev 1912 (song collection)
• Translated selected edition of Andersen's fairy tales, 1918
• Majßelech in fersn (“Stories in Verses”), 1918/19 (with illustrations by Marc Chagall; several editions: Kiev, Warsaw, Berlin)
• Gedacht, Berlin, 1922/23 (Collection of fantastic visionary stories, 2 vols.)
• Fun majne giter, Kiev 1929 (pessimistic stories)
• Hojptschtet, Moscow 1934
• Sekß majßelech, 1939
• Di mischpoche Maschber, Kiev 1939 (1st volume), New York 1948 (2nd volume)
• Churboneß, Moscow 1943
• Derzejlung and eßejen, New York 1957 (posthumous)
• Revolt, Moscow 1969 (posthumous)

Expenses (selection)

The following were published in German translation:

• "Under the fence". Yiddish stories , Frankfurt, 1988, afterword by Daniela Mantovan-Kromer
• "The Mashber Brothers". The Yiddish epic. Translated by Hans-Joachim Maass, Frankfurt / M., 1990

The following was published in English translation:

• The Family Mashber , New York, 1987

The following were published in French translation:

• Sortilèges. Contes , traduits par Delphine Bechtel, Paris, 1992
• Contes fantastiques et symboliques , traduits par Delphine Bechtel, Paris, 1997

The following was published in Italian translation:

• Prologo di uno sterminio . Venice, 2000, afterword by Dr. Daniela Mantovan-Kromer

Literature (selection)

• The Yiddish World, born 1913, ed. by Samuel Niger , Vilnius 1913.
• Borromäus-Blätter / Die Bücherwelt, born 1919, ed. from the Borromeo Association , Bonn 1919.
• Borromäus-Blätter / Die Bücherwelt, born 1924, Bonn 1924.
• Salomon Wininger , Vol. III, 1925 ff.
• Salman Reisen : Lekßikon fun der Yidischer Literatur un press. 1926 ff., Vol. II.
• Saul Kaleko, Article Nister, in: Jüdisches Lexikon, Vol. IV / 1, Berlin 1927.
• Günter Stemberger , History of Jewish Literature, 1977.
• Delphine Bechtel: The Nister's Work 1907–1929. A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist. Bern 1990 (= "Contacts" Etudes et Documents, III, 11).
• Delphine Bechtel: The Nister's 'Der Kadmen'. A Metaphysical Narration on Cosmogony and Creation. [«L'origine» de The Nister. Une narration métaphysique sur la cosmogonie et la création], Yiddish, vol. VIII, n ° 2, New York, 1992, p. 38-54.
• Daniela Mantovan-Kromer: Female Archetypes in Nister's Symbolist Short Stories. Jerusalem 1992 (contribution to the 4th International Conference in Yiddish Studies).
• Daniela Mantovan-Kromer: The Nister's 'In vayn-keler'. A Study in Metaphor. In: The Field of Yiddish. Fifth Collection, Northwestern University Press and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York 1993.
• Peter B. Maggs: The Mandelstam and "The Nister" Files. An Introduction to Stalin-Era Prison and Labor Camp Records. 1995.
• Sabine Boehlich : "Nay-Gayst". Mystical traditions in a symbolist story by the Yiddish author "The Nister" (Pinkhas Kahanovitsh) . Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008 (Jewish culture; 18).

Web links

• Literature by and about The Nister in the catalog of the German National Library
• Daniela Mantovan-Kromer: The Nister. The hidden one . In: Trieste contemporanea (English)
• Daniela Mantovan-Kromer: The Nister: colui che e 'nascosto . In: Trieste contemporanea (Italian)
• The Nister 1884–1950 Short biography (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to other sources 1952
2. ↑ JTA : The Nister hidden no more. Grave of influential Yiddish writer and Soviet resistance fighter discovered at former gulag . August 30, 2017; Newsru.co.il: В одном из лагерей ГУЛага в Коми найдена могила члена ЕАК писателя Дер Нистера . 29th August 2017.