Modernist Yiddish Aesthetics, I. L. Peretz’s Middlebrow Yiddish Poetics,and the Place of Yehoash in Modernist and Middlebrow Literary History

Yehoash (the pen name for Solomon Bloomgarden, 1870-1927) was a revered Yiddish poet during the interwar period, the Holocaust, and the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.1 This essay establishes a critical methodology for recovering the work of this important Jewish poet. Before Yiddish poetry became closely identified with modernism, Yehoash’s inclusive and comprehensive aesthetic received broad approval for its function as a bridge between the sacred and secular dimensions of modern Jewish experience.2 That bridge offered the possibility of cultural survival during the Holocaust, especially for American Jews whose Yiddish speaking relatives were being murdered in Europe. Although the conservative, preservative function of Yehoash’s poetry runs counter to progressive modernist notions of emancipation from tradition, it serves an important role in the ongoing restoration of Yiddish literature after the Holocaust. Even the skeptical modernist Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, a writer whose interwar practices of inward looking Introspectivism run counter to Yehoash’s encyclopedic poetics, goes so far as to say that Yehoash foresaw the catastrophe of the Holocaust and strove to provide “a guarantee against the decline of our language” by “rescuing thousands of Yiddish words” from the “here and newness” and “say it straight compulsion” of an interwar international Jewish world whose creativity had been diminished by violence and assimilation (Glatstein, in tokh gekumen 65-66). For Glatstein, Yehoash’s project of “renewal and revitalization” through the “harmonizing” of the modern and the traditional (Glatstein 67) represented a fulfillment of the “organic integration” (Winer 93) of secular and sacred literature, a process popularized in the early twentieth century by the revered Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz, and continued by Yehoash after Peretz’s death in 1915. Yehoash’s