Conference Report-Ashkenaz Theory and Nation

The Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

26-29 May 1998

What if they held a conference and no one knew what it was about?

That is not exactly the case with "Ashkenaz: Theory and Nation," but many of the participants clearly arrived with only a vague sense of the premise on which the conference was based. One of its co-coordinators, David Miller, professor of Yiddish and Ashkenazic Studies at

Ohio State University, sought to set the tone in his opening address. "French is to France as German is to Germany...as Yiddish is to..." Miller urged his audience to view the answer--Ashkenaz, of course--as both an assertion and a field for interrogation.

But where, exactly, is (or, more to the point, was) Ashkenaz? Miller's Ohio State colleague, Neil Jacobs, set about to tackle the question from a linguistic point of view in the conference's first session. In his breathless, jump-cut style, Jacobs took us through his four-page handout on "The Map of Ashkenaz: Evolution, Approaches, Problems." Since maps and place names tend to reflect the biases of their creators, Jacobs asserted, "The map of any country should be ripped up and redone as a series of infinite overlays." And the map of Ashkenaz would demonstrate, in Jacob's words, "that there was a there there."

Hovering over this presentation was the imposing spirit of Max Weinreich, whose History of the Yiddish Language and other studies Jacobs turned to repeatedly. It was Weinreich who put forth perhaps the most compelling reason for mapping a place called Ashkenaz, for many of Eastern European cities and towns figure far more prominently in Jewish history and/or the Jewish imagination than they ever did for non-Jews. "Vilna...will have to figure on the map in larger letters than Vilnius, Viljn'a, Wilno on a non-Jewish map," wrote Weinreich. "Lisa, Kotsk, Ger...must be on every Jewish cultural-historical map; they are places too small to figure on a 'general' map. Khelem and Linsk have no interest for us as real cities Chelm and Lesko, but as the homes of Jewish simpletons. Hotseplots and Boyberik have real non-Jewish equivalents in Silesia and eastern Galicia, but among Yiddish speakers they are places in the world of fantasy."

No Khelemers or Hotseplotsers seemed to be among the presenters, though quite a few came from the United States, with others spanning much of Europe (though France and Germany seemed to abstain). A handful came west from Israel as well. Participants also spanned the map of Academe: the ghettos of graduate school, the shtetlekh where the young professorate cuts its first teeth, and the glitzy metropolises inhabited by the tenured cosmopolites. Many of the participants had come to Cracow for the first time, and discussions between and after sessions often gravitated to the strange mix of sensations elicited by holding a Jewish Studies conference in that city. In a vacuum, the city is lovely: beautiful architecture, a magnificent central square lined with echt-Central European cafes, many historic sites. "Here," explained a friend, a historian who know Poland well, "we are in Central Europe. Warsaw is in Eastern Europe." But Cracow's picturesqueness is not without a certain eeriness. After all, Kazimierz, the old Jewish section of town, is well-preserved, but its Jewish community was all but obliterated. Now, in addition to sites of historic interest, one can eat quasi-Jewish food in the cafes, listen to pseudo-klezmer music, and book a ticket on a "Schindler's List" tour. Or buy a Jew in the covered market in the middle of Rynek Glovny, the central square: grotesque wooden statuettes with beady eyes and hooked noses.

Back at the conference, one could hear papers on the culture, history, and language of the Eastern European Jews via a broad range of disciplines: literary criticism, history, linguistics, art history, psychoanalysis, musicology, theatre history, and material culture. Many presenters attempted to place their remarks in the context of questions surrounding the theory of Ashkenaz, but most of the ones I heard did not, apparently preferring to let geographical or cultural connections speak for themselves.

Since, as the Yiddish saying goes, "Me ken nisht tantsn mit eyn tukhes af tsvey khasenes" --you can't dance with one tukhes at two weddings (at least not simultaneously), I had to miss some potentially interesting attempts to engage the subject. The most sustained effort I heard that addressed Ashkenaz head-on was anthropologist Jack Kugelmass's periodization of American Jewry's perception of Eastern European Jewry, "Imagining Ashkenaz: memory and Nation." Kugelmass took his listeners through what he saw as six phases in American Jews' consciousness of Ahskenaz, from the prevalence of the trans-Atlantic journey in such works as Abraham Cahan's novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, to recent views of Ashkenaz as homeland, as in comedian Billy Crystal's recent search for his roots in the film Midnight Train to Moscow. Along the way, Kugelmass visited a variety of cultural landmarks, yizkor books, the films The Pawnbroker and Shoah, and the March of the Living.

Other presentations bit off more concentrated pieces of Ashkenaz (and again, the list is slanted in the direction in which this particular tukhes veered): a survey of illuminated pinkosim from Ukraine; rises and falls in the reputation of Polish-Jewish painter Maurycy Minkowski; a number of papers offering close readings of Yiddish poetry and prose; intellectual history focusing on the work of Isaac Hourwich; an overview of Jewish life in small-town America; reports on Yiddish, Polish, and Russian youth autobiographies; and studies of interwar theatrical activity in Cracow and New York.

Hearing all the discomfort with the theory of Ashkenaz, which participants voiced in presentations, in responses to papers, and informally outside of the sessions themselves, I recalled a distinguished art historian's defence of one of his many bold readings of the painting and sculptures of Michelangelo. Having been criticized by a colleague for taking his interpretations too far, he parried that one could accept as much or as little of them as one wanted. Were he to hold back, his readers would have no such choice.

The same might be said of "Ashkenaz: Theory and Nation." Perhaps Miller's and Jacob's theories of Ashkenaz will not hold up in the long run. Nevertheless, the conference that arose from their intellectual agenda offered a starting point for discussing a broad range of issues that fell under its umbrella. "Ashkenaz: Theory and Nation" may not have brought us any closer to determining where, or even whether, to place Ashkenaz on the map, but by attracting a number of talented scholars from numerous points on the map of Europe and North America, it served as a useful forum for an exchange of ideas.

Joel Berkowitz

Oxford University

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