Life lessons with the refugee from Hitler who pioneered Yiddish at Harvard
“FIND YOURSELF a teacher,” we are told. When I was at Harvard I found Ruth Wisse, the world’s leading scholar of Yiddish literature. Ruth encouraged me to become what Americans used to call a “public intellectual” when I left. I phoned her at home in New York to talk about her new autobiography, Free As A Jew.
Wisse, now 85, was born in 1936 in Czernowitz, which was then in Romania, had previously been under Austrian control, and is now in Ukraine. Her parents escaped with her and her younger brother to Montreal in the summer of 1940. As she writes in her memoir, in the “most momentous period of Jewish history” she had been “whisked from the centres of action to a land of peace and prosperity”.
Yet today, Wisse says: “I find myself in at the heart of world events after all, as a combatant in the war over the future of America” – because, she believes, the “actual target of antiJewish politics” is liberal democracy itself. The result is that Wisse is best known not as an academic pioneer who held the first chair in Yiddish at Harvard and taught generations of scholars, but as a fearless and outspoken defender of Israel. How did she feel when she realised she had become notorious?
She laughs. “I just think about what’s incumbent and true, and the truth is, what does surprise me is when people say that what I’ve said is controversial. When I’m writing about politics, and even literature too, I try to say the most obvious thing: ‘What is this about?’ When you try to say what is most obvious and people say that it’s most controversial, it’s a little disconcerting.”
She is troubled by the contrast between her personal success as a Jew in the New World, and the weakening of the society in which she lives. Her book, she says, is “a story of great fortune: everything I did and experienced, and the people I’ve known, has been so fortunate at a time when many people, members of our family, were far less fortunate”.
The problem is, Americans have forgotten how lucky they are: “The culture and the country are moving in the opposite direction, largely as a function of the fact that people don’t understand their collective good fortune. All that once used to reinforce a sense of gratitude – through prayer, through family life, through institutions – all those things have been brought into question or actually rejected.”
The alternative is “a culture of grievance and blame, and it isn’t going well, personally or collectively”.
That’s the trajectory that troubles her: “On a personal level, one can write one set of recollections, and on the other I feel very much a creature of my environment.”
Wisse believes that the revival of Jewish sovereignty has permanently altered the political environment for all Jews, wherever they live. “It’s the driving impulse of my memoir, more than anything else,” she says. “Whether I live in
Israel or not is not the main thing. The main thing is that it lives and to see the way it lives, the way it thrives. This is a national imperative and a national joy.”
Again, she emphasises her good fortune. “I say, ‘Look, in the 1940s this people that was so humiliatingly reduced by one-third of its number, in that same decade it re-established its national homeland that had been under foreign domination for two millennia.’ And I say, ‘Look, I don’t know another miracle of that magnitude. I can’t find it in Jewish history, in human history. If you think of it in those terms, it’s inconceivable. And this is the people whom I find myself among, and this is what happened in my lifetime. So how can you be luckier than that?”
Perhaps surprisingly, she is untroubled by reports that many young American Jews are drifting away from Judaism and Israel. “The story of the 12 tribes, of whom 10 got lost, is more or less the story of the Jewish people. I don’t worry about that happening in America: it’s a natural phenomenon. I’m not worried about people who stop being Jews. I only worry about Jews who want to pretend that Judaism is the opposite of what it actually is.”
Assimilation, she says, is “the
The American people have somehow forgotten how lucky they are
Israel’s a miracle unlike any other in Jewish or even human history
greatest gift” that America can offer its citizens. “There are people who don’t want to be Jews and America gives them the opportunity of not being that. We know people like that, and some of them are wonderful. I definitely do not begrudge them. The problem comes with Jews who feel uncomfortable and become anti-Jews… Those people do cause Jews danger because they can be much more antagonistic and angrier than others.”
I remember in one class Wisse told us she chose literature because no other field taught so much about life. She is still learning – and still teaching.
“Last week, I wrote about Sholem Ansky’s Behind A Mask, a work that I’d been teaching for many years and that I once translated. It’s about these boys who in the 19th century set out to enlighten their community. This story seemed more than a little unreal to me when I first read it: I thought it was exaggerated. But now, in terms of what’s happening in terms of Jewish anti-Israel activity in campuses, I say, ‘Boys, I now recognize you!’ Until now I’ve always believed that literature is one of the ways I’ve learned about life. But now I see that life has shown me how to read a book.”
Ruth Wisse’s Free As A Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation is published by Wicked Son (£20).