Early Yiddish Epic

by Jerold C. Frakes (Editor)

Unlike most other ancient European, Near Eastern, and Mediterranean civilizations, Jewish culture surprisingly developed no early epic tradition: while the Bible comprises a broad range of literary genres, epic is not among them. Not until the late medieval period, beginning in the fourteenth century, did an extensive and thriving epic tradition emerge in Yiddish. Among the few dozen extant early epics, there are several masterpieces, of which ten are translated into English in this volume. Divided between the religious and the secular, the book includes eight epics presented in their entirety, an illustrative excerpt from another epic, and a brief heroic prose tale.

These texts have been chosen as the best and the most interesting representatives of the genre in terms of cultural history and literary quality: the pious "epicizing" of biblical narrative, the swashbuckling medieval courtly epic, Arthurian romance, heroic vignettes, intellectual high art, and popular camp.

464 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2014

Reviews

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have absolutely no knowledge of Jewish folklore and fiction, so when I saw Early Yiddish Epic in Netgalley, I was intrigued. As it turns out, there is a reason why I had never heard of Jewish epics before now: they neither created nor borrowed the epic narrative form until the Judeo-Persian and early Yiddish cultures began to simultaneously develop them. Even these are of a rather peculiar form. There are two main types of Yiddish epic: the secular, which are without exception adapted from other German or Italian epics of the time, and the midrashic, which centre around the lives of biblical figures and fill in the details that are seen to be lacking in the biblical texts. While midrashic books were usually written by rabbis and both expected and required an audience highly versed in biblical knowledge, the secular books were seen as "morally corrupting." In fact, many midrashic books went so far as to warn against the corrupting influences of these secular narratives.

The longest of the midrashic epics included in the collection is the Seyfer Shmuel, or "Book of Samuel," dated to approximately 1525. According to Frakes, this is the first time that the story has been translated into English. It provides a more detailed version of Samuel 1 and 2, depicting the adventures of Sameul, Saul, and David. I found the story to be rather troubling. It portrays a captious God who punishes anyone who cannot follow his incomprehensible rules, and a people who are rather terrifyingly bloodthirsty, murdering "friend and foe alike." All the same, there are a few exceedingly amusingly unchaste phrases such as my personal favourite:

"He who dies from threats is buried to the sound of farts.”

The unexpected gem of the collection, to my mind at least, was Vidvilt, an anonymous 15th-16th century epic and the only known Yiddish Arthurian romance. Vidvilt was adapted from the German Wigalois, but surpasses it both in form and substance. It "de-Christianizes" the story, substituting miracles and divine intervention with cleverness and wits. Interestingly, it also utterly removes the vicious anti-Muslim bigotry that pervades Wigalois. Vidivilt starts out in a manner rather reminiscent of The Green Knight: when a mysterious man arrives and tricks Arthur into potentially humiliating his court, Galahad ends up as a prisoner of the stranger. The story then takes a rather unexpected turn to depict the adventures of Vidvilt, a handsome and successful knight despite his rather unfortunate name. (When his mother asked his father about a name for their son, he replied, "Call him whatever you want," so she promptly named him "Vi-du-vilt," which translates to "whatever you want.") The story ends up involving magical belts, scheming kings, angry dragons, magical giantesses, and quite a few contests of wits. I found it as entertaining as the stories of Chretien de Troyes or Galahad and the Green Knight.

My major complaint against the book is the author's rather disparaging attitude towards other scholars. He defines the epic very narrowly and is contemptuous towards those who include prose in their study of the epic. He rather harshly dismisses the theories he disagrees with, and while I obviously know nothing about the theories he derides, I found his attitude a little partisan and divisive. For example, when he argues against the theory of a direct German influence for Duke Horant, he ends with:

“In any case, Duke Horant is a unique epic, that is, it exists in a single manuscript and only in Old Yiddish, and no amount of germanistic speculation about its alleged Middle High German sources will change that fact.”

However, I am very glad to have had the opportunity to read these stories. While the midrashic epics were not precisely absorbing, they provided a window into a unique cultural perspective. Frakes also sedulously explains the more esoteric details of the stories such as the h'alitzah, a tradition that releases a widow from the responsibility of marrying into her deceased husband's family. (How it works: the brother-in-law renounces her, then she removes one of his sandals, spits in his face, and says, 'This is what is done to the man who does not build up his brother's house!' Then she can marry whoever she wants.) However, the most pleasant surprise of all was the utterly delightful secular epic, Vidvilt. While my lack of rigorous biblical knowledge and Jewish culture made this book a little arduous, I definitely recommend Vidvilt to anyone interested in Arthurian romances.

Excerpted from my review on Booklikes, which also contains a summary of each of the stories contained in the collection.

~~I received this ebook through NetGalley from the publisher, Syracuse University Press, in exchange for my honest review. ~~