Enlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's …npillay6a2010.wikispaces.com/file/view/Cultural_comparison.pdfEnlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's "The Mare" and Dangarembga's

Enlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's "The Mare" and Dangarembga's "NervousConditions"Author(s): David AberbachSource: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2004), pp. 214-230Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247429Accessed: 25/04/2010 19:58

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ENLIGHTENMENT AND CULTURAL CONFUSION: MENDELE'S THE MARE AND

DANGAREMBGA'S NERVOUS CONDITIONS

David Aherhach

A persecuted minority that sees the dominant Culture-the culture of the confusion a superior possible way out ofsocialand cultural entrapment, is highly vulnerable to confusion in social relations and cultural values, acute self-criticism and disillusionment, leading to revolt. The individual within such a minority is more than usually susceptible to what Erikson calls "negative identity":

The individual belonging to an oppressed and exploited minority, which is aware of the dominant cultural ideals but prevented from

emulating them, is apt to fuse the negative images held up to him by the dominant majority with the negative identity cultivated in his own group.1

This essay explores two novels by minority victims of the "enlightenment" purveyed by dominant empires: The Mare (Yiddish versions: 1873, 1888, 1911; Hebrew version: 1911) by Mendele Mocher Sefarim ("Mendele the Bookpeddler," pen name of S J. Abramowitz, 1835P-1917), and Ner- vous Conditions (1988) byTsitsi Dangarembga (1959- ).2The characters in both novels are cursed with exceptional sensitivity to their social limita- tions. They begin with idealistic enthusiasm to improve their personal and social situations through education and the abdication of their Native' iden- tities. Education for both is the way out of the poverty trap. Their idealiza- tion of the dominant culture clashes with their growing awareness of the evil that poisons that culture (and ultimately proves politically fatal). Disil- lusionment sets in when they find themselves - their hopes and ambitions,

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

214

ENLIGHTENMENT AND CULTURAL CONFUSION 215

the education they receive, the kind of person they are becoming - to be

symptomatic of the social malaise from which they struggle to free themselves. Their bright-eyed innocent hope of making a mark in the world fades as they find the deck stacked against them. They cannot wrench themselves from their group of origin but must suffer the humiliation of catch-

ing up in a foreign culture that, while attractive in some ways, corrodes their self-esteem, and leads to what Fanon calls "colonization of the personality."3

1. Mendele and The Mare

To compare such different works and writers - one writing in Yiddish and Hebrew in Tsarist Russia, the other a Black woman writing in English of British-dominated Rhodesia in the 1960s - calls for justification. The dif- ferences make the similarities all the more surprising. Mendele is univer-

sally acknowledged as the "grandfather" both of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature. The five novels which he wrote twice, first in Yiddish then in Hebrew, are the artistic foundations of these literatures.4 He is a pivotal figure in the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and a mordant social critic who revealed the corruption of diaspora Jewry, particularly in the shtetl (small town) and, implicitly, the need for Jewish nationalism. He is also the first Jewish novelist whose works are comparable with those of the great 19th century writers of fiction. He is particularly close to the Russian sati- rists Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Particularly as a Hebrew writer he breaks new ground in his use of classical sources, his manipulation of a

parallel between present and past: in this respect, he anticipates modernists such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Robert Alter has pointed out Mendele's

pivotal role as a modern Hebrew novelist, in making "the heritage of the

sages the medium of vividly satiric storytelling, pungent with the concrete details of quotidian reality."5 In sum, Mendele is indispensable in the canon of modern Jewish literature.6

Yet, Mendele is largely forgotten today. His works are set in a world that no longer exists: the Russian Pale of Settlement, the area on the western frontier of the Russian empire between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. Here the Russian Jews - the single largest Jewish community in the late 19th century, about five million, mostly uneducated, Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated into Russian society, living in medieval conditions, adhering for the most part to strictly Orthodox rabbinic Judaism - were confined by

2i6 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

law, increasingly impoverished, overcrowded and persecuted, until the Rus- sian Revolution. Mendele's writings expose unflinchingly the economic conditions primarily responsible for the migration of about two million

mostly Russian Jews westward in the generation prior to World War I.

Also, in common with Tsarist Russian literature generally, his fiction had

particular importance in a totalitarian state as an expression of an alternative vision and way of life. Critical views on Mendele naturally tend to focus on the Tsarist Russian-Jewish milieu, but as this belongs to the past the reader might have the impression that Mendele s work, fascinatingly original though it is, no longer speaks to the present. It might seem less

part of a living literature, an umbilical link to the rich culture of the lost East European Jewish centers than a grim shadow memory of an entirely different people, thankfully gone. Also the central ideology of Mendele s

writings, that of the Haskalah, was both discredited by the rise of Euro-

pean nationalism and anti-Semitism and, paradoxically, realized de facto after migration, mainly to America. The Haskalah, modeled on the Ger- man Aufklarungy was based on the premise that through secular education the Jews would "earn" civil rights and emancipation. The entire issue of

education, so pressing in Mendele s time and so painfully expressed in works such as The Mare, has been largely settled. The didactic element central in most of Mendele s writings, including The Mare - and with no real parallel in Dangarembga s novel - appears to be totally out of date. Most Jews no

longer feel, as they did in Mendele's day, that secular education and re- formed religious education necessarily alienate them from Judaism and Jew- ish society. Intermarriage, which was virtually unheard of in Mendele's world, is the norm in most Jewish communities today. Jewish identity is no longer as clearly defined as it was in Mendele s day (though Mendele's fiction itself points toward fragmentation). Outside universities, The Mare is rarely read. Hebrew literature has shrunk in importance during the 20th century, like most other Western literatures, as other media have grown.

Most of Mendele s Yiddish readers were murdered; and he lost his elite, discerning, critical European-born Hebrew readers, who understood what he was doing and delighted in the pure literary brilliance of his art, to Israeli readers who wanted a different kind of Hebrew, more colloquial and down-market, and dealing with Israeli reality. Unlike Charles Dickens and Nicholai Gogol, who are in some ways comparable to Mendele but whose

language in the original remains clear to most readers, Mendele's Hebrew

requires extensive background preparation and unusually close study. His

language is probably no more comprehensible to the modern Hebrew reader


than Chaucer s Middle English is to the English reader, though as in the case of Chaucer his style, once mastered, is a source of delight and wisdom. Mendele's art was created not for its own sake but with the aim of lifting the Jewish people from their ignorance, poverty, and backwardness. How-

ever, among Jews today, almost all Westernized, educated, middle or up- per-middle class, politically sophisticated citizens of developed and

well-functioning states, there can no longer be any real first-hand identifi- cation with, or full understanding of, the appalling social conditions which haunt Mendele s fiction and which drove him creatively. In some ways, the distance between Mendele and the contemporary Jewish writer, between the life of the Jews under Tsarist rule and the life of Jews today, is unbridge- able.7 No Jewish writer today could strike a collective chord among Jews by writing as Mendele did in his introduction to the Yiddish novel Fishke der Krummer (1888):

It has been my lot to descend to the depths, to the cellars of Jewish life. My stock in trade is: rags and mouldy wares. My dealings are with paupers and beggars, the poor wretches of life; with degener- ates, cripples, charlatans and other unfortunates, the dregs of hu-

manity. I always dream of beggars. Before my eyes, I always see a basket soaring

- the old familiar Jewish beggar basket.8

There remain many good reasons for reading Mendele: his brilliant

style both in Yiddish and Hebrew, his sharply satiric characterization, his masterful use of Jewish sources, and generally his comprehensive social and

psychological portrait of a tormented minority undergoing major change. Yet as a social reformer, Mendele wanted nothing so much as to be socio-

logically passé. Mendele might be described as a successful casualty of the social and economic transformation of the Jews, from poverty to relative

affluence, from the working class to the middle class. As a result, a vital area of Mendele's continuing relevance has been almost totally overlooked. While Mendele since 1945 has largely ceased to have meaning to most Jews, he is not passé m the Third World. Here conditions familiar to Mendele - poverty, disease, ignorance, persecution, a distorted self-image, and the lack of life chances, under tyrannical regimes

- remain the norm. The literature of the Third World is far closer to Mendele than practically any post- 1945

Jewish fiction (with the exception of literature on the Holocaust, which is in a different category, as impoverishment was part of the process of geno- cide). If Mendele were alive today, he might feel less kinship with his He- brew descendants - Israeli writers such as Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and

2i8 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

David Grossman - than with African and South American writers. That Mendele speaks to the Third World more directly than to practically any Jewish readership today is startlingly clear in a comparison between The Mare and Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, though life in Tsarist Russia was generally far worse than in Rhodesia under British colonial rule.

The Mare, originally written in Yiddish in 1872, was a reaction to the first Russian pogrom, which had occurred the previous year, in Odessa. The Russian Jewish press, then in its infancy, was not allowed to mention the atrocities. Mendele's novel was a thinly disguised cri de coeur of an en-

lightened Russian Jew whose prior faith that Jewish emancipation was possible under tsarist rule was severely tested. In the novel, a young Jew allegorically named Israel is in a major life crisis. He realizes that only through secular education can he escape the poverty and backwardness, the

provincialism and the religious and social entrapments of the Pale. His

worldly ambition and refusal to marry young, as was the custom, have cut him off from Jewish society. Israel is the despair of his widowed mother who supports him, her only child, through her small shop.

But then he is barred from entering medical school by anti-Semitic

university examiners. Frustrated and alienated on all sides, he breaks down. He has hallucinations of the mare, an allegorical representation of the suf-

fering Jewish people throughout history. Once a noble prince, the mare is now dehumanized, unsexed, starved, and tormented. Israels hallucinations, far from being symptoms of madness, are eminently sane and filled with

potent social satire. The cutting edge of Mendele's satire is aimed at the Russian Jewish intellectuals who (like the author himself) clung to illu- sions. The Mare is also one of the most powerful attacks on anti-Semitism in literature, though spoken mainly by the Devil. In an autocratic state, any suggestion of alternative forms of power is subversive. One thinks of Milton in Paradise Lost or Dostoyevsky in The Possessed, published in 1871-2, not

long before The Mare, which uses imagery of demonic possession as a par- able of contemporary Russia: "[...] that s exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and pages/'9 The Mare was the only work of Mendele s which

got him into trouble with the Russian police.10 In mad fantasy, Israel is enticed to join the Devil's party:


^rm ïkw *ain ! 'tavn * on&ut At nafty nnaV ,nV mana w» nni tmVy xpn it mn n-waa na* «mm DiTâ îaanna ato ,Dnwrn oni&m d*oio ,oViya nain .nyn tf?v o*ormn& on p-nr*r«|Ki «xnrwn ja ihhq nrpnn Kto ,naK A'avni .Dmaa naosna unnv noVm Va» ,ma* rt n*vawi D'won naVa mim mma nassr ,awa pvn .Wa ran î^k ,Dn)inn tuo oioa mi î»« dk «n^v^^vm inrmet miyna oâ^ tan - nwonv oniKa DiT»^ nprn^» nann crnr^ xm msnvsnr nt w'otoyn* rf?«sno ipn nn m ™» .nâanan o>oion mny taa d*tod ,nw»aa on nn D»mon urn .ona nitaoa rm ,naanaa D'ta)&i tx" »jrn» k^»k oaw na^n noyaai irwa n» ntao .mayn 41m» ta nnayai mranv .nfrnn nawm »n^y ii&ipv no nan» .nan n^nai ntata î'ay na jiânm .Dîyb na«pna »nn-naya mmV\ ̂ 13»^ Kin» »aV o^nâa oa^K na naa tntavn^ nna ta tow onai nhma -n&^v ny kVk nvnVi •nasyV onnva onaxi bânn "îxvn n^ yap nrx» nyua n& jnroa mv^ nanx rav na â dt» Vy Kixa^? na nwn - mteto n^n i naâV - nV «ik inânV - nb Ptdxiq nmui nrnpi mvi ^pinv nai naa ,ona-m onai on ,D>ywyrc ̂ aâ ina iai>ai mKo?i?-»nai

•"ntavn* ova o^npi narmxa nman^ oânoav

The Devil tells the truth, he has insight into evil and how to overcome it. The Devil brutally uncovers the cost of emancipation, the

self-abasement, alienation and self-hatred which result. And what, after all, was the use of education? You tell this miserable creature: 'Get an education!' I'm asking you: First, why pick on her? There are

plenty of unschooled animals, even lowly horses and donkeys, who

provide for themselves unhindered. If only the mare were as fit as they! Second, it s true that she was never stable-trained. Stallion tricks mean nothing to her. Still, she's not totally ignorant like a common horse or donkey. Third, though she has none of the entertainment value of the trained horses, she s more useful: they hunt and pull chariots but she's worn down by hard work. Yes, whatever people may say, she serves a function and her work has permanent value. Fourth, what does livelihood have to do with Haskalah? Who has the right to make education a prior condition to eating and breath-

ing? A mouth - to eat; a nose - to breathe; legs - to walk; and ev-

erything else is like circus tricks - prancing round a ring, leaping through a hoop - superfluous amusement, things which come last -

that's Haskalah. (332)11

22O COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Translated: the Jews might have been uncouth and backward but, unlike the majority of the Russians (the "lowly horses and donkies"), they possessed an ancient tradition of religious education and were not totally ignorant. Also, the Jews belonged almost entirely to the working class and contributed greatly to the Russian economy, as government studies showed.12 In contrast, the Russian aristocrats, the "trained horses," did little or no useful work. But the most important point implied by the Devil is that the Russian government had no right to demand the enlightenment of the Jews as a precondition to granting them, through emancipation, the means of survival.

The feeling of cultural limbo caused by emancipation is most com-

monly associated with Western European Jews such as Kafka, who wrote in 1921: "What most of those who began to write in German wanted was to break with Judaism, generally with the vague approval of their fathers [. . .] but their hind legs were bogged down in their father s Judaism, and their front legs could find no new ground. The resulting despair was their inspi- ration."13 There is a direct thematic link between The Mare and Kafka's

story "A Report to an Academy" (1917): an ape, faced with the choice of

being caged in a zoo or having limited freedom as a variety entertainer, opts for the latter and gains the requisite power of speech: "there was no attrac- tion for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a

way out, and for no other reason."14 The ape s enlightenment does not mean, however, that he gains full acceptance by the "higher" species.

The Mare is perhaps the most outspoken expose of the truth of the

Jewish condition in Tsarist Russia by a Russian Jew. (It evidently passed the censors scrutiny only because of its allegorical disguise.) Yet, in the end, it buckles under the oppressive discourse in which it is caught. The book ends with a Decalogue of Jewish corruption spoken by the mare. Although Is- rael refuses to be similarly corrupted

- symbolically to "ride the mare" -

there is no open condemnation of the government, and there could not be. As in most Haskalah literature, the Jews are blamed for their own disabilities.

2. Nervous Conditions and The Mare

Nervous Conditions was published in 1988, 115 years after The Mare and

eight years after Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, and gained independence


from Britain.15 Issues of color and gender, including those connected with female authorship, obviously distinguish Nervous Conditions from The Mare, Unlike The Mare, Nervous Conditions was written in the language of the colonial oppressors, though not under the shadow of a state censor. Yet the book deals with forms of psychological censorship parallel to those in Mendele s novel. Nervous Conditions is set in the late 1960s in Rhodesia under White minority rule. Like Mendele in TheMarey Dangarembga tells her story in the first-person. The narrator, Tambu, is many years removed from the events in the novel. Tambu describes herself, a teenage girl in a remote impoverished village. After her older brother Nhamo's death when she was thirteen, she grabs the chance for an education in the only way pen to a poor Black girl - in missionary schools run mostly by White Chris- tians. Tambu has to fight her family as well as handicaps of race and gender. Her brother s death is not a tragedy to her. He stood in the way of her education and tried to discourage her: "You go nowhere. Because you are a

girl" (2 1).16 The novel probes the dilemmas facing highly intelligent Black

youngsters under colonial rule. With narrow means of escape from dire

poverty and a discriminatory colonial system, the price of success was high. It often meant a violent breaking away from family and culture and a dis- tasteful struggle for material well-being via assimilation in a White Chris- tian educational system.17 Tambu, like Israel, begins with eager willingness to pay the price of assimilation, though their mothers warn that education will make strangers of them. However, it is Tambu s cousin, Nyasha, who

puts most forcefully the case against education, of which she is herself a victim, with a burning sarcasm that Mendele would have understood:

To forget who you were, what you were and why you were that. The

process, she said, was called assimilation, and that was what was intended for the precocious few who might prove a nuisance if left to themselves, whereas the others - well really, who cared about the others? So they made a little space into which you were assimilated, an honorary space in which you could join them and they could make sure that you behaved yourself. (178-9)

Though in theory Israel and Tambu have superficially attractive opportunities, the entire structure of their societies ensures discrimination

against them and ultimate failure, or only partial success, of their "emanci-

pation." The Mare and Nervous Conditions refer to the oppression of Jews and Blacks, respectively, through severe restrictions on land ownership.

222 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Education increased understanding of these restrictions, making them harder to bear. The mare's lack of grazing land of its own is an oblique allusion to the Russian prohibition on Jewish landownership. In Nervous Conditions, education heightens awareness of how White control over labor and land determines social relations between Blacks and Whites and corrupts their

institutions, beliefs and values. Part of Tambu s rite de passage to maturity is her sober recognition that Rhodesian Whites, typically of colonial masters, forced Blacks from the best land, leaving them only stony and barren land

(18). Blacks provided cheap manual labor (26). Subservience is required of them: "endure and obey, for there is no other way" (19).

Both The Mare and Nervous Conditions have at their heart a bitter alle-

gorical "fairy tale" of bewitchment, telling how things came to be as they are, how the Jews came to be tormented among the nations, and how the Blacks came under humiliating colonial rule. In The Mare, this is a tale of the exodus in reverse, in which freedom turns into slavery. Once a prince, the mare has been unsexed, dispossessed, and humiliated in exile, she con- fesses to Israel:

wm' tyai 11331 nan *rm< iterp mn onn owai - T»ny«D /pax rpam imtoa ttu nr ito p mm jyqid nw ,o^nya mpin Va na rnrft nun&a- -mjn /w am Dwtnn *W«a nx&D n* -onxo i*ai jop*ixi op ft •mb mno Haw /farp vnx **$ oya A'&oipi romm p.traiA ft n&anna nan tiain Av-irteDa iton ,isn«a nwo* i^»n-]a nx iaom Dnônâ owDinn iwyi .Dîyn V&7 Dâaâi i»inai nvp nray taa lisa nnuc rraym

.oo&rn dwd%

In those days there lived a wise, good prince. This prince, while still a boy, would wander far from home, to see what went on in the world, and he became famous among the nations. The king of Egypt, a land defiled with the idols of magicians, sorcerers, and wizards, got angry with the prince, who had come as a visitor to live in his coun-

try. He consulted his retinue and said: Let us find a good way of

destroying him. The magicians used their sorcery to turn the prince into a mare and made him do the hardest work, building Pithom and Rameses with bricks and straw. (312)

Similarly, in Nervous Conditions, Tambu s grandmother spins a tale of a

princess, a prince, and the evil white wizards who entrance their victims


with the lure of luxury only to betray and enslave them: "Wizards well versed in treachery and black magic came from the south and forced the

people from the land" (18). In both The Mare and Nervous Conditions, education is seen as the magic formula for ending the evil spell. For this reason, Tambu regards her uncle, Babamukuru, headmaster of a mission school and possessor of university degrees from South Africa and England, virtu-

ally as a "divinity" (87, 164): "Through hard work and determination he had broken the evil wizards' spell" (50). Babamukuru is a role model for

breaking out of poverty, "from under the weight of the white man" (64). What neither Israel nor Tambu realize at first is that education is itself part of the evil spell.

The problems of being Black, female and poor in Nervous Conditions are thus comparable with those of being Jewish and poor in The Mare. As in The Mare, education, which in theory should improve life, makes life harder, at times impossibly so, for several of the main characters of Nervous Condi- tions: Tambu; her aunt, Maiguru; and especially Nyasha, Maiguru s daughter, whose "nervous condition" verges on madness whose causes are not unlike those in The Mare. In each novel, madness results partly from being trapped in a social and educational no-man's-land from which it is possible neither to move forward to meaningful assimilation into the dominant culture nor to retreat contentedly to native culture.

Tambu's idealized hopes for and disillusionment with education are

broadly similar to those of Israel in The Mare. Both feel their remote pro- vincial world, cut off from the big city, as social entrapment, enhancing their feelings of handicap and the allure of education as a means of escape. Both, repelled by the backwardness and superstition in their primitive societies, exaggerate the value of modern education. Tambu sees education in much the same roseate way as 19th-century Maskilim, such as Israel, as

"emancipation" (53, 56, 59), even "reincarnation" (92), leading to 'freedom' (183). The symptoms of poverty affecting much of the Third World are found in practically every detail in Mendele and Dangarembga: low income; poor educational opportunities, especially for girls; poor access to clean water and sanitation and medical services, and high infant mortal-

ity - Tambu's mother has lost four babies (51). Life expectancy in Tsarist Russia was about 45 years; in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia in 1965 it was 48 years.18

Israel and Tambu forcibly immerse themselves in the culture of the

oppressive power, which they idealize but with which they cannot fully identify. The Russian Jews assimilated so little under Tsarist rule that as late as the 1897 census - a century after they came under Russian rule -


97% gave Yiddish as their first language. There was great resistance to secular education, which was intended in many cases to drive a wedge between the Jews and Judaism. By studying Russian history, folklore and myth, Israel moves away from his community but gains no acceptance among the gen- tiles. Israel and Tambu struggle in such harsh desperation not so much for education itself - much of what they learn they regard as useless - but rather for the attendant benefits: higher social status and income; a degree of personal independence; a more comfortable existence, satisfying and respected employment, better health; and longer life. Perhaps most important to both is the symbolic escape from religious or racial stigma - Israel from the anti- Semitic charge that the Jews are social parasites, Tambu from the view of Blacks as inferior. Education is a testing ground in which prejudicial social theories and attitudes can be proved wrong, though the educational system is designed to maintain the unjust status quo. Disillusionment makes both Israel and Tambu incipient nationalist rebels.

Consequently, The Mare and Nervous Conditions expose inbuilt am- bivalence toward the culture into which the protagonists aspire to assimilate. Education cuts them off from their family and culture. In The Mare, Israel is alienated by studies preparatory to university entrance, which are largely irrelevant to his aim of becoming a doctor. In Nervous Conditions, Tambu is indifferent to Christian teachings in the schools she attends. She wants a lightening of her burdens and an increase in life chances, and is prepared to accept indoctrination somewhat in the same spirit in which 19th-century European Jews such as Heinrich Heine submitted to baptism: to gain their "entrance ticket" to European civilization. And similarly, the cost in alienation from native culture is high. By seeking secular education, Israel enrages the traditionalists in his town, who ostracize him. For both Israel and Tambu, secular books represent a world that is both alluring and forbidden.

A major issue in both novels is gender. Though The Mare is written from an elite male perspective and Nervous Conditions from a female one, both contest the perception of the female as inferior. The Haskalah was a feminist movement, and Mendele advocated major changes in the treatment of women:19 two of his four daughters became doctors, a remarkable achievement for Russian Jewish women in the late 19th century. The Jews in Mendele s allegory have been robbed of their manhood and are reduced to a weak "feminine" state, subject to discrimination and persecution. As in The Mare, in which education makes Israel sharply self-conscious both of being different in Jewish society and of his position as a Jew in an anti-


Semitic society, in Nervous Conditions education makes Tambu critically aware both of being Black in a culturally dominant White colonial system and of her subservient female position in African society (115-16). Being female, she is discriminated against by her family as a matter of course: "The needs and sensibilities of the women in my family were not consid- ered a priority, or even legitimate" (12). Her brother steals the maize she is

growing to pay for her education. Her father tries unsuccessfully to take the school fee money Tambu has earned, saying "That money belongs to me"

(30). Tambu s coldness to her brother s death, which has no parallel in The

Mare, is a tragic sign of confusion and breakdown in social relations and cultural values under the pressure of colonialization. Its weight is under- lined in Dangarembga's narrative method. The novel opens with Tambu s

confession, "I was not sorry when my brother died" (1). The first quarter of the novel tells of the circumstances leading to his death. On the threshold of Tambu s new life, the knell of her indifference tolls again, as for an ob- stacle that has now, fortunately, gone: "I was not disappointed when he did not arrive" (53).While Israels isolation in The Mare is emphasized by his

being an only child, orphaned of his father, the death of Tambu s brother is Tambu's salvation. Afterwards, she is given his place at her uncle s mission school. Her life is set to change beyond recognition: "I expected to find another self, a clean, well-groomed, genteel self who could not have been

bred, could not have survived, on the homestead" (58-9). Two years later, she wins a scholarship to a mostly White convent school. By this time, she knows she can belong only on an 'honourary' basis. In a racist society, her intellectual gifts are in the category of a freakish curiosity, somewhat like that depicted in Jewish allegories of the struggle for assimilation, such as The Mare or Kafka s "A Report to an Academy," or in a more realistic mode, Babels "The Story of my Dovecot." Still, there is an overriding argument in favor of education: "everybody knew that the European schools had better equipment, better teachers, better furniture, better food, better every- thing" (179).

In The Mare and Nervous Conditions, education means selling one's

soul, as it were, to the Devil. In Tsarist Russia, whose official state religion was Russian Orthodox, secular education was at first imposed on the Jews to indoctrinate and "russify" them, to break down rabbinic authority and make the Jews "useful" to Russia. Until the reign of Alexander II (1855- 81), Christian religious teaching was mandatory in the curriculum and pressure was put on Jewish children to convert.


Colonial rule, similarly, used education to coerce, though not as harshly as in Tsarist Russia. Native languages and culture were discouraged: Tambu s brother, Nhamo, for example, forgets his native Shona (52). Missionaries were often informal agents of the state, with intentionally limited objec- tives: to train people for the lower ranks of the colonial civil service.20 As Tambu observes sarcastically in Nervous Conditions, seven was "the age at which the government had declared that African children were sufficiently developed cognitively to be able to understand the abstractions of numbers and letters: 1+1=2; k-i-t-s-i = kitsi" (13). However, as in The Mare, education could arouse discontent as it inadvertently led to greater awareness of the injustice of the system and created ideological tools for fighting it.

The "negative identity" of the dominant culture drives the characters in The Mare and Nervous Conditions mad with self-hate. There is much Jewish self-hate throughout Mendele s fiction. In the Hebrew story Bi- Yme ha-Raash {Earthquake Days, 1894), Mendele states baldly the sense of deformity created by education among the Jews: "No creature on earth is more miserable than Jews who think. They feel the hump on their back and are ashamed" (412). The perverse nature of Mendele's self-Jewish hate is clear when he is compared with Dickens. Dickens gives graphic accounts of Victorian poverty, hunger, child labor, the workhouse, crime, disease, overcrowding, educational backwardness, discrimination against women, but as social problems largely resulting not from Christianity or some flaw in English identity but from the industrial revolution. In The Mare and elsewhere, Mendele presents identical social problems almost as though Europe is enlightened while the Jews remain perversely in medieval be- nightedness, the fault of Judaism or of backward Jewish traits. One would never know from Mendele that standards of literacy, hygiene and life expectancy were higher among the Jews than among the general population. Similarly, in Nervous Conditions, Black negative identity and self-hate are inculcated via Tambu s submission to the educational standards of the dominant White culture.

Israels state of being in social and cultural limbo is shared by Tambu, in language and attitudes to family. As Israel must grapple with Russian, leaving Yiddish and Hebrew behind, Tambu must master English; in both cases this leads to cultural confusion. At thirteen, Tambu does not speak English (28), only her local dialect, Shona. Education, which is in English, in effect cuts her off from her native language. When Tambu returns to her homestead from the mission school, she (like her brother when he was alive) is put off by the poverty and backwardness of her family: "I could not


imagine anyone actually wanting to go there, unless, like me, they were going to see their mother" (123). (Similarly, if not for his mother, Israel would probably seriously consider leaving Russia to study abroad, as in- creasing numbers of young Russian Jews did in the late 19th century.) At the mission school, her family is a warning of the cultural dislocations to which Tambu is now exposed. Before her cousins went to England in 1960, Tambu loved them. They came back as strangers. Nyasha describes them as 'hybrids' (78), at home neither in the Black world from which they come nor in the White world into which they try to assimilate, a state parallel to that of many 19th and early 20th-century European Jews, for whom eman-

cipation led to alienation from their own people. In one scene, Babamukuru

literally does not recognize Nyasha, his daughter, when she dresses up (109). Babamukuru, struggling to keep his grip on the traditional African patriar- chal role, is undermined by the education to which he has devoted his life. Far from breaking the wizards' spell through education, he has unwittingly become the wizards' accomplice.

To Tambu, as to Israel, insight itself becomes a torment. When her uncle decides that her parents are not properly married and are living in "sin," he is, in Tambu s view, parroting Christian ideas that, applied to her

family, are humiliating and farcical, part of the hegemonic ideology of colonialism. Tambu revolts. Her refusal to attend the "wedding" is the first of several female revolts at the end of the book, pointing the way out of the "nervous conditions." In both The Mare and Nervous Conditions, refusal to

marry becomes a form of revolt against what is felt to be excessive social control. By the end of Nervous Conditions, all the women revolt. Babamukuru's wife briefly leaves home in frustration. His daughter becomes bulimic and receives psychiatric treatment. Nyasha in illness sums

up the colonial cause of her nervous condition: "They've deprived you of

you, him of him, ourselves of each other. We're grovelling [. . .] There's

nearly a century of it" (200, 201).22 In The Mare, too, nearly a century of

living under anti-Semitic Tsarist rule has led to a "nervous condition" - and ultimate revolt, especially through emigration, but also through Zionism, socialism and revolution - among the Russian Jews. As indicated earlier, Israel's revolt is ultimately symbolized by his refusal, despite the Devil's blandishments and threats, to ride the mare and join the ignominious cor-

ruptors of his people. The implicit call for internal unity and integrity within the Jewish community reverses the assimilationist tendencies in the Haskalah movement, confronts for the first time in Jewish fiction the full murderous force of anti-Semitism, and anticipates the rise of Jewish nationalism among


the Russian Jews after 1881. The very act of writing about these things was a form of resistance: this was, perhaps, especially true of the Yiddish version of The Mare in view of the low status of Yiddish at the time, even

among its own writers.23 In The Mare, however, the portrait of poverty carries a weight of irony

perhaps unique in literature: it exposes the desperate state of a people ste-

reotyped as rich usurers and misers, whose vulnerability to such stereotyp- ing was enhanced by their extreme poverty. But there is a further irony: this

very poverty drove exceptional numbers of East European Jews to emigrate to countries, above all America, where within a generation or two they moved from the working class to the middle class, from poverty to relative affluence. Had their poverty not been so extreme as to force them to leave, many of them and their children would have perished in the Holocaust. Mendele's expression of despair was, paradoxically, a basis for hope, for in his confident, original style, utterly, unashamedly, and entertainingly Jew- ish, warts and all, he proclaimed cultural independence from Russia and

challenged his readers to prove him wrong. The Mare and Nervous Conditions explore the complex feelings and

details of the very poor. However, poverty in The Mare is set at a distance

through allegory and associations of biblical grandeur. The Veal' identity of the mare is that of a prince: he has fallen but can, in theory, be restored to his former state. Religious-cultural capital, especially in the Bible, ensures

Jewish aristocracy, regardless of outward appearances. Throughout Mendele s

writings, the minutiae of poverty are treated with satiric revulsion border-

ing at times on Jewish self-hate. Mendele s furious intolerance of and re-

pugnance toward his people's degraded state have no parallel in Nervous Conditions. This fury is all the more remarkable, as the poverty which Mendele describes is essentially pre-modern, general in a huge backward

empire, and for the most part impossible to overcome in the prevailing conditions. The means for curing poverty in Nervous Conditions are far more

developed but are not employed effectively, and there is, therefore, far more than in The Mare, a serious moral issue which applies to the Third World

generally. Tambu may be a princess intellectually and emotionally, but her pov-

erty is described in a matter-of-fact, even accepting way, as part of everyday life in the Third World: the dung-floor; the ox-plough; water fetched from the river; maggots in the latrine; menstruation into old rags washed and reused; the smoky kitchen causing bronchitis; Tambu s thick-skinned feet and scaly skin; her ignorance of traffic lights and tea strainers; the holes in


her one good dress. Perhaps the Third World could do with Mendele s fiery social conscience, his moral outrage and scorn.

The Mare and Nervous Conditions, separated by over a century, by language, culture, race, religion, gender, by vastly different social and historical settings, by authorial experiences, literary status, narrative techniques and

readership, have at their core the "negative identity" of a persecuted people, the tragedies, disabilities and psychological confusion of "the colonization of the personality.

" The hatred of injustice and poverty and the passion for

change drive Mendele and Dangarembga. Their writing is all the more

significant for germinating in conditions of oppression. In both, the culture of the dominant power becomes a vehicle for the articulation of discontent

along Western liberal lines, using the language of anti-colonialism, anti-

imperialism, and feminism. This culture, including its Judaeo-Christian elements, is not just a mode of oppression. It is also a tool of emancipation.

McGill University, Montreal and The London School of Economics

Notes

1. Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (London: Faber) 303. 2. Editions used in this essay are: Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Collected Works (Hebrew),

(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1947); and Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, (London: The Women's Press, 1988). Translations from the Hebrew (Susati) are by David Aberbach. For a translation of The Mare from the Yiddish version {Die Kliatsche), see J. Neugroschel, Great Works of Jewish Fantasy (Woodstock NY: The Overlook Press, 1986). The protagonist's name might be rendered Tisroel', 'Yisrolik', or 'Izzy', from the Yiddish, but as the translation is based on the Hebrew version, 'Israel' is used as being suitable to Mendele's allegorical purpose.

3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961).

4. The critical literature on Mendele, on his own and in the context of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, is substantial. See Joseph Klausner, History of Modern Hebrew Literature (Hebrew), vol. 6 (Jerusalem: Ahiasaf, 1958); David Patterson, The Hebrew Novel in Tsarist Russia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1964); Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973); Gershon Shaked, Between Laughter and Tears: A Study of the Works of Mendele Mocher Sefarim (He- brew) (1974; Ramat Gan: Agudat Hasofrim, 1965); Samuel Werses, From Mendele to Hazaz (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987); David Aberbach, Realism, Caricature and Bias: the Fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim, (Oxford: The Littman Library, 1993). For a summary of critical approaches to Mendele, see Mirons Introduction to S. J. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim) (1996) Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler, eds. Dan Miron, Ken Frieden; trans. Ted Gorelick, Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1996).

5. Robert Alter, The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Real- ism (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1987) 67.

6. See Ruth Wisse on the importance of The Mare in the context of modern Jewish literature, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 2000).


7. I.L. Peretz s story "Bontshe the Silent" is, similarly, bound to the impoverished world of East European Jews which is hard to imagine today: it describes the starving, downtrod- den, but righteous Bontshe arriving after death at heavens gate and, told that he can have

anything he likes, asks for what for him would be the height of luxury: a buttered roll. 8. Mendele Mocher Sefarim, Fishke the Lame (Fishke der Krummer, in Hebrew: Sefer ha-

Kabbtzanim = The Berrar-Book), trans. Gerald Stillman (1888; New York Yoseloff, 1960) 15. 9. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, 2 vols., trans. Constance Garnett (1871-72; Lon-

don: Dent, 1952) 2:288. 10. Klausner 6:358. 11. Mendele s critique of education echoes that of Russian writers such as Turgenev, in

Fathers and Sons and Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. See Aberbach 81-82. 12. See L.S. Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation, 2 vols. (1944;

New Haven Conn: Yale University Press, 1965) 1:168-70; and I.M. Dijur, "Jews in the Russian Economy," in J. Frumkin etal. eds., Russian Jewry (1860-1917), trans. M. Ginsberg (New York, 1966).

13. Franz Kafka, Letters 1902-1924 (New York: Schocken Books, 1958) 337. 14. Franz Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country and other stories, trans. Willa ôc Edwin

Muir (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978) 154. 15. For critical approaches to Dangarembga, see Ann Elizabeth Willey and Jeanette Treiber,

eds., Emerging Perspectives on Tsitsi Dangarembga: Negotiating the Postcolonial (Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2002).

16. As late as 1990, twenty years after the novel is set, the rate of female illiteracy in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was 40%. See A. Thomas and B. Crow, eds., Third World Atlas, 2nd edn. (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994) 74.

17. African graduates of European universities were often highly critical of their own societies. A Belgian colonial minister wrote in 1954: "We have seen that those Natives who have been shown Europe, and given a very advanced education, do not always return to their homelands in a spirit favourable to civilization and to the Mother Country in particular." Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1978) 100.

18. See Thomas & Crow 74, Aberbach 71. 19. Aberbach, 75. 20. Tim Allen ôc Alan Thomas, eds., Poverty and Development in the 21st Century (Ox-

ford: The Open University and Oxford University Press, 2000) 264. 21. See Aberbach 48-64. For an analysis of Israel's madness in The Mare, see David

Aberbach, "Fantasies of Deviance in Mendele and Agnon," Association for Jewish Studies Review 19.1 (1994): 45-60.

22. White education as a threat to Black native traditions and values, a source of confusion and conflict, is attacked also by the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek in Song ofLawino (1966). A women laments her husband's unmanning by books. By "uprooting the pumpkin"

- reject-

ing his own customs and traditions - he has become slave to a foreign culture, which he foolishly looks up to as superior. Once free and proud, a princely chief, he is poisoned and choked by education. He has become "a weak woman," a "dog of the white man," a "walking corpse."

23. See Miron.

Documents

Enlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's …npillay6a2010.wikispaces.com/file/view/Cultural_comparison.pdfEnlightenment and Cultural Confusion: Mendele's "The Mare" and Dangarembga's