The directory «Plots»

Peretz Isaac Leib
(1852–1915)

Isaac Leib Peretz, also known as Yitskhok Leybush Peretz יצחק־לייבוש פרץ and Izaak Lejb Perec (in Polish), best known as I.L. Peretz was a modernist Yiddish language author and playwright. Payson R. Stevens, Charles M. Levine, and Sol Steinmetz count him with Mendele Mokher Seforim and Sholem Aleichem as one of the 3 great classical Yiddish writers. Sol Liptzin wrote "Yitzkhok Leibush Peretz was the great awakener of Yiddish-speaking Jewry and Sholom Aleichem its comforter... Peretz aroused in his readers the will for self-emancipation, the will for resistance..."

Peretz rejected cultural universalism, seeing the world as composed of different nations, each with its own character. Liptzin comments that "Every people is seen by him as a chosen people..."; he saw his role as a Jewish writer to express "Jewish ideals...grounded in Jewish tradition and Jewish history."

Unlike many other Maskilim, he greatly respected the Reform Jews for their mode of being in the world; at the same time, he understood that there was a need to make allowances for human frailty. His short stories such as "If Not Higher", "The Treasure", and "Beside the Dying" emphasize the importance of sincere piety rather than empty religiosity.

Born in the shtetl of Zamość, and raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, he gave his allegiance at age fifteen to the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. He began a deliberate plan of secular learning, reading books in Polish, Russian, German, and French. He planned to go to the theologically liberal Rabbinical school at Zhytomyr, but concern for his mother's feelings got him to stay on in Zamość. He married, through an arranged marriage, the daughter of Gabriel Judah Lichtenfeld, whom Liptzin describes as a "minor poet and philosopher".

He failed in an attempt to make a living distilling whiskey, but began to write Hebrew language poetry, songs, and tales, some of them written collaboratively with his father-in-law, a collaboration that nonetheless did not prevent his divorce in 1878, after which he promptly married to Helene Ringelblum. Around the same time he passed the exam to become a lawyer, a profession which he successfully pursued for the next decade, until in 1889 his license was revoked by the Imperial Russian authorities on the basis of suspicion of Polish nationalist sentiments. From that time he lived in Warsaw, where his income came largely from a job in the small bureaucracy of the city's Jewish community. There he founded Hazomir (The Nightingale), which became the cultural centre of pre-World War I Yiddish Warsaw.

His first Yiddish work appeared in 1888, notably the long ballad Monish, which appeared that year in the landmark anthology Folksbibliotek ("People's Library"), edited by Sholom Aleichem. This ballad tells the story of an ascetic young man, Monish, who unsuccessfully resists the temptress Lilith.

A writer of social criticism, sympathetic to the labor movement, he wrote stories, folk tales and plays. Liptzin characterizes him as both a realist and a romanticist, who "delved into irrational layers of the soul", "an optimist who believed in the inevitablity of progress through enlightenment", who at times expressed that optimism through "visions of Messianic possibilities". Still, while most Jewish intellectuals were unrestrained in their support of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Peretz's view was more reserved, focusing more on the pogroms that took place within the revolution and concerned that the revolution's universalist ideals would leave little space for Jewish non-conformism.

Much as Jacob Gordin influenced Yiddish theater in New York City in a more serious direction, so did Peretz in Eastern Europe. Israil Bercovici sees Peretz's works for the stage as a synthesis of Gordin and the more traditional and melodramatic Abraham Goldfaden, an opinion that Peretz himself apparently would not have rejected: "The critics," he wrote, "the worst of them thought that M.M. Seforim was my model. It's not true. My teacher was Abraham Goldfaden."

Some of Peretz's most important works are Oib Nit Noch Hecher ("If not Higher") and the short story "Bontsche Shvaig" ("Bontsche the Silent"). "Bontsche" is the story of an extremely meek and modest man, downtrodden on earth but exalted in heaven for his modesty, who, offered any heavenly reward, chooses one as modest as the way he had lived. While the story can be read as praise of this meekness, there is also an ambiguity in the ending, which can be read as showing contempt for someone who cannot even imagine receiving more.

Peretz died in the city of Warsaw, Poland, in 1915. There is a street in Warsaw named after him.

Israel, 1996, Isaac Leib Peretz