Naomi Feuchtwanger- Sarig,» Rimon- Milgroim<
pean way of life, retaining only some traditional Jewish cultural traits,such as the use of some religious festival customs; while the third wereYiddishists, who saw Yiddish as an East European lingua franca and thefocus of Jewish life.<< 69
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While it was probably not the second group mentioned by Narkisswhich>> Rimon- Milgroim« targeted, the two other components of EastEuropean Jewry most definitely were. The schism between these twogroups can best be exemplified by the personal involvement of Bergelsonand Der Nister with» Rimon- Milgroim«. The Jews in that part of theworld were not a uniform group of intellectuals sharing the same goals,interests, and understanding of their Jewishness( much less ideology) intheir religious and national identity. Neither were the American Jews,many of whom were émigrés from Eastern Europe, members of both theblue- and to a lesser extent-white- collars. Once again, their feelingstowards their respective homelands and the traditions they left behind inthe East were ambivalent to say the least.» Rimon- Milgroim<< struck thisvery chord, and reminded some of their past, from which they had triedto detach themselves, attempting to become an integral part of Americansociety, while others had created a physical and mental» shtettel«< of pasttimes in the>> New World«<. And then there was the Jewish communityin Palestine, exploring a sense of collectivity with other ethnic groupsof Jews from Oriental Glossar ::: zum Glossareintrag Oriental and Sephardi cultures while struggling with a cli-mate too hot and harsh to leave room for any intellectual inspiration, andwhile coming to terms with the Ottoman ruler and Arab fraction of thelocal dwellers of the land. One would naturally seek a common denomi-nator in these very diverse societies, defined by Rachel Wischnitzer asthe target readership of» Rimon- Milgroim«.70 Apparently, the editorswith their attempt to inaugurate a literary organ encompassing Jewisharts at large was doomed to failure from the start.
Limiting their scope to the eastern and western Ashkenazi intelli-gentsia, it seems that the schism between the Yiddishists and the He-braists, the leaders of the Jewish cultural avant- garde, was too deep to
69
70
Narkiss( Rachel Wischnitzer, Doyenne, note 5), p. 10. The battle went far beyondthe technical question of language. It was all about culture of the Jews in a» new era«.See further Malgorzata Maksymiak- Fugmann: Zionistische Identitäten um 1900:Ein„ Kulturkampf» zwischen Ost und West. In: Marten- Finnis, Winkler( note 4),pp. 167–178.
Wischnitzer 1979( note 25), p. 7.
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