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STANLEY NASH
The Discussion over YaLaG’s Legacy
On the Centenary of His Death
t h e
c e n t e n a r y
o f
t h e
birth o f YaLaG (Yehudah Leib Gordon,
1830-1892) was commemorated with ex trao rd inary vigor and
passion by his adm irers and detractors alike. At the time Gor
don, and with him the en tire topic o f Haskalah literature , was
seen to possess great contemporary relevance; these were live
issues and not relegated merely to academic study .1
Gordon, in particular, had long been the focus o f ideological
controversy. He was the foremost poet o f the Haskalah, at once
the symbol o f a hoped-for amalgam o f Hebraic literary renas
cence and Russian humanism and, at the same time, a relentless
satirical crusader for Jewish legal and societal reforms. His fa
mous phrase
Heye adam be-tsetkha vi-yehudi be-ohalekha
(“Be a p e r
son when you go out and a Jew in your ten t”) from his 1863
poem,
Hakitsah Ami
(“Awake My People”), epitomized this credo.
It was, unfortunately , misconstrued and distorted. Particularly
in the wake o f Go rdon ’s reluctance to jo in many o f his colleagues
in hailing Jewish nationalistic and Zionistic aspirations, it and
he became ana them a for a host o f rivals who reviled Gordon
as a craven assimilationist. T h e full exten t o f these gross mis
representations is detailed in Michael Stanislawski’s recent ex
cellent book on Gordon .2
Acclamation and debate raged for years over Go rdon ’s pow
erful historical and satirical epics, o f which the most famous
1. Ben-Ami Feingold, “YaLaG be-Perspektivah Historit,”
Moznayim,
February-
March, 1982, pp. 45-50.
2. Michael Stanislawski,
For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis
o f Russian Jewry
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). And see my
review in
Bitzaron,
X (Summer/Fall 1989), pp. 84-86. For the English reader
seeking plot summaries o f Gordon’s work there is the vastly inferior book
by A.B. Rhine,
Leon Gordon
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1910).
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