A Jewel with Vision
- By Arthur Schulman
The frontispiece of Visions and Jewels, an autobiography published by Henry Holt in 1926, is a photograph of a bust of the author, Moysheh Oyved (1885-1958), created by his friend Jacob Epstein, the great twentieth-century sculptor. Oyved, unlike Epstein, has been almost completely forgotten, but his story and his works deserve to be lifted out of the darkness.
In late March 2014, in the discarded books section of the Recycling Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, my rescuer’s eye was caught by the spine of “Visions and Jewels”. Oyved was an author whose name I hadn’t encountered before, let alone read. But Epstein’s image of him was intriguing, and even a cursory browse through the book suggested that this was stuff worth getting to know. Oyved had composed Visions and Jewels, and its companion volume Gems and Life, in Yiddish, and translated both books into English with the help of some friends. (The original Yiddish version was not published until 1931). Oyved’s English rendering of his Yiddish text preserves much of its character and is probably as faithful a translation as one might hope to achieve. As an example of his style, here is what Oyved says about his childhood experience in Cheder:
“When I was three years of age, my grandmother, Sarah Rebecca—peace be unto her!—took me, as Abraham had taken his son Isaac to the sacrifice—to the Cheder—the Hebrew school. Oh, how I hated going! No sooner had I opened the door than I at once saw and heard the teacher—a white beard, red eyes, and a black leather strap—beating a screaming little boy whose trousers had been let down. On the spot, I conceived a hatred for the Cheder, teacher, Holy Law, and the alphabet. And gradually there was born within me a great question, as to whether there was a God in the world at all. “A good God does not exist,” thought I. “And a bad God, we do not want. And, if there is no God, then, surely, Cheder, Holy Law, Jew and Gentile are altogether superfluous things.” I began to deny; and I gave up praying; and lived a hypocritical life, because I continued to attend the synagogue, where I compelled myself to move my lips like one who is praying.”
Oyved remained haunted by his memories of Cheder; in 1940 he published, in sardonic Yiddish verse, In Cheder Arayn, a reconstruction of his experience there.
Oyved was born in 1885 in Skampa, a village in the Pale of Settlement of Alexander III’s Russia. Wikipedia knows nothing about Skampa, and you will not find it on modern maps of Poland. He was the second child of a once-prosperous family who, before a disastrous fire burned down their house and nearly everything around it, made daily use of “silver spoons and forks” which “rattled in the little village of Skampa like those Polish and German words which drop into the poor Yiddish.” Soon after the fire the family moved to Oshentshin (with its fearsome Cheder), a village mentioned in passing by Weinreich in his “History of the Yiddish Language” and, it seems, by nobody else. When Moysheh was 10, his family moved to Alexandrova,
“a frontier town between Russian-Poland and Germany [which] possessed characteristics such as distinguished few towns in the world. Although but a little place, of a few thousand inhabitants, amongst them a hundred Jewish families, it was, nevertheless, a cosmopolitan metropolis—a world-centre, a little Paris. It had the most beautiful railway-station in Poland, at which the trains used to stop many times in the day—world-expresses, like the Berlin-Warsaw, the Berlin-Vienna, and the Berlin-Moscow.
Several times in the day, the whole world’s civilisation was poured out on the platform—its perfume and its dirt: the German pride, the Russian might, the French chic, and the Viennese refinement. Nor were the silent English and the energetic Americans ever missing. There were also yellow Chinese, brown Japanese, and dark Turks, wild Indians, black men, gypsies, and Jews with little bundles.”
When he was 18 Moysheh made his way to London, settling in the East End where, after working as a watchmaker, he founded Cameo Corner, a jewelry shop that catered to the rich and sophisticated, and where he would meet and get to know not only Jacob Epstein but also prominent figures of the Jewish intelligentsia of his time.
The Jewish Encyclopedia has no entry for Moysheh Oyved, but the Encyclopedia Judaica tells us that “the London Yiddish literary society that included Kafka’s friend Dora Diamant issued Loshn un Leben, 69 (1945) to celebrate his 60th birthday”, and that “his papers are at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.” And the Brooklyn Eagle, reviewing “Gems and Life” on August 19, 1927—“Visions and Jewels” had escaped the paper’s attention—describes it as “a book of remembrances far superior to the usual volumes of reminiscence…. Oyved often writes about his soul, and tells in a simple and distinct manner of the joys and woes befalling gem dealers and their customers.”
In Visions and Jewels Oyved tells us that his birth was
“none too easy. It was far from a ‘twilight sleep’. I was born on the eve of the Day of Atonement, when the mood was not in accord with such joyful events. My father and grandfather recited a good many Psalms and they shed enough tears to extinguish a little fire. It was only then that my mother gave birth to me. When my two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Pessa, ran to tell my father and grandfather the news, they asked her: ‘What? A little boy, or a little girl?’ ‘Something good,’ she answered.
And they prepared an Initiation ceremony in accordance with all the Laws which Moses gave to the Children of Israel. And they gave me the name of Moysheh Oyved, which means ‘Moses the Servant.’ I do not know how I got the name Moysheh. But Oyved was after my great-granduncle—the famous Rabbi Oyved, of Sheps.”
Few writers seem to be aware of Oyved today, even those who might be expected to have taken note of him. A.A. Roback, in his remarkable “The Story of Yiddish Literature” (1940), looks back at a time when England’s Yiddish “well ran dry” and mentions Oyved only in passing as “one of the older writers… in the field of belles-lettres.” And Marcus Moseley, in his recent Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (2006), mentions Oyved only in a footnote, quoting briefly from his recollection of Cheder in Visions and Jewels.
When Oyved opened his new jewelry shop in London, he hired a man to paint a sign-board for him.
“I told him to write: ‘Edward Goodack, Watchmaker’, on one side, and ‘Jeweller’ on the other. He repeated: ‘Edward Gaduck.’ Said I: ‘No. Edward Goodack.’ Again he mispronounced my name, and again I corrected him.’” The painter was “drunk as Lot”, and “said to me, ‘What use is Gaduck to you? Why not simply Good—Edward Good? No one in the City trades under his real name. I have been writing signs all my life; and I know. Nobody!’” The painter got his way, but “years later, when… the name ‘Edward Good’ had become popular in the whole of the British Empire, even in Chelsea, it fretted me bitterly… that my name had been changed.… Why had I, without rhyme or reason, insulted my forefathers’ surname, and my national pride?
It was only in 1917, when I wrote under my real name, Moysheh Oyved—a name which I sanctify, and which sanctifies me—it was only from that period that I grew indifferent to all other names. ‘Goodack,’ and ‘Good’—both are mine, and not mine. It was then that I began to believe that every man should have several names and also nicknames, the more the better—names which should express every wise act, every profession and every foolishness of his life. It is really time that we were delivered of the tyranny by which surnames generations-old oppress and offend a growing flourishing family.… That was what I thought; and that was how I consoled myself after many years of regret.”
Oyved not only wrote in Yiddish, but was a strong advocate for the use of the language. His “lyrical hymns of praise to Yiddish” were published in 1919 in the monthly journal, Renaissance.
“But the hymn of praise to Yiddish procured me many enemies, particularly in the Land of Israel, among the Hebraists.
I was misunderstood by both parties.
In truth, many a time I wanted to sing the praises of Hebrew, but I could not rise to the lofty plane of the theme.
Often I stand in front of a brutal, archaic work of art, and find no word to utter, because of my great amazement.… And how much greater is my wonder when I stand wrapped around by a ragged ‘Exile’ language, before the ‘Kingdom’ of the Holy Tongue, the language created in the remotest times, by prophets of the living word—the language that was the sword of liberation in Egypt and in the Desert.
How could I—how could I, under the wings of a language whose every feather wilts at the root and bleeds at the point, sing, with my lyre, the magic of the Hebrew melody?
But Yiddish is, after all, the language of our ‘Exile’, of the last, dying breath of the eternal agony of the living. It is not the language of the living word, but of the living self.
And, in that language God inspired me, that I might sing the song of love and life.”
In his own time, Oyved was valued not only by London's Jewish intellectuals but by some of England's best writers. The invitation to Oyved cited below came several years before the publication of Visions and Jewels; as such, it must have been based on his earlier, often mystical writings:
“In the summer of 1922, Ernest Rhys proposed my name as a guest of honour at a monthly dinner of the P.E.N. Club.… John Galsworthy, the famous dramatist and novelist, presided. According to custom, he called out the name, branch of art, and nationality of each guest of honour.… When it came to my turn, he announced: ‘Moysheh Oyved, a Polish poet.’… It was a smack in the face the fingermarks of which will remain for a long time to come.…The reason why this happened was that John Galsworthy is an aesthetic gentleman, a man who is full of pity for the living, and who is a friend of the Jews. It seems that he did not want to offend me before such a large audience by announcing that Moysheh Oyved was a Jew.”
Arthur I. Schulman is a veteran cruciverbalist and Associate Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Virginia
