The Aesthetics of Jewish Primitivism I

Abstract

The avant-garde short stories of the Yiddish writer Der Nister were a form of primitivist literary abstraction, fracturing the narrator-ego into a kaleidoscopic and disorienting landscape, thereby destabilizing the privileged subject at the center of the Western literary tradition. The primitivist aesthetic theory of Carl Einstein clarifies Der Nister’s own innovative solution to the problem of abstraction—as a visual and spatial phenomenon—in literature. Einstein noted that primitivist abstraction was in principle achievable in literature but in practice absent. Der Nister’s familiarity with Yiddish folklore gave him a resource for the creation of a literary abstraction motivated by both literature and the visual principles familiar from modernist painting. His primitivism resulted in a revolutionary aesthetics that fused Jewish sources with the universalist claims of his politics.