Shtetlspeak: The Triumph of the Dialogical in Zalman Shneour's Shklov

Abstract:In 1927, the neoromantic poet Zalman Shneour made a fundamental shift from poetry to prose and from Hebrew to Yiddish. Rather than single out for praise the one work that he himself later refashioned into Hebrew, this essay proceeds from his composite Yiddish masterpiece: the comic vignettes about life in the prerevolutionary Belorussian shtetl of Shklov that appeared in Shklover yidn (1929), Feter Zhome (1930), and Shklover kinder (1951). Rather than view Shneour as an epigone, the Shklov Cycle reveals his profound understanding of Sholem Aleichem's comédie humaine, which Shneour sought to augment and update, as vividly illustrated by "Reading Newspapers," his recycled version of "Dreyfus in Kasrilevke." Where everything was animated, everything became a potential source of vitalism, which in Shneour's scheme of things always carried an aural quality. These stories, furthermore, were wildly dialogical; speech acts always trumped that which was merely textual, monological, or traditional. Shtetlspeak, in Shneour's comic oeuvre, became the dialogical baseline against which to judge the monological claims and strictures of religion, society, and technology.