The nineteenth century had brought social and political ferment, especially with Marxism, Zionism, and various reformist and revolutionary movements in Eastern Europe. Jewish life, and Yiddish literature, took up these energies in various creative ways. Father/son conflicts, running a scale from tender (as in Peretz Markish's Generations) to violent, became a staple in Jewish writings. Workers and artisans became heroes, often political fighters - in contrast to traditional views, which had either scorned them as inferior to the intellectual, rabbinical, and wealthy strata, or idealized them as the true bearers of piety, simplicity, and holiness.
Similarly, the Jewish underworld took its bows in fiction, but rather nervously, since both writers and readers didn't care to dwell on this shady facet.
In "The Draft," Fishel Bimko develops caricatures into gutsy satire: the gap between the soft wealthy classes and the tough proletarian roustabouts. Military conscription was indeed a terror for Jews, who were hardly popular in Christian armies. Furthermore, Orthodox Jews would be cut off from study, kosher food, and most other aspects of religious life.
However, modern war affected civilian life far more devastatingly. Avrom Reyzen's "Acquiring a Graveyard," with its tender irony, sketches one such aspect of World War I in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia.
In the wake of the Great War came the Russian Revolution and its utopian promises. The ambiguity of this period was both satirically and mystically exposed in Moyshe Kulbak's novel Monday. Borrowing expressionist techniques of exaltation, juxtaposition, exaggeration, and collective characters like the Mass, he contrasted and interwove Jewish and Communist Messianism. Kulbak uses the traditional notion of the lamed-vovniks, the secret saints, usually to be found among the simplest and most ordinary Jews. His main figure is an outsider, a mystic and intellectual, who has no place in the revolutionary society - thereby incarnating the qualms that many Jews, especially the religious and the intellectual ones, felt about the revolutionary movements and the coming Socialist world.
The utopias never came. Jewish culture was persecuted in the Soviet system as in the Fascist countries. And then World War II brought the worst destruction in Jewish history.
Dealing with the horrors of the Nazi period is an impossible task for most writers, especially Jews, because most literature is unequal to the events, and there is danger of cheapening those events with self-pity, sentimentality, and even martyriological idealization of the victims. An effective way of coping with these problems is reached in Der Nister's "Meyer Landshaft." Der Nister had previously written mystical fantasies and fairy tales. But settling in the Soviet Union during the twenties, committing himself to socialism, and forced to abandon his previous work by censorship, he turned to a more realistic mode. Like most other Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union, he was killed in the anti?. Yiddish purges of 1948-52. In his story "Meyer Landshaft," he chose, wisely, to dwell on the psychology of the victims, on the sense of loss, rather than the physical horrors themselves. Forming an iron-clad defense against cheap emotions and sentimentality, he uses long, seemingly rambling, highly rhetorical periods, sentences that seem as undecided as Meyer Landshaft himself, taking a long, long time to reach any resolution. The distanciation created by the style, the cunning alienation effect, force us to deal with the psychology of individuals - something difficult to do amid collective annihilation.