Frischmann_commentary_Flying_Letters

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David [Frishman], “Flying Letters”, 1887. Commentary by Shachar Pinsker

This feuilleton was published in February 26, 1886 by the young writer David Frischmann in Ha-yom (The Day), the first daily Hebrew-language newspaper in the world. Yehuda Leib Kantor established Ha-yom in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, just a couple of weeks earlier in collaboration with other contributors. Their goals were to create a universal, pluralistic forum that would rise above internal differences in the Jewish public sphere, as well as to move beyond the realm of exclusively Jewish issues, adapt to European journalistic standards, and introduce Jewish readers to events in Russia and around the world. Frischmann’s feuilleton was entitled “Otiyot porḥot” (“Flying Letters”), part of a series of feuilletons with this name that appeared in Ha-yom in a recognizable, designated place on the second page below the line. He used the pen-name “David” as a distinct feuilletonist persona. “I will serve you under the line,” David announced to his readers in an intimate tone, when inaugurating the series, “and from here I will set my eyes on my surroundings to discern and describe what’s above and what’s below, what’s in front and what’s behind.”

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The text has many of the hallmarks of the European feuilleton, with its first-person narration and direct dialogue with the readers. It is also a good example of how the feuilleton developed in Hebrew in the second half of the 19th century. In a playful language that employs many biblical and other traditional Jewish texts, David describes the sights, sounds, and smells, the convivial atmosphere of a party for Jewish university students taking place in the Russian capital, organized by the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (OPE), which provided stipends to poor students. This was an urban scene that must have been of interest not only to the relatively small Jewish community in St. Petersburg, but to modern readers who lived all over the Russian Empire and beyond in the Jewish diaspora. The feuilleton describes the gathering with music, dances, and witty chatting, focusing on the young revelers, and someone known as Mr. H. Feldman, who claimed to have special telepathic powers of hypnosis and mindreading and was performing his abilities in St. Petersburg. This event was previously announced in the news section of Ha-yom. Feldman goes from one person to the next, and scares them, presumably revealing what is really on their mind, which often goes against their outward appearance.

When Feldman ends his performance and dancing commences, the narrator cannot stand the heat in the dancing hall, and goes out with his friend to the reading-room. There they are engrossed in a lively conversation about what is really on their mind, namely Heinrich von Treitschke’s third volume of the Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century) which had just been published and was a topic of much discussion and debate. David is furious with Treitschke, the prolific nationalist German historian, because he deemed the “overrepresentation” of Jewish journalists and writers to be a dangerous threat to Germany’s politics, press, and literature.

David takes issue with the way Treitschke’s antisemitism influenced his evaluation of the writings of Heinrich Heine. According to Treitschke, “Heine, with his feuilleton style was the first to throw down the barriers which must separate poetry from prose,” to develop the feuilleton, a superficial yet accomplished style with an easy-to-consume character, to take the “foam of this French passion-drink,” and to bring it from Paris to Germany. Treitschke wrote against Heine’s “internationalist fellows” engaged in newspaper enterprises. This judgement was soon echoed by the literary critic Adolf Bartels, who claimed that Heine stands for Jews who are the “chief representatives of a feuilletonism in Germany,” which is “at bottom corruption...that takes French literature and the French journalistic model as its ideal.” The feuilletonist writes that Treitschke was incapable of recognizing that Heine was the “greatest German writer since Goethe,” and implies that Heine’s feuilletons were a great achievement, one that became a model for his own writing.

Thus, Frischmann’s 1886 feuilleton is not only a superb example of the genre in Hebrew, but also ars-poetic in nature, a feuilleton about feuilletons. It highlights its hybrid nature between poetry and prose, journalism and literature, fact and fiction, high and low, urban scenes and criticism. It is about the possibilities of the feuilleton, its pitfalls, as well as the curious association between feuilletons and Jewishness that hovers around this playful and urbane text.

Sources:

Adolf Bartels, Heinrich Heine: Auch ein Denkmal (Dresden: C.A. Koch, 1906).
Adolf Bartels, Jüdische Herkunft und Literaturwissenschaft (Leipzig: Verlag des Bartels-Bundes, 1897).
Heinrich von Treitschke, “Das souveräne Feuilleton,” Bilder aus der Deutschen Geschichte, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirze, 1908).

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Frischmann_commentary_Flying_Letters