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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
So welcome to the YIVO Institute Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Director of Public Programs of yivo, and we're so pleased to have you here with us today for our talk with Naomi Seidman and Ken Frieden on Naomi's new book, Translating the Jewish Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish. And this book is available from YIVO's online stores. Hope you'll check it out. For those that don't know yivo, we're a very special place for the celebration and cultivation of Jewish history and Jewish culture. We have a library and archive with over 23 million documents and over 400,000 books which are used by researchers around the world, including, I think AMI will talk a little bit about for this very book that we're talking about today. And we have a variety of public programs and classes and exhibitions which bring to life the world of our collection. So thanks so much for joining us. Naomi Seidman is the Jaffman Humanities professor at the University of Toronto, the Department for the Study of Religion, and the center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her fourth book, Sarah Schener and the Base Yaakov Movement, A Revolution in the Name of Tradition, won a National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies in 2019. And I'll just note that that's also a book that heavily draws on materials we have at YIVO, and we have a talk about that on our YouTube channel, recordings of Past Events. Her podcast on Leaving the Ultra Orthodox Jewish World, Heretic in the House, was recently released by the Shalom Hartman Institute. Professor Ken Frieden is the B.J. rudolph professor of Judaic Studies at Syracuse University. He takes a comparative literature approach to Yiddish and Hebrew writing in the broader context of European and world literature. From this perspective, he has recently completed a book on travel and translation in Jewish literature. His past books include Classic Yiddish Stories of Abramovich Sholem Aleichem and Yudlovic Parrots Classic Yiddish Fiction, Abramovich Sholem Leche, Sorry I said that, Freud. And then importantly for today's talk, Freud's Dream of Interpretation, but also books including Genius and Monologue, which was Ithaca Cornell University Press of 1985. Frieden also edits a series, Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music and Art at Syracuse University Press. And in addition to working in the fields of Yiddish, Hebrew, and comparative literature, he is active as a collective Glasmer clarinetist. So, Naomi and Ken, thank you both so much for joining us. I'm going to hand it over to you for today's conversation.
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A
Thank you for inviting us. It's a delight to be able to converse with Naomi again in this context. Maybe we could start by asking how you thought of this book. How did it come about? How did this begin?
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C
Thank you so much. I'm just going to start by thanking you, Ken, not only for being a respondent and my dream reader, but also for being, I think, one of the first people, maybe the first people to invite me to give a talk about this. And, you know, that's how books have to start. Someone has to tell you to talk about it in public. And that Rudolph lecture was really a kickoff point for the book. And then, of course, I have to thank Ivo, where I spent not only many visits, but a whole year as a senior NEH Fellow and dug into Max Weinreich's archive and looked up every mention of Freud that I could find. So it's so sweet. This is such a. This is my first and actually, so far, my only book talk. And it's so special for it to be at yivo. So let me share my screen to tell just a little bit of the story of how this came to be. Let's see. Can people see that? I think I have to press play. Let me go back. Oops, sorry. This is the hardest part of my job. Here we go. So one of the things you have to know is that I live in a beautiful but tiny little house. And there is a little house, there's a little room. There's a little closet off my living room, which is called the Freud closet. That's what people in my family call it. And what it is is just all my Freud stuff. So there on the little desk is a Hebrew book. I think the book on the left is the first book that I found in a used bookstore in Jerusalem called the Book Gallery. And it's totem and taboo. There it is on the left, and I saw it falling apart. The idea of reading Freud in Hebrew was somehow very appealing to me. There on the right is a book, Psychopathology in everyday life, 1942. This one on the left is 1939. There are better images of them. Torah, Freud. I love that the Torah of Freud. Here is something that unfortunately I don't have in my closet. I have to go to the Yivo archive to read. But this copy is actually from the Jewish Historical Institute, that this is 1936, Freud Reinfirm Psichon Alise. And in the front page is a letter from Freud in Yiddish. It doesn't even say it's translated. So I had. Let's see. Do I have anything more to show? Oh, yeah, this is. One of my students sent me this. I actually have two copies of this. This is the first edition of Group Psychology in the individual eye, 1928. I have the first edition and the second edition, both 1928. One sent to me by Itzhak Gottesman and one by Miriam Borden in Toronto. And one of them was from a lending library and it had the borrower's card. And I loved these books and I just started collecting them. I now have an almost complete run. The one that I'm missing, unfortunately, but very, very rare, is the Weinreich's 1936 introduction to psychoanalysis. So I'll stop my share for a minute and if I can figure out how to get there. Sorry. Ah, you guys still there? Yes, sorry. I now have a big pop up and John, could you help me? Could you give it. Sorry. That guy.
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A
This?
- [06:38]
C
Yes, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Okay. Sorry about that. So basically I was trying to figure out what to do with this stuff. Like, I just had it. I wasn't even reading these books, and I just loved them so much, and I was trying to think of what to say about them. And then I read that letter from Freud to Weinreich congratulating him on the translation. And it says, I can't read your book, but it makes me so happy. And I thought, okay, I wasn't even reading them. And it made me happy, and it made Freud happy. And I'm like, what is it that's making us happy? What are these pleasures that we're getting from this particular book collection that I had? And then, of course, now I have all the Freud tchotchkas, because once you start collecting the books, your family starts giving you these things for birthday presents. So I had this delicious little space that was supposedly a collection that one day I was going to write a book about. And I don't even. I had this for years before I started reading these books. And then I thought, I'm going to write a book about why these books give me so much pleasure. And basically the book is about the pleasure of Jewish connection and how Freud felt it, how I feel it. Not just pleasure. There are all kinds of other complicated feelings that arise between Jews. But that's basically what my book is about.
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A
But you started to answer the question, how is this book different from every other book about the Jewish Freud?
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C
Should I answer that one?
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A
You want to say more about what's.
- [08:19]
C
Yeah. So One of the things that I, you know, in my Freud closet, I have all the books about the Jewish Freud, and obviously I have Kens, and I'm not arguing with these books, but I wanted to do something different. What I saw that these books is doing is basically trying to figure out what role Jewishness played in the development of psychoanalysis. In other words, how do you understand, let's just say, Totem and Taboo as a Jewish book? That is an excellent question, but it's not my question. My question is, how did Freud feel when Totem and Taboo got translated into Yiddish? Whatever Jewish meaning Totem and Taboo might have, and Freud denied that it had any meaning, and all these scholars were saying, oh, yes, there actually is deep Jewish meaning in Freud. I was saying, let's look at the thing where Freud said it has deep Jewish meaning. What were these things, feelings that came up for Freud by seeing his words translated into Jewish languages? What is that thing, not only for Freud, but for all of us, that. I think this is a kind of Jewish feeling, and part of it has to do with having a kind of personal connection to a famous Jew, right? So there's a million psychoanalysts out there in the world. Well, not a million, but many, many, many. And they know Freud backwards and forwards. My feeling was that I had a special connection to Freud, right? I had a connection that even if I don't know the standard edition by heart, and even if I've never been psychoanalyzed and even if I've never gone to a psychoanalytic conference, I have something with him that is real and that doesn't need to be dug up. It's right there on the surface. So a lot of these books in the 1990s were. Freud hid his Jewishness. And one thing I decided to do is to take a different approach, what's called surface theory in literary studies. And it's like instead of always trying to look at what's buried, right? Which, of course, Freud was the person who figured out how to do that more than anyone else. Let's look at what's right there on the surface, and let's figure out what's been lost by believing that the only thing that's important is what's been buried. Some things are mysterious and important even if they're right on the surface. And the surface is what Freud had. When he looked at Hebrew books, he said he couldn't read them. The surface is what I have in my closet, the surface of Jewish languages that are nevertheless really meaningful, even if you don't open up the book. And if you can't read it in the case of Freud, or if I was too, I don't know, lazy or preoccupied to read it, it was the case for me for many years.
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A
You talked about the Yiddish and Hebrew translations of Freud. So far you haven't said much about the Yiddish and Hebrew that emerges in Freud that he himself uses. The Dream Book, 1900, and especially the Joke Book from 1905. Maybe we could talk about one of those jokes that seems to have Yiddish in it. So in the joke book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where he tells a story of a baroness who is about to give birth. And while waiting, the husband and the doctor are playing cards in a neighboring room. And at some point they hear her cry out, ah, mon Dieu, que je suffre, in French, oh God, how I'm suffering. And the husband jumps up and the doctor says, sit down, it's not time yet. And they play cards. A little later they hear ach, good Wasson. And the husband jumps up and the doctor says, it's not time yet. Third time they hear her cry. Doctor says, now it's time. So that seems to be Yiddish that she has. And Freud mentions her original nature that she sort of is try putting on airs. She can speak French, she can speak German, but when it really comes to the push comes to shove, she switches into Yiddish.
- [12:31]
C
Nice. Push comes to shove. So that's, you know, that's a joke that I look at a lot, and it's one of the jokes that I look at using, let's call it the 1990s, post colonial queer Studies, Suspicious reading, and that I try to look at also using my method of surface reading. So the first reading of the joke is that what we have here is basically the stratified psyche, right? So according to Freud, the psyche has kind of layers, superficial layers and deeper layers. That's his first model of the psyche. And. And the deeper layers are, right? The ID is the kind of deepest layer, or as you know, as Strecche and Jones in the 1920s, worried, the ID sounds a lot like Yid. Maybe the ID is Yiddish. And this is a joke that tells you that the ID is the buried Yiddish within the assimilated Jew. So that joke very beautifully can illustrate the thesis that the stratified psyche has a European language at the top. It doesn't just have the superego ego and id, it has French, German and then Yiddish. Yiddish as the deepest level of the Jewish psyche. And there's no doubt That a lot of the translators, a lot of the Yiddishists who are interested in Freud, totally saw this connection. And Strachey and Jones saw it too. Wasn't just the Jews who saw it. What I'm suggesting is that there's also another way of looking at this joke. And the joke is also a way that assimilated Jews parade out little bits of Yiddish, right? So who's. Instead of looking at this woman, right, this woman that's kind of made fun of. Who? She's a phony. She speaks French. But then when she's really seriously in labor and she's just dying of pain, then suddenly the Yiddish breaks out. Yeah, there's her. But how about Freud? How about the people telling the joke? Those people and those people, at least some of them are men. They're not in labor. What they're doing is how do they connect to other Jews, you know, in a kind of. With a certain kind of sexual aggression against Jewish women, let's say, through the medium of the Jewish joke. What does the Jewish joke do? Like, if you laugh at the joke, then there's some connection that's made that heals something that hurts a little bit in Jewish society with the loss of Jewish intimacy, with the loss of Jewish languages, with the. With the tensions between aristocratic and assimilated Jews and Eastern European Jews. According to Don Ben Amos, the folklorist who passed away this year, the joke does the work of doing some kind of healing and providing some kind of connection between Jews. And I think that's also needs to be said. In other words, you don't just look at the deep structure of the joke. I'll remind people that Freud was not an archaeologist. He was an archaeologist, metaphorically, as a psychoanalyst. He dug up deep layers. He was a collector. He took things out of their context and he displayed them in his house. And in some way, the Jewish jokes are a kind of artifact of depths, as opposed to the depths themselves. So that's how I treat that joke. Try to provide two kinds of readings of it. Do you want to Yiddish for people who don't really know it? Who knows three words they know? Oy vey.
- [16:44]
A
Do you want to, at this point, mention the Galician Jews on the train?
- [16:49]
C
Yes, that's, I think, one of the jokes that I think illustrates my thesis, the surface theory, its thesis of Jewish languages as a node of connection between Jews of different varieties, including Freud and me. Let's just say we're different varieties in a lot of different ways. So the joke is, it's in the joke book, the 1905 book of Jewish jokes of jokes, which I don't think he said, Ken, but that joke book actually started as a collection of Jewish jokes. So in the same way that Freud collected ancient artifacts, he collected Jewish jokes. So that joke is about a Galitziano Jew who's sitting in a train car somewhere and he has his feet up on the bench opposite. And this very distinguished middle class, upper middle class gentleman walks into the. Walks into the train cart. And immediately the Galizianer takes his feet off the bench and puts them down and sits up straighter. And the distinguished looking gentleman reaches into his fancy suit jacket and pulls out a calendar and he's leafing through it and he says, excuse me, do you know what day Yom Kippur falls this year? And the Galitzianer says, azoi, why didn't you say so? And he puts his seat back up on the bench. And this is a joke. And notice the joke is about a certain kind of. The joke manifests the coming together of different kinds of Jews and in the joke. And it also does the work of bringing different kinds of Jews together by the telling of the joke. And one of the things I say about that joke, that joke is always. The focus is always on the Galitzianer, right? The Galitzianer, why is he acting that way? But it's also interesting to think about the German who signals his Jewishness. There's an American English term called bageling, which Sarah Labaton explained to me, which is when you try to say to someone who may not realize you're Jewish, hey, I'm Jewish, you throw in a Jewish word. So there's a game being played here on both sides. And one of the things about the way Freud is often treated is he's the subject, the Jewish studies professor is the one who knows the Jewish languages, who has the ability to detect things about Freud. And Freud isn't playing the game. Freud is only trying to cover up his Jewishness. That's how that game is played. And I don't think that's true. I think Freud is playing the game. And I think Jewish study scholars are playing the game, the game of are you Jewish? What does it mean to be Jewish? Signaling to each other in various ways. Does that make sense?
- [19:48]
A
Yes. On that matter of depth, I would add, though, that the method of free association, although it purports to take us back to the depth, actually takes us beyond. So there is a surface element of the process of interpreting dreams, right? It doesn't he claims at first that it takes us back to the latent meanings, but I think he realizes later that it's also because of the free associations. It takes us beyond into new meanings.
- [20:21]
C
Yeah. The surface theory is sometimes described as kind of the opposite of symptomatic or paranoid readings. The need to interrogate a text to discover what it's hiding. And that's associated with Freud. So what does it mean to use a surface reading on the founder of suspicious readings? I mean, it's not just Freud, it's Marx and Nietzsche. But one of the great figures associated with suspicious readings is Freud. Right. You say, oh, I'm not thinking about my mother, which means you're thinking about your mother. So everything that's said has to be understood as a cover for something else. But you're right that Freud also had this idea of free association, where you read off whatever occurs to you as it occurs to you, which is a kind of surface reading. And Freud himself, and especially when it comes to Jewish languages. Freud wrote the prefaces to two Hebrew books that are in the standard edition that are sort of canonical, two Hebrew translations of his work. And then he also wrote this letter that's non canonical. That's in, you know, we don't even have the original German. That's in Weinreich's Yiddish translation. And he says, the feeling I have when I look at these books, which again, he has only surface access to, is so deep I don't know what it means. One of these days science will figure out what. What it means to feel Jewish. And Freud is saying, I don't know what it means. And I think Jewish studies scholars say. Jewish scholars may believe they know what it means. You study Torah, you study Maimonides, you study whatever. You're the expert on what Jewishness is. I don't think so. I think Freud, and let's say the crowd of people who consider themselves experts on the Jewish Freud. The mystery is shared. That's my belief. We still haven't quite gotten there what the deep unconscious and surface character of Jewishness, as let's call it intersubjective, communal, collective, trans, historical. This is something I think we can't act like. As Lacan said, people think psychoanalysts are the people who know. Psychoanalysts aren't the people who know, and Jewish studies scholars aren't the people who know.
- [22:47]
A
If we could go back to the question of how this book is different. Seems to me you agree with a lot of the arguments that I made and other people's have made about Freudian interpretation. I'm less interested in Freud as a Jew than in Freudian dream interpretation as somehow a displacement of. As somehow related to Talmudic dream interpretation or Talmudic interpretation in general. Okay, so seems to me you. You basically agree with that. You're going beyond that. But can we go back a step? But do you agree that there are resonances between Freudian interpretation and midrashic or Talmudic interpretation?
- [23:25]
C
So my book basically starts by bracketing that question. Whether that's right or not, and it asks a different question is why do we want it to be right? Why do we want to. What is it about? What gives us pleasure in discovering the Jewish resonances in psychoanalysis. And actually I'm also interested in how does that whole thing start. So how did people get to the point of. So one of the things it is, is a reception history of Freud and Jewish languages. And one of the things I noticed is that for the first about five years of people describing Freud's work in the Hebrew and Yiddish press, which they did before they started the translation, but they had to translate in order to, you know, you had to find a translation for the psyche for the. Right. So the first thing that they always stressed in the first five years was how different Freud. Freud's dream interpretation was. As Freud himself said, this isn't biblical, this is a modern thing. So Yiddish and Hebrew readers were trying to become modern and Freud provided them with that sophisticated modernity, so they weren't trying to link it to some deep Jewish whatever. And then suddenly I actually think I found the minute when somebody first had the idea that Freud was entirely doing rabbinic interpretation. And it happens through the Yiddish language. It happens in the course of trying to explain who Freud is in using the Yiddish language, where suddenly the resonances of Freud's what's so. So the way it actually started. I don't want to get too into this. It'll take too much. It was somebody writing an essay about how Freud can be applied to Jewish sources, which is a very different thing than saying that Freud's methods are Jewish. So how he can be applied to Jewish sources. Sure, he can be applied to anything, but in the course of applying him to Jewish sources, suddenly the language, the fact that the psyche or the zela in German is suddenly a neshama and the. The drive is a yaetzer. I think it was through the act of reformulating Freud into Jewish language. And he reached for these rabbinic terms in the same way that strache reached For Latin, right? You're trying to. You're mining the resources of your language to describe these new things. And suddenly he's saying, you know, like the rabbis. Freud also believed that there is no error. There is no real error. Every error has meaning. He's looking at Rashi describing a scribal error in the Bible, is saying it's sexually motivated. Rashi says, so it's in the story of Rebecca where instead of saying there's a DVAV missing, I won't get into the whole example, but suddenly it occurs to Glixman, just through the process of doing psychoanalysis in Yiddish, that it's actually Jewish. The yetzer, the libido. Yeah, we know about the libido. We got the yetzer hara.
- [27:00]
A
Right. And it's also really interesting when these translations are happening in the 20s, 30s, 40s, Yiddish is a vernacular that's able to do things very well as a vernacular, and Hebrew is not. Is becoming a vernacular. So that it's. How. How would you characterize the difference between those two kinds of translations since the languages were in such different places in 1930?
- [27:24]
C
Yeah, that's true. Well, one of the things that's so interesting to me is that in, you know, Yiddish can always produce a little diet varish. And, you know, like the example I give is. Is in group psychology, the first Freud's books to be translated into Hebrew and to Yiddish, the word orhunda, the primal horde. What the heck is that? Right? So in Yiddish, you get orhunda, whatever that means, Right? You just Germanize, you just write it in Hebrew letters and you got yourself a psychoanalytic term. Occasionally you could find a Hebrew term that resonated. And they did. They loved that. The translators in Hebrew, you can't do that. So they had, you know, what do you come up with? And what devosis the Hebrew translator came up with was machene bereshit, the camp of b'reisheet. So the primal b'reishit. I don't know. So suddenly Freud says in Totem and Taboo that this is not a book about Judaism. When it's written in a Jewish language, it absurd Jewish feelings, but it has no Jewish viewpoint. He says it very specifically in the introduction he wrote to DeVos's Hebrew translation. But you're calling the primal herd the herd of Genesis. It creates associations, and it's almost impossible not to, you know, Heidegger. Not to bring Heidegger into a Jewish situation. But he says language speaks. The Hebrew language created the Jewish Freud without any Jewish Studies scholar having to do any work. It just did, and I actually think it did before the conscious thinking of the translators recognized what had happened. And by the way, the translator of Totem and Taboo filled the footnotes with all these translators. Footnotes where Freud says, you know, there's a taboo he kept finding biblical and Talmudic. You know, Freud says, you know, animism, not a Jewish thing. It has to do with these. These other cultures. He's looking at the belief that humans and animals have some deep connection. Devosis didn't agree. He wrote in his footnote. No, it's clear that Jews are animists. We name ourselves after, you know, animals. There's all the Jewish names, you know, dove and Beryl and whatever. We're all animals. So he felt this urge to really, let's call it, thicken the Jewish Connections of Freud. And that's, I think, explains the title of the book, what it means to create a Jewish Freud through translation. Create or discover, who knows, Right. Is it in Freud or is it imposed by translators or interpreters? I absolutely think the real insights come when you bracket that question. And instead you look at the desires that animate that scholarship. The same desires animate the scholarship and animate the pulling out of the calendar and the putting the feet in back, you know, back up on the chair. Those are all related. The academic and the social relationships between and among Jews are all related to each other. Jews in the archives and Jews in train cars are enacting similar impulses, in my view.
- [31:05]
A
In the years between 1905, when Dwight published a joke book and when he died, the conceptions of Yiddish changed and Yivo came into being. You know, as you write in the. In the book, jargon was a commonly used word in German, Yiddish jargon, because Yiddish hadn't yet been established as a more appropriate term. You want to say more about Freud's attitude toward Yiddish and his connection to Yivo?
- [31:36]
C
Yeah. So Freud was among those European, you know, Middle Central European Jews that didn't really have the concept of Yiddish at his disposal. It was a jargon. And translators are like, what do we. You know, there's the Brill translation, the native Yiddish speaker, Freud's first Hebrew translator. What does he hear when he hears the word jargon? And what does, you know, James Strachey here, the. You know, the London base gentile, when he hears the word jargon. And Rill hears maybe a little bit Yiddish. So the whole question of what Freud was talking about when, for instance, Anna O or Breuer. Anna O'S. German devolves into a ungrammatical jargon. Is she speaking Yiddish in her hysteria, or is she what's going on? Or what is the baroness in the joke book speaking at the end of that joke? It's not entirely clear. And these are cases in which scholars have said Freud is talking about Yiddish, but he doesn't want to admit it. He's hiding his Jewishness. That may be true for the early work, but by the 1930s, Freud was fully aware of Yiddish as an established Jewish language. He felt moved by being translated into that language. He was fascinated by the fact that YIVO was a center of psychoanalytic research at the very end of his life. He communicated, I mean, throughout the 1930s. He joined the board of YIVO in 1925, and he had regular communication with Weinreich. One of his last visitors was a group of delegation from the London friends of yivo. So by the way, gives me great pleasure to see on the YIVO website Freud's name and Einstein's name. These were like the famous Jews of the day, that Freud had a real connection. He spoke about YIVO and psychoanalysis as in many ways, parallel institutions threatened by the same forces. And as a matter of fact, some of Freud's questions is what does Jewishness mean? How does Jewishness transmit itself unconsciously from one generation to the next? These. These were questions that were at the heart of YIVO's psychoanalytic work. Max Weinreich, along with translating Freud, wrote a book called Der Wegz Unserjugend which one of the things that Weinreich looks at is why are Jews afraid of dogs and other animals, including horses? And I'll just point out that one of Weinreich's, one of Freud's, or Freud's only published child. Case of Child Psychoanalysis. Weinrath's whole book is about psychoanalysis of children and adolescents. Was Little Hans who was afraid of horses? Now Freud doesn't say. Well, of course he was afraid of horses. He was Jewish. But if that had occurred to him, he could have looked at. I mean, it was yet to be written. It was 30 years in the future. He could have looked at Weinreich's book, and Weinreich would have explained to him why fear of animals is transmitted as an unconscious Jewish trait. So these are, I think, parallel. Not. They're parallel programs, enterprises that are not sufficiently in conversation with each other. So the last chapter of my book is an attempt to put evils, psychoanalysis at center stage and give people a look at what psychoanalysis would look like if it could read Yiddish, if it could fully take into account what was being discovered by psychoanalytically oriented youth researchers at EVO like Weinreich, whom Freud wished he could read. So this is an encounter that didn't happen, and I try to stage it.
- [35:41]
A
I'm going to ask one more question, and then I encourage people in the audience to submit questions in the Q and A down below. So we'll try to get to those while we wait for those to come in. Let me ask more about Freud Yiddish, because, I mean, he wasn't really hiding it. You can't say that after you read the joke book. There's so much Yiddish, the shadchan and the schnorrer, and there are many Yiddish words and typical contexts. So what would you say about, you know, how. I mean, how can you even say that he's hiding his Jewishness if he's using Yiddish so freely?
- [36:18]
C
Exactly. Even when Freud talks about his Jewishness somehow, I mean, I think Freud knew some Yiddish. I don't know. I don't, I don't. I try not to play what I think of as obnoxious game of I will expose your Jewishness. Right. Derrida describes this as performing a second circumcision on Freud, as if the first one isn't enough. You can't resist when you're an eight day old baby. You can't resist when you're a dead man. He might have resisted. I mean, that's also part of the Jewish game. Like, leave me alone. Stop mocking me. So how much Freud knew? He like one of the points at which people go, how much Yiddish and Freud. How much Yiddish and Hebrew Freud knew? Basically the scholarly consensus of the 1990s is he wasn't willing to admit how much Yiddish and Hebrew he actually knew. And one of the pieces of evidence is that in the dream book, which is 1899, 1900, he writes that he dreamt the Hebrew word. I know you write about this and I cite you. And he says, I consulted with the philologist to find out what that word meant. And the scholars, like, jump on him, sorry, I think this is you. But it's also a lot of other people. And they go, look, it's his own dream. What does it mean? He didn't know what the word meant. How do you dream a word that you don't know? It came out of his unconscious, dreaming mind. And one of the things I say is, I think that's very Common. I think we all know things we don't entirely know. We need to have a more subtle idea of what language is and what it means to know it and to understand that, to interpret a dream in which foreign languages might be speaking through us. Right. Language doesn't just express us, but expresses things we've heard that we didn't understand, that a translator and a psychoanalyst are doing parallel operations. Freud doesn't go to a psychoanalyst to understand his dream, he goes to a translator. In the same way, a translation is a form of psychoanalysis, and translation into Hebrew and Yiddish are forms of telling us something about what psychoanalysis is that it didn't itself know, wasn't necessarily hiding, but it didn't entirely know. So this is why I think translation is also psychoanalysis, and why my book is a contribution, if I can say so myself. It doesn't sound too grandiose that translation is a contribution not only to the field of translation studies and the reception of psychoanalysis, but a contribution to psychoanalysis proper. Psychoanalysis proper requires, asks for Hebrew and Yiddish translation among other languages.
- [39:26]
A
Yeah, your book goes farther afield in other ways too. I mean, even the Passover dream, as I call it, with Al Kazaris is a response to seeing Herzl's play Dasnoya Ghetto, the new Ghetto. So it's a dream about persecution in connection with nascent Zionism. And your book does touch on Zionism and diasporism. Do you want to say anything about that?
- [39:50]
C
Yeah, just very quickly. So even though in the title it says Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish, the book, I think for personal reasons, among other things, and the fact that I spent a year in the YIVO archive, is mostly concerned with Yiddish. But for Freud, the Hebrew language, which the Hebrew Alphabet, which of course Yiddish is in, is partly what he's attached to. He takes these books with him to London. So what? But there is a chapter on Hebrew, it's called A Godless Jew in the Holy Tongue. And it basically examines the ideological, emotional feeling that the translators of Freud into Hebrew and the publishers and the editors had during the years, especially in the late 1930s, when Freud's books were being burned in the bonfires, in the Nazi bonfires, in the Zionist Yishuv, translating Freud and other German speaking Jews was understood to be a form of Zionist rescue of endangered Jews, a kind of symbolic rescue fantasy which the editor of the psychoanalysis series of in the 1990s, Emmanuel Berman, happens to be the major psychoanalyst who's analyzed the role of rescue fantasies in psychoanalysis. So I wanted to contribute to his work the role of rescue fantasies in what I call salvage translation. What does it mean to salvage something through translation? We tend to think of translation as loss. It's also, in certain circumstances can be rescued. And that's how they conceptualize translation.
- [41:54]
A
Now we have some interesting questions coming in, so I'll try to convey. Okay, let's go for it. Just a minute ago, E. Fromovich from Leeds, UK asks, does Yiddish appear in Freud in a serious non humorous context or is it only part of the low register?
- [42:13]
C
Oh, I love that. I love that. You know, one of the things I say in the book is that Yiddish is also the language of the superego. Freud in the psychopathology of everyday life makes a mistake. He picks up a tuning fork instead of the hammer that he needs and he free associates on that mistake and he hears the word hammer, hammerhammer. Somebody is calling him an idiot. Or as I, you know, in my childhood it was hammer eisel, you ass. So I don't know if that's high or low. It's superego. But it's. But other serious. I mean Yiddish tends to, you know. Does he. I would say that the place of high culture, Yiddish high culture for Freud is what he knows of Yivo. He understands Yivo to be a place of Yiddish high culture and he can't participate in it himself. He's much better at the low culture aspect of it, but he certainly knows of it. And he speaks of, he uses the term der heretz respect when he talks about holding the proofs or the pages. It's not clear of Weinreich's book in his hands. So there's no, there isn't a shred of whatever the coarse, the Yiddish coarseness, the Yid as id. It's complete. Derek Eretz is his feeling toward the Yiddish that he knows is operative at evil. At least he has nothing but respect for great. It's no joke.
- [43:48]
A
Nancy Sinkov wrote an comment at 140. In many ways, the Jewish studies fascination with Freud is part of the historical engagement with the westernization of Polish slash Galician Jews. Their acculturation becoming kosher, so to speak. But then the anxiety persists. Freud's Jewishness will be exposed, claimed by fellow Jews, perhaps hated by anti Semites.
- [44:16]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean I, all I can do is echo that. That's exactly right. I think the, you know, people talk about Freud's anxieties about psychoanalysis being perceived as a Jewish science. Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to the non Jews and the gentiles around it. He was fine with it. When Jews thought that way. I mean, you know, people Jewish. I think the first real book about psychoanalysis of Jewish science is 1929. A.A. robach sends it to Freud. The Jewish Influences on Psychology. There's a whole two chapters on psychoanalysis. He says that Freud is influenced by hasidism. Is Hasidism. He has no idea that people didn't know that much about Freud's background. And Freud said, okay. He says very mildly, no one's ever accused me of that. But it may interest you to know. In other words, I'm not disagreeing, but that's news to me. And it may interest you to know that until 20 years ago, my father was a Chassid. I don't know very much about it. He left it behind. But I'm not denying it, you know, you're not an anti Semite. You want to call me a Jew, fine. I mean, you want to call psychoanalysis a Jewish science. He didn't object to it when Jews. I mean, if he objected to it, he objected to it in the most, in the mildest possible way.
- [45:37]
A
Those last two books of Freud that are the most explicitly Jewish are probably my least favorite. I like. I like the dream book and the joke book. But someone asks, David Goldstein asked, what was Freud's motivation for writing his book? Moses and Monotheism.
- [45:52]
C
Really interesting. I mean, one of the things that. One of the ways of understanding that book, I'm not saying, I mean, it's a bizarre book and mostly I don't know what to do with it, like anybody else. It's funny, in the beginning of that book, Freud says, people are going to feel the Jews at their moment of great persecution are going to feel that I stole their leader from them. And the line I have there is like, you read the reception in the Hebrew and Yiddish press. And nobody felt that way. They were like, why? He doesn't know any Hebrew. Like five years before, everybody was like, ah, he's so Jewish. Look at all this Hebrew and Yiddish. And then the Moses book comes out and they're all like, he doesn't know Hebrew at all. He thinks Adonai and Aton are related. Where Adonai is like a late rabbinic rewriting of the Tetragrammaton. They're like, why didn't he read some Jewish scholars? Like, he's reading this German biblical criticism. He doesn't know any Hebrew. It's perfectly clear. The Hebrew and Yiddish press were united in thinking that that book was garbage, but they weren't threatened by it as he thought there would be. But some of them were also very moved by the fact that he was going back to Jewish sources in this weird way. And he was going back to answer the question, which I think is still a question, which is, what is this Jewish thing all about? You know, if you don't believe there's a God who gave you the Torah on Sinai, then what are we still doing and why is it so powerful? And I think that question, even if the answer is weird, the question is real and it's still not answered. And I'll just say that at Yivo, the very last conversation, I mean the last conversation that he had with this delegation from Yivo is every time any like sort of East European Jew, Yiddish speaking Jew showed up, he would say, in this very pathetic way, he would say, do you hate me because of the Moses book?
- [47:48]
A
You froze.
- [47:50]
C
Right? We know that he was like very insecure around Eastern European Jews. It's also a familiar dynamic. And they were like chas v', shalom, right? He's talking to Ian Steinberg, an Orthodox Jewish anarchist. And in halachic language he said, you know, when it comes to the truth, you have to say it. There can't be any considerations of the times of the hour. So you got rabbinic permission to write that from someone from a Yivo delegate. So this is what I'm interested in. Not what is that book about, but what's the Jewish game around it? How do Jews respond to it? What are they threatened by? What do they feel superior about? How does he feel insecure around Eastern European Jews? That's the drama that I'm interested in. And that's what you read about in my book.
- [48:37]
A
If you read my book, there's a similar drama around Kafka. Jacqueline asked, have you come across any connection between Freud and Kafka? And because in Kafka's published writings there's no mention of Jews, but there's a lot of reflection about Jews in his diaries and in the unpublished stock. So it's part, it's sort of the same thing of the Westernizing German, Austrian Jews. They've made it into, I mean, in their reception they've been finally, maybe not at first they were not quickly received, but as they were finally received, what, what, what's the need to bring them back to their Yiddish?
- [49:24]
C
Especially when they want to be brought back to their Yiddish, Right? So it's Kafka, it's cru, it's Marx, It's Heinz, right? It's, it's, it's all these assimilated Jews. We all want to, I don't know, perform a second circumcision or expose them, or touch them, or play with them or play that game on snl. Do not a do how do wish. Especially when they're famous. The reason why Freud is such an interesting example of this dynamic is that you can take his own methods and use them against anything he says about. You can use his own negation. I already talked about negation. You say, oh no, I didn't dream about my mother. Well, clearly you're dreaming about your mother. Oh no, I don't know yet is clearly Yiddish. You know, there's something very satisfying about playing that game with Freud because it's so self recursive and it's so satisfying to do a Freudian analysis of Freud, a Jewish Freud. So, you know. Yes, the pleasures are available with certainly. What's my favorite Kafka story? I love leopards in the temple. I love animal in the synagogue. Why? Why are these the ones I love? And what do I feel special about? And I love reading about Kafka in the Yiddish theater. It's like that's what I want to try to figure out. Give me a psychoanalysis of that. Don't tell me about Kafka, tell me about myself. Explain to me what this is, what this thing is.
- [50:53]
A
We just have a few more minutes. I want to touch on what Gabrielle G. Asks about how when you bring up Freud, often you're met with folks dismissing him or only thinking of him as goofy or demonizing him. What do we lose by doing that? It is hard. I try to teach the joke book. My students don't really want to read Freud, right?
- [51:15]
C
Freud is like, yeah, there's this whole like, Freud is a dead white European male, but he's also the Viennese Jew. You know, there's like these ways of dismissing him. I mean, one of the things that's so interesting to me is how so the, the, the I look at how these attitudes towards Freud are shaped by, changed by the fact that he was a Jew, right? So in the Yiddish press, like for instance, AB Kahan, the, the editor in chief of the Forward, he thought, like many other Yiddish speakers of the time, he thought psychoanalysis was just absurd. He said, you know, that it's the practice of it. They're charlatans. They're charging nervous women too much money to lie on the couch and say whatever. He didn't buy anything or Freud had a filthy mind, or Freud was associated with crime. And then for Freud's 80th birthday, he says, we know all this. We're not endorsing psychoanalysis. But here's Freud, the most famous Jew in the world, and it's his 80th birthday, and we're not going to let it go by without mentioning it. So Freud's Jewishness, even during his own lifetime, was a key to overcoming what psychoanalysts might call resistance to psychoanalysis. It was a very good tool for Jews to go, okay, you know, it sounds crazy to me, but I'll give it a try. Not only was he a Jew, he was a persecuted Jewish. Wright said, this is a period of antisemitism. The other thing is that during the 30s, this explosion of Yiddish newspaper culture and the Yiddish lecture circuit, they need material, they need to educate Jews, and they need to entertain them. The only person who can do both simultaneously, make them feel sophisticated and make them laugh is Freud. So Freud is like. And the other thing is, there's just a boom of lists of famous Jews. This is like, we still have the famous Jews. By the way, Weinreich talked about why we have the famous Jews thing. He thinks famous Jews is a big part of Jewish identity. So Freud was the most famous Jew in the world. That's not a. In other words, you don't have to look that much further than that. Like what exactly he said about the death drive or whatever, it barely matters to the Yiddish press. It's. I mean, to some of them, it matters a lot. Certainly to Weinreich, it mattered a lot. But to Abkahan, he needs to sell newspapers, and famous Jews sell newspapers. So, I mean, your students today are unimpressed. Okay. I don't know. I mean, I'm not making an argument for Freud being right. Lord knows, I don't know. I'm just making. I'm not making an argument at all. I'm describing my attachment and other people's attachment. My attachment is basically fairly not dependent on whether he was right about anything, though I happen to think that the death drive. Once I actually sat down and read Freud on the death drive, I think that's genius. I mean, that explains so much.
- [54:22]
A
Yeah. On the attraction to Freud, let me just confess that, in a sense, Freud was, for me a transitional figure between comparative literature and Jewish studies. You know, I wrote a dissertation in comparative literature, and I was learning Yiddish and Hebrew. And in moving into Jewish studies, I wrote a book about Freud, and then I published a book about Yiddish classic authors. So he played that role for me, too.
- [54:47]
C
Like, the role he played for me is here's this huge, sophisticated field that people take seriously that has, you know, practitioners and then that feeling of, you know how scholars are. You need a niche. It's like you need a cozy little space to call your own. And, you know, Freud is both the sophisticated, worldly, famous, important thinker. And he's like, I got a little cozy thing with him. And I think that's like the sort of perfect sweet spot.
- [55:24]
A
Yeah. We haven't been able to talk about all of the questions, but someone asked, why the scary cover? So since we're surface reading, if you look at the COVID is it scary?
- [55:36]
C
You know, I had a few ideas for the. I think Rachel Beal came up with the idea. I wanted to have Freud reading a Yiddish newspaper. You know, that famous photo of him reading a newspaper just substituting a Yiddish newspaper. I thought that would be. I don't know why this one ended up being the one. I don't necessarily find it scary, though. It is the old Freud. Like the old Freud. Sometimes people say, how about the young Freud? He was better looking, as we all were. Right. So except for Ken, he's Dorian Gray.
- [56:13]
A
Is not scary.
- [56:14]
C
All Freud is when he just to
- [56:17]
A
say, my cover is Freud and the Talmud. One of my. One of the versions of my cover.
- [56:21]
C
Ah, let's see that again. I got a very tiny little. I mean, I have it in my
- [56:24]
A
closet, but Freud and the Tracte berechot on dream interpretation in the Talmud.
- [56:29]
C
Ah, that's on the COVID I forgot that. Okay, so the COVID Yeah, I didn't have like a ton of. But yeah, I wanted to have something in which Freud and Yiddish were not separate things, but somehow one in the same image. Because I really do believe that Jewish languages are both inside and outside Freud. That navel of the dream, that thing we share with others, that we don't necessarily know it all. There's an idea there. What can I say?
- [57:04]
A
So we've reached an hour. I don't know if Alex wants to come back and sign us out or. Nomi. If you want to say one more thing. I've enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for inviting me to be part of this. Congratulations on your book. It's very.
- [57:19]
C
So much. It's so meaningful to have a conversation with you and to have a conversation at yivo.
- [57:27]
B
Thank you both so much. This has been fascinating and we encourage everyone to check out the book which is for sale on the yivo store. Congratulations, Naomi and Thank you both so much.
- [57:38]
C
Thank you all for coming.
- [57:41]
A
Zeige Sud.
- [57:43]
B
Excellent. And I'll just note for those that are with us that we've got a bunch of really fascinating talks coming up, including our Yiddish Civilization lecture series, which includes lectures in Yiddish and English, which bridges the summer program where we'll have about 100 students learning Yiddish with us from around the world. And we make some of the experience of that available to our broader audience with these lectures, which are both for the students as well as the general public. So check that out on our website and join us again soon.
- [58:14]
C
Thank you.