ABSTRACT
In Berlin, the Mecca of Yiddish high culture, Der Nister might have found the only Gemeinschaft willing to support his elitist, uncompromising, and Utopian art. In a sacred fellowship of Yiddish Utopian dreamers, Der Nister would have officiated as High Priest. Pinkhes Kahanovitsh means Phineas, Son-of-the-Priest, or Kohen. It was unmistakably the name of a Russian Jew But the writer who called himself Der Nister. World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution strengthened Der Nister's faith in the marriage of art and reality. From his perspective, the collapse of the old order in Russia presaged the rise of a new holy community composed of wandering writers, graphic artists, and teachers. In his priestly fictions, Der Nister had maintained a hierarchy of values and a strict separation between good and evil, spirit and matter, fantastical story and everyday life. He could have produced a Yiddish storytelling corpus commensurate with the Stalinist horrors.
