ABSTRACT
The main challenge of writing a Yiddish historical novel consisted of balancing a static, mythic, and religiously based Jewish universe with the developmental scheme of its protagonist and the open structure of the genre. The origin and development of the Yiddish historical novel was closely tied to its use as a commodity in the literary market dominated by the Yiddish press, which would serialize, promote, and critique Yiddish literature for a mass readership in Eastern Europe. In his study The Historical Novel, the Marxist literary theoretician Georg Lukacs stressed the genre's humanist impulse to educate, and examined its representation of historical trends and historical-social types. In a 1931 lecture at the Warsaw PEN club, Joseph Opatoshu argued that the Jews, like the Norwegians and Danes, are called upon to make Europe view them as a living historical force and not a relic of the ancient world. The Kotsker Rebbe is the novel's main historical figure, an iconoclastic, visionary Hasidic leader.
