ABSTRACT
The achievement of Moyshe Kulbak's Berlin writings, as well as the phenomenon of Yiddish literature in the Weimar context generally, falls at some distinct crossroads in the history of Yiddish literature and European modernism. For works such as Raysn and Meshiekh ben-Efrayim s pecifically, Kulbak's conflicted temporality portrays a larger rupture both between Berlin and Belarus and between the old Pale of Settlement and either the newly established Polish Republic or the equally new Soviet Union. Kulbak's major Berlin writings offer contrasting and interconnected strategies for conceptualizing specifically Yiddish notions of nostalgia and apocalypse. The unharmonized instability between the pre-modern collective and the post-Freudian individual demonstrates that temporality as such is seldom stable in Kulbak's writing, but always conflicted so that neither generic categories nor narrative modes ever remain constant or self-contained. In the folkloristic terms from which Kulbak derives this imagery, Benye's status in this passage between machine and primordial the legendary homunculus made Kabbalistically out of clay.
