The hasidic story and the Yiddish cabaret: folk performance as a barbaric disruption in S. Y. Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy

Focusing on S.Y. Agnon’s novel The Bridal Canopy (Hakhansat kala), 1931, this article investigates an under-explored path in modern Jewish literature where folklore and popular culture serve as a radical disruption of European literary norms. Whereas modern Hebrew and Yiddish literatures typically strove for what Dan Miron called “cultural normalcy,” struggling to mould Jewish materials (including language, modes and genres of writing, and ways of life) into European literary standards, Agnon’s first novel flaunts “Jewish otherness.” Agnon orchestrates a polyphony of Jewish performers, including the storyteller, the badkhn, the purim-shpiler and the popular Yiddish cabaret the Singers of Brod. Introducing the sensibilities of the Yiddish vernacular into the highbrow Hebrew book, improvised performance into the written text, simple rhyming into Agnon’s rich prose–all these disturbances add up to what might be called, following, Theodor W. Adorno’s term, a “barbaric” interference in the esteemed European genre.