SOURCE: "Der Nister's 'Under a Fence': Tribulations of a Soviet Yiddish Symbolist," in The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, edited by Uriel Weinreich, Mouton & Co., 1965, pp. 263-87.

In the following essay, Shmeruk examines "Under a Fence" in light of the restrictions placed upon Yiddish writers by the Soviet government in the 1920s.

Literary analysis of works produced under a totalitarian regime must depend, even more than any other critical enterprise, on reading between the lines. For the historian, the very existence of "lines" written in Yiddish, like the mere fact of social organization on a Jewish basis, signify—in the light of the grudging toleration of Jewish group aspirations by the Soviet regime—an assertion of Jewish identity and loyalty comparable to more explicit and ambitious manifestations of Jewish nationhood under freer regimes. When a work has literary merit in addition—and a great...