Sholem Asch (, ; 1 November 1880 – 10 July 1957), also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. Asch initially wrote in Hebrew, but, on the advice of the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, he subsequently decided to write only in Yiddish, becoming a significant cultural figure in the Yiddishist movement.

Asch's career was marked by both critical acclaim and controversy. His 1904 work A Shtetl offered an idyllic portrait of traditional Polish-Jewish life. In 1920, a 12-volume set of his collected works was published in honor of his 40th birthday. His 1906 play God of Vengeance, set in a Jewish brothel and featuring a lesbian relationship, sparked fierce debates both within the Jewish community and the greater political landscape. God of Vengeance encountered bans, arrests, and an obscenity trial when it played on Broadway in 1923. Lord Chamberlain banned the London production in 1946. Asch's trilogy Three Cities (1929–31) chronicled Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow. Asch was awarded Poland's Polonia Restituta decoration in 1932.

In his later career, Asch wrote another trilogy: The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949), about the lives of Jesus, Paul, and the Virgin Mary. While Asch intended these works as a bridge between Jews and Christians and remained Jewish throughout his life, for Jewish war victims in Europe. In 1953, Asch left the United States, after being questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and amid ongoing controversy over his writing. He stated, "I am returning to England with a broken heart." His house in Bat Yam, Israel, is now the Sholem Asch Museum.

Asch was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

In 2023, Asch was recognized as a notable Yiddishist figure in the exhibit, Yiddish: A Global Culture, at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. and curators Mindle Cohen and Caraid O'Brien. O'Brien has also translated Asch's plays into English and was credited by The New York Times with contributing to a modern revival of interest in Asch's work. Hebrew, French, German, Russian and other languages. and Frajda Malka, née Widawska, also known as Malka (born 1850, Łęczyca). He grew up in a Hasidic family. Moyshe had 17 children total.

Asch grew up in Kutno, then a majority Jewish town, in which Jews constituted over 70% of the population in the 19th century. It was a diverse community that included Zionists, Bundists, and Hasidic Jews from various sects, and was known as a center of Torah study. Growing up, Asch thought Jews were the majority in the rest of the world as well.

Sholem was fluent not only in his native Yiddish but in Russian, and literate in Hebrew. In Włocławek, he became enamored with the work of prominent Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. While there, he also began writing. He attempted to master the short story and wrote in Hebrew. What he wrote there was later revised, translated into Yiddish, and ultimately, launched his career. It is about a Jewish brothel owner who attempts to become respectable by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying off his daughter to a yeshiva student. Set in a brothel, the play includes Jewish prostitutes and a lesbian scene. I. L. Peretz famously said of the play after reading it: "Burn it, Asch, burn it!" Instead, Asch went to Berlin to pitch it to director Max Reinhardt and actor Rudolph Schildkraut, who produced it at the Deutsches Theater. God of Vengeance opened on March 19, 1907, and ran for six months, and soon was translated and performed in a dozen European languages.

The play was first brought to New York City by David Kessler in 1907. The audience mostly came for Kessler, and they booed the rest of the cast. The New York production sparked a major press war between local Yiddish papers, led by the Orthodox Jewish Tageplatt and even the secular Forverts. Orthodox papers referred to God of Vengeance as "filthy," "immoral," and "indecent," while radical papers described it as "moral," "artistic," and "beautiful". Some of the more provocative scenes in the production were changed, but it wasn't enough for the Orthodox papers. Even Yiddish intellectuals and the play's supporters had problems with the play's inauthentic portrayal of Jewish tradition, especially Yankl's use of the Torah, which they said Asch seemed to be using mostly for cheap effects; they also expressed concern over how it might stigmatize Jewish people who already faced much anti-Semitism. The association with Jews and sex work was a popular stereotype at the time. Other intellectuals criticized the writing itself, claiming that the second act was beautifully written but the first and third acts failed to support it. In 1922, it was staged in New York City at the Provincetown Theatre in Greenwich Village, and moved to the Apollo Theatre on Broadway on February 19, 1923, with a cast that included the acclaimed Jewish immigrant actor Rudolph Schildkraut. Its run was cut short on March 6, when the entire cast, producer Harry Weinberger, and one of the owners of the theater were indicted for violating the state's Penal Code, and later convicted on charges of obscenity. In Europe, the play was popular enough to be translated into German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian and Norwegian.

Indecent is a 2015 play written by Paula Vogel that recounts the controversy of God of Vengeance. It opened on Broadway at the Cort Theater in April 2017, directed by Rebecca Taichman.

Asch attended the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908, which declared Yiddish to be "a national language of the Jewish people." He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and the United States in 1910, a place about which he felt deeply ambivalent.

Later adult career

thumb|right|300px|Asch (left) with literary critic [[Shmuel Niger and Niger's brother, labor leader Baruch Charney Vladeck 1920s]]

In the pursuit of a safe haven from the violence in Europe, he, Mathilde and their four children moved to the United States in 1914, moving around New York City for a while before settling in Staten Island. In New York, he began to write for Forverts, the mass-circulation Yiddish daily that had also covered his plays, a job provided both income and an intellectual circle.

Asch became increasingly active in public life and played a prominent role in the American Jewry's relief efforts in Europe for Jewish war victims. He was a founding member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. After a series of pogroms in Lithuania in 1919, Asch visited the country as representative of the Joint Committee, and he suffered a nervous breakdown due to the shock of the horrors he witnessed. Despite accusations of conversion, Asch remained proudly Jewish; he had written the trilogy not as a promotion of Christianity but as an attempt to bridge the gap between Jews and Christians. Much of his readership and the Jewish literary community, however, did not see it that way. His long-standing employer, New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts, not only dropped him as a writer but also openly attacked him for promoting Christianity. He subsequently started writing for a communist paper, Morgen frayhayt, leading to repeated questioning by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1953, Chaim Lieberman published The Christianity of Sholem Asch, a scathing criticism of Asch and his Christological trilogy that disgusted even some of Asch's strongest critics. Lieberman's book, and the McCarthy Hearings, led Asch and his wife Mathilde to leave the US in 1953, whereafter they split their time between London (where their daughter lived), continental Europe, and Israel.

Death and legacy

Asch spent most of his last two years in Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, Israel, in a house that the mayor had invited him to build, but died in London at his desk writing. Due to his controversies, his funeral in London was small. His house in Bat Yam is now the Sholem Asch Museum and part of the MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam complex of three museums. The bulk of his library, containing rare Yiddish books and manuscripts, as well as the manuscripts of some of his own works, is held at Yale University. Although many of his works are no longer read today, his best works have proven to be standards of Jewish and Yiddish literature. His four children were Moszek Asz/Moses "Moe" Asch (2 December 1905, Warsaw – 19 October 1986, United States), the founder and head of Folkways Records, Natan Asz/Nathan Asch (1902, Warsaw – 1964, United States) and Janek Asz/John Asch (1907, Warsaw – 1997, United States), both also writers; and daughter Ruth Asch Shaffer (1910, Warsaw – 2006, England).

His grandson Michael Asch is an anthropologist, and his great-grandsons are David Mazower, a writer and a BBC Journalist., and Mark Mazower, an author and history professor at Columbia University.

In July, 1967 a street in Co-op City, the Bronx, New York was named in honor of Asch (Asch Loop).

Inspirations and major themes

Many of Asch's father figures are inspired by his own father. Sholem was believed to have adopted much of his own philosophies from his father, such as his love for humanity and his concern for Jewish-Christian reconciliation. He summed up his father's faith as "love of God and love of neighbor".

  • Kiddush ha-Shem, 1919 (translated into English 1926), novel
  • Di Muter (The Mother), 1919 (translated into English 1930)
  • Di Kishufmakherin fun Kastilien (The Witch of Castile), 1921
  • Der Toyter Mensch (The Dead Man), 1922, play (translated into English 2021)
  • Urteyl (Death Sentence), 1924
  • Khaym Lederers Tsurikkumen (The Return of Khaym Lederer), 1927
  • Schalom Asch, "Rückblick," Jahrbuch (Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1931), pp. 35–77.
  • Farn Mabul trilogy (Before the Flood) 1929–31, translated as Three Cities, 1933
  • Die Gefangene Gottes (God's Captives), 1932
  • Der T'hilim Yid, 1934, translated as: Salvation
  • The War Goes On, 1935
  • The Calf of Papers, 1936, novel
  • Bayrn Opgrunt, 1937, translated as: The Precipice
  • The Mother, 1937, novel
  • Three Novels, 1938
  • Dos Gezang fun Tol (The Song of the Valley), 1938 (translated into English, 1939)
  • The Nazarene, 1939, novel
  • What I Believe 1941, essay, 201 pages
  • Children of Abraham, 1942, short stories
  • My Personal Faith, 1942, Published: London, George Rutledge & Sons, Ltd
  • The Apostle, 1943, novel
  • One Destiny: An Epistle to the Christians, 1945
  • East River, 1946, spent more than 6 months on the New York Times Best Seller List (1946–7) including one week at No. 1
  • Tales of My People, 1948, short stories
  • Mary, 1949, novel, unrelated to his earlier work of the same name
  • Salvation, 1951
  • Moses, 1951, novel
  • A Passage in the Night, 1953
  • The Prophet, 1955

Discography

  • In the Beginning: Bible Stories for Children by Sholem Asch (Performed by Arna Bontemps) (Folkways Records, 1955)
  • Joseph and His Brothers: From In the Beginning by Sholem Asch (Performed by Arna Bontemps) (Folkways Records, 1955)
  • Jewish Classical Literature: Read by Chaim Ostrowsky (Folkways Records, 1960)
  • Nativity: Sholem Asch's Story of the Birth of Jesus (Performed by Pete Seeger) (Folkways Records, 1963)
  • Readings from the Bible - Old Testament: Compiled by Sholem Asch (Performed by Harry Fleetwood) (Folkways Records, 1972)
  • Sholem Asch: A Statement and Lecture at Columbia University, N.Y. October, 1952 (Folkways Records, 1977)

References

Further reading

  • Mostly about Asch's controversial trilogy that began with The Nazarene.
  • “The Yiddish writer’s re-Judaized imagining of St. Paul turns 75.”
  • Sholem Asch Discography at Smithsonian Folkways
  • Ben Siegel, , 313 pages.
  • Alyssa Quint, Asch's Diamonds, A New Essay Collection Gives an Oft-neglected Master His Due, a review in The Jewish Daily Forward
  • "Workbook" on the Asch-Howe Quarrel
  • Biographical article of Sholem Asch by Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Sara Blacher-Retter reads A shtiler gortn and A dorf-tsadik
  • A bust of Sholem Asch by Jacob Epstein, from the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
  • Sholem Asch Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
  • Asch Wednesday 2021: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Sholem Asch Congress for Jewish Culture. Feature-length (1:49) video on various aspects of his life and work.