Taking the shundroman seriously

By Saul Noam Zaritt

 The Bloody Woman, The Bloody Stain, The Family of Sin, In the Snares of Sin, In a Demon’s Hands, The Mystery of the Turkish Harem, The Warsaw Mystery, Broken Hearts—these are titles of some of the serialized novels published in Yiddish newspapers in Warsaw from the early twentieth century through the interwar period. Appearing over a number of months or sometimes a couple of years, novels like these were twisting tales of murder and infidelity, adventure and political intrigue. As staples of the Yiddish newspaper, novels and short stories like these number in the thousands, part of the daily entertainment of Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe, the US, and throughout the global diaspora of Ashkenazi Jewry. Mostly anonymously or pseudonymously authored, they were hybrid creations, often loosely translated and adapted from other European literatures.

At times an author would Judaize a borrowed plot to make the text more palatable to Yiddish readers—a story about Parisian aristocrats would become an account of Warsaw’s monied Jewish elite. At other times the author would preserve foreign elements as a way to attract readers to an exotic and strange world—an adventure tale set in the Far East would include deeply Orientalist and even racist portrayals. A writer would also invent entirely new sensationalist plots, using the popular genre to exploit the potential drama and intrigue of Eastern European Jewish life. These texts were among the most read and circulated pieces of Yiddish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were also the most maligned and criticized.

Critics of the time labeled these works as shund, in an effort to denigrate such populism and sensationalism. Stemming from the verb schinden, to flay an animal, the German noun Schund means that which remains after the act of flaying, what in English is called trash, refuse, waste, or dross. In nineteenth-century Germany, this term was used pejoratively by critics to bemoan the rise of popular German fiction, in particular serialized novels that were printed cheaply and distributed widely. Each installment was likened to the worthless remnant that had been discarded from the pure body of world literature.

Stemming from the verb schinden, to flay an animal, the German noun Schund means that which remains after the act of flaying, what in English is called trash, refuse, waste, or dross.

The word shund came into use in Yiddish in the late nineteenth century, likely among Yiddish speaking (and German reading) intellectuals in the US and then Eastern Europe. The label shundroman was first applied to pamphleted entertainment literature (what in American English was later called “pulp fiction”) and then to the serialized fiction of the transnational Yiddish press. Popular Yiddish theater of similarly low status, notably musicals and melodramas, was called shundteater. Critics wanted to protect Yiddish readers from material they considered pornographic and aesthetically inferior, from the dangers of “women’s culture,” which they disdained for its privileging entertainment over political and ethical instruction. Take, for instance, these lines from a 1922 serialized newspaper novel by Sarah B. Smith, who was later dubbed “the queen of the shundroman”:

Mona wanted to laugh, but some instinct warned her not to tease him now. She had to be patient. Patient and tender. She stretched her cold hand to his cheek and said: “My darling Albert, don’t be a fool! My darling boy—I thought you were cleverer than that. Clever boys don’t kidnap their princesses in the middle of the night!” “I want to have you. I want you to be mine, mine forever, do you hear me?” “Yes, of course, your girl hears you. Your girl’s ears are so sensitive, but her wings are clipped, she cannot fly—she lives in a world with a mama, strict brothers whom she fears, and much else besides.” He pressed her head against his shoulder and asked with a sigh: “What next then, my love, my kitten?” “A rabbi, a chuppah, and guests!” “Aha! Now I understand! What a fool I am! Sure, a chuppah, let’s find a chuppah!” She now let slip a laugh, giving him a peck on the cheek. She had learned the terrible game of love so quickly …

This lovers’ exchange comes right out of the popular English-language American fiction of the day, tinged by sensationalized erotic longing and the coquettish flirtation of the early twentieth- century “New Woman,” including an embedded critique of heterosexual love (the “terrible game of love”). The author even throws in a reference to Jewish marriage practices, not as some meditation on collective identity or a reflection on the role of religion in modern love, but as one more facet in the melodrama. “Sure, a chuppah”—what’s important in this scene is the sexual energy between lovers, the play of power between them, not some broader consideration of the tension between tradition and the modern world. Shund always privileges entertainment and pleasure.

The focus on pleasure can make it difficult to place this literature within conventional systems of literature, divided as they are by language, national origin, and the way texts move within transnational markets. Popular Yiddish fiction does not particularly count within such conventions— a critically ignored corpus written for a readership now long disappeared and seemingly limited in any further circulation. But what can we make of the way in which the text itself, before translation, is already shot through with multiple cultural discourses? Smith’s text and others like it are so close to works by Edna Ferber, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton, and yet never factor in histories of women’s fiction and entertainment writing of the early twentieth century. What might happen if scholars turned to this literature not as a curiosity but as a source for rethinking how popular culture works, telling the story of mass-produced literature from the vantage point of a minority language in deep and sustained dialogue with surrounding cultures?

One way this story of popular Yiddish fiction could be retold would be to acknowledge that the Euro-American novel and short story, as they developed in the nineteenth century, were not simply divided between canonical and non-canonical forms, between the popular and the literary—and they were hardly limited by national borders. Many novels of the nineteenth century, in Europe and America—Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Bleak House; William Thackeray’s The Virginians and Vanity Fair; various works by Henry James and Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—were serialized in mass-produced periodicals such as Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly and, often through translation, were consumed by culturally and linguistically diverse readers. In many ways, fiction as we know it today began as a popular, mass-produced, transnational phenomenon.

The same is true for Yiddish. The first novels in the mid-nineteenth century were serialized and/or circulated as cheaply produced pamphlets that circulated transnationally. Even when there was an attempt to establish a centralized and institutionalized literature, in particular by Sholem Aleichem, of Fiddler on the Roof fame, it came in opposition to a rise in popular writers such as Shomer (pseudonym of Nokhem Meyer Shaykevitch, 1849–1905). In the late nineteenth century, Shomer was by far a better-selling author than Sholem Aleichem, who had yet to produce his famed Tevye the Milkman, Menachem- Mendl, and Motl stories. Such disparity between the writers did not stop Sholem Aleichem from launching a campaign against shund and all of its hybridity, at one point writing a mock trial against Shomer by lobbing accusations of poor taste, literary theft, obscenity, and immorality. Sholem Aleichem’s invective was repeated throughout the twentieth century, forcing most writers of shund to retreat behind pseudonyms for fear of damage to their writerly reputations. Many stars of Yiddish literature—including such luminaries as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aaron Zeitlin, Israel Rabon, and Yehoshua Perle—secretly produced shund in order to pay their bills, as their own more “elevated” writing was not as reliably remunerated.

Many stars of Yiddish literature—including such luminaries as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aaron Zeitlin, Israel Rabon, and Yehoshua Perle—secretly produced shund in order to pay their bills.

Yiddish studies has largely inherited this same distaste for the genre. There have been few sustained studies of shund, and scholarship still has no clear sense of its parameters, themes, and stages of development. Some of this neglect may be due to the sheer volume of texts that would need to be analyzed; there is also the problem of developing the digital tools that could allow scholars to take on such an expansive corpus. Even selecting these texts requires facing the conceptual challenge of definition: many texts that appeared in the Yiddish press or on the Yiddish stage skirted the blurred boundary between high and low culture, such that one can identify within a single work conflicting strategies that aimed at once to entertain a mass audience and to conform to modernist aesthetic standards. Taking shund seriously requires rethinking the boundaries of Yiddish literature as it has come to be known. No longer is it a literature that begins in the shtetl and ends in post-Holocaust commemoration, or that develops from primitive beginnings, arrives at modernist achievement, and fades into postwar oblivion. Instead, in considering shund as the engine of Yiddish culture, a more muddled and culturally hybrid image comes into view. Yiddish literature is immediately wild and translational, anonymous and populist, and no longer contained by teleological narratives of national birth and national decline.

Viewing modern Yiddish culture through the lens of shund can also help reveal the ways in which writers and artists constantly contend with a set of conflicting cultural discourses: writing modern literature—whether high, low, or somewhere in between—means facing incongruences between European vocabularies, traditional Jewish norms, and attention to local vernacular experience. Works of shund do not hide this uncomfortable confluence behind a proposed synthesis between tradition and modernity; they do not offer a stable institution for Jewish literature. Rather, such texts wear their confusing hybridity on their sleeves. It may not make sense to map the Parisian aristocracy onto Jewish Warsaw, but this is precisely the experience of most modern Yiddish speakers of the early twentieth century; the chuppah may be a site for flirtation and erotic tension rather than a site of national or collective renewal. On a daily basis, the modernizing readers of shund had to constantly translate between Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, to understand the popular under and through the guise of a local vernacular. An analysis of this process of translation can illuminate the cultural modes of Yiddish while allowing for a new and multifaceted view of the mainstream itself. A turn to shund and to an investigation of its vast archives will allow for the discovery of just how important and vital such trash might be.

This article appears in the Berlin Journal 39 (2025-26).

Image: Cover of Mentshn on a morgn (Herkules, 1938), a murder mystery by Urke Nakhalnik. Image courtesy National Library of Poland