their own make-believe Apollonia? Could they not be redeemed like everyone else—as a nation? Perhaps they could. A lot of Jews thought it an eccentric idea (the Chosen People without a God? A Yiddish Blood and Soil?), but many were willing to try. 88 “Normal” nationalisms began with the sanctification of vernaculars and the canonization of national bards. Accordingly, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, Yiddish acquired the status of a literary language (as opposed to a shtetl jargon or Mercurian secret code); incorporated, through translation, the “treasury of world culture” (i.e., other modern nations’ secular pantheons); accommodated a great variety of genres (so as to become a universal, all-purpose vehicle); and produced its own Shakespeare. It went through the same pangs of rebirth, in other words, as Russian a hundred years earlier or Norwegian at about the same time. Homer, Goethe, and Anatole France were being translated simultaneously, as if they were contemporaries; the beauty and suppleness of Yiddish were found to be remarkable; and Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yakov Abramovich, 1835– 1917) was discovered to have been “the grandfather of Yiddish literature.” And then there was Sholem Aleichem. As Maurice Samuel put it, on behalf of most readers of Yiddish, “It is hard to think of him as a ‘writer.’ He was the common people in utterance. He was in a way the ‘anonymous’ of Jewish self- expression.” 89 All the elements of “normal” nationalism were there, in other words—except the main one. The point of nationalism is to attach the newly created national high culture to the local Apollonian mythology, genealogy, and landscape; to attribute that high culture to the “spirit of the people”; to modernize folk culture by folklorizing the modern state. Very little of this enterprise made sense in the case of the Jews. They had no attachment or serious claim to any part of the local landscape; their symbolically meaningful past lay elsewhere; and their religion (which stigmatized Yiddish) seemed inseparable from their Jewishness. No European state, however designed, could possibly become a Jewish Promised Land. Perhaps most important, Yiddish-based nationalism did little to alleviate the problem of unheroic fathers. One could sentimentalize them, or craft a powerful story of their unrelieved martyrdom, but one could not pretend that they had not been service nomads (i.e., cobblers, peddlers, innkeepers, and moneylenders dependent on their “Gentile” customers). One could not, in other words, help Jewish sons and daughters in their quest for Apollonian dignity by arguing that the Yiddish past had not been an exile. Why should one, in fact, if