by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
When that happens, the overall perspective suggested in this book ought to have a growing relevance. It is a two-sided view of political and social action within a democratic society. On one side, a constant battle for all those “little” things—better health care, new housing programs, more equitable taxation, the rights of women and blacks—that occupy the attention of liberals. On the other side, a fundamental critique of the society in the name of democratic socialist values. To say both kinds of things, to say them at the same time, to keep a humane balance between the near and the far: that is the view we have tried to advance in the twenty-five years of Dissent . . .
Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem with Ruth Wisse
{1979}
HOW DO TWO EDITORS WRITE an essay together when one lives in New York City and the other in Montreal? They follow the epistolary tradition of Yiddish literature and send one another letters. That is what we did, sent real letters that we soon began to look forward to receiving. It could have gone on almost forever, but we stopped because Sholom Aleichem said, “Enough, children, enough.”
IH TO RW
Reading through the Sholom Aleichem stories we have brought together, I have an uneasy feeling that this is a Sholom Aleichem seldom before encountered. Or at least, seldom before recognized. Yet the stories, apart from the few translated here for the first time, are familiar enough, part of the Sholom Aleichem canon.
The writer universally adored as a humorist, the writer who could make both Jews and Gentiles laugh, and most remarkable of all, the writer who could please every kind of Jew, something probably never done before or since—this writer turns out to be imagining, beneath the scrim of his playfulness and at the center of his humor, a world of uncertainty, shifting perception, anxiety, even terror.
Let no innocent reader be alarmed: the stories are just as funny as everyone has said. But they now seem to me funny in a way that almost no one has said. Certainly if you look at the essay on Sholom Aleichem by the preeminent Yiddish critic S. Niger, which Eliezer Greenberg and I anthologized in our Voices from the Yiddish, you will find described there a writer of tenderness and cleverness, with a profound grasp of Jewish life (all true, of course)—but not the Sholom Aleichem I now see.
Is my view a distortion, the kind induced by modernist bias and training? I’m aware of that danger and try to check myself, but still. . . . As I read story after story, I find that as the Yiddish proverb has it, “a Jew’s joy is not without fright,” even that great Jew who has in his stories brought us more joy than anyone else. True, there are moments of playfulness, of innocent humor, as in the portions of the adventures of Mottel the orphan that we’ve excerpted here—he, so to say, is Sholom Aleichem’s Tom Sawyer. But the rest: a clock strikes thirteen, a hapless young man drags a corpse from place to place, a tailor is driven mad by the treachery of his perceptions, the order of shtetl life is undone even on Yom Kippur, Jewish children torment their teacher unto sickness. And on and on.
Perhaps the ferocious undercurrent in Sholom Aleichem’s humor has never been fully seen, or perhaps Jewish readers have been intent on domesticating him in order to distract attention from the fact that, like all great writers, he can be very disturbing.
No, he isn’t Kafka, and I don’t at all want him to be. (The world doesn’t need more than one Kafka.) Still, aren’t there some strands of connecting sensibility? When Kafka read his stories aloud, he roared with laughter. And now, in reading Sholom Aleichem, I find myself growing nervous, anxious, even as I keep laughing. Like all great humorists, he attaches himself to the disorder which lies beneath the apparent order of the universe, to the madness beneath the apparent sanity. In many of the stories one hears the timbre of the problematic.
Of course, I’m exaggerating a little—but not much. And what I’m not trying to say is merely that we now see Sholom Aleichem as a self-conscious, disciplined artist rather than merely a folk-voice (or worse yet, the “folksy” tickler of Jewish vanities). For while it is true that Sholom Aleichem is tremendously close to the oral tradition of Yiddish folklore (you once remarked that a number of his stories are elaborations, or complications, of folk anecdotes), still, that folk material is itself not nearly so comforting or soft as later generations of Jews have liked to suppose.
Given the nature of Jewish life in Europe these past several centuries, how could the folk tradition have been as comforting or soft as it has come down to us through both the popularizers and the sentimentality of people who have broken from the Jewish tradition even as they have felt drawn to it? The Chelm stories, the Hershel Ostropolier stories, the Hasidic tales, even sometimes the folk songs: all have their undercurrents of darkness. Life may have been with people, but the people often lived in fright. Sholom Aleichem, then, seems to me a great writer who, like all the Yiddish writers of his moment, was close to folk sources yet employed them for a complicated and individual vision of human existence. That means terror and joy, dark and bright, fear and play. Or terror in joy, dark in bright, fear in play.
Am I wrong?
RW TO IH
Your concluding words remind me of the description by Ba’al Makhshoves (the Yiddish critic and one of Sholom Aleichem’s earliest admirers) of the feeling we have when we think we’ve committed a terrible sin, or experienced catastrophe, and wish it were all just a dream. This, according to him, is Sholom Aleichem’s incomparable achievement: he conjures up the collective anxiety and then dispels it magically, laughing the danger away.
I guess Sholom Aleichem’s contemporaries took the nightmarish uncertainties for granted and enjoyed the relief he alone provided. But you’re right. Nowadays his name has become such a byword for folksy good humor, innocent “laughter through tears,” that we’re surprised to rediscover the undertone of threat in his work. It may be, as you say, our “modernist bias” that attracts us to the darker side, but there it is, menacing and grotesque. There is fear, not just confusion, and guilt, a nastier emotion than sorrow. That recurring image of the sick father, once powerful but now coughing fitfully between sentences, or the humiliated teacher, never able to recover his authority, suggests the fatal weakness in the culture and—more to the point—the narrator’s sense of his own shared culpability in having brought it low.
And actually, how could it be otherwise? For the author of these works is a sophisticated literary man, living at some remove from the insular and cohesive society he delights in depicting. Remember I told you how startled I was to find that all the correspondence between the author and his family, his wife and children, was in Russian, obviously the language of the home. Unlike Tevye, Sholom Aleichem encouraged his children’s Russification, realizing that the centrifugal force of change would leave little of the old way of life intact. Oh, to be sure, he was still the product of “tradition,” and confined to a Jewish fate. Raised in a Ukrainian shtetl, he later suffered the indignities of living in Kiev without a residence permit, scrambled like a thousand other Menachem-Mendels to provide for his family, fled the pogroms, joined the great migration to America. In some ways it’s the very typical Jewish story. But he was also the consummate artist, working the full range of modern literary genres; the shrewd journalist, attuned to every nuance of socialist, Zionist, or assimilationist politics and polemics; the exacting editor, forging a new cultural idiom and enjoying a cosmopolitan milieu. Small wonder that there is so much masking and unmasking in his stories, so many instances of dislocation and social ambiguity. Everyone was remaking himself, with varying degrees of success. And among them was Sholom Rabinowitz, experiencing all the personal and social upheavals that as “Sholom Aleichem” he would reorder with amusing grace.
Far from distorting, your comments begin to set the record straight. And if you’re particularly struck by the generally overlooked “ferocity” of the work, I’m amazed by the ingenious and self-conscious artist behind the widely accepted notion of the folk-voice. Take “Station Baranovich,” one of the train stories we decided to in
clude. Early Yiddish readers were likely to know that their author, the man you once called “the only modern writer who may truly be said to be a culture-hero,” had suffered a complete collapse at that fateful stop during a grueling speaking tour, an attack of “acute pulmonary tuberculosis” that was followed by years of convalescence. At Baranovich the great entertainer, the spellbinding story teller, had almost left the train for good.
So much for fact. What about the fiction? The story is narrated by a traveling salesman. The passengers’ conversation runs appropriately grim—to pogroms, murders, anti-Jewish decrees. The interior story of a certain Kivke, alternately a victim of the czarist regime and a blackmailer of his own community, might have been used by many another Jewish writer (God save us!) to demonstrate the demoralizing effects of persecution. But Sholom Aleichem, who at Baranovich was warned of his own mortality, makes this a writer’s story: the fate of Kivke and of the Jewish community are ultimately in the hands of the gifted story teller whose untimely departure at Baranovich constitutes the story’s only really fatal event. The artist can transform reality at will—a potent charm in desperate times—but his magic is subject to temporal claims. Hilarious the story is. But doesn’t it also comment bitingly on the relation of the artist to his audience and to his material, of the audience to its artists and environment, of reality to art? It even manages a stroke of revenge in its parting shot: “May Station Baranovich burn to the ground!” Our colleagues analyzing “self-reflexiveness in art” should have a field day here!
It must be some fifty years since Van Wyck Brooks drew attention to Samuel Clemens lurking behind the sprightlier Mark Twain. If anything, we’re a little late in exposing the negative, the harsher “World of Sholom Aleichem” and the canny Mr. Sholom Rabinowitz behind the man with the avuncular smile. Or should we stick to the compulsively naive and cheerful? As in his, “What’s new with the cholera epidemic in Odessa?”
IH TO RW
We’ve been stressing, so far, the “modern” Sholom Aleichem, a comic writer whose view of Jewish, and perhaps any other, life tends to be problematic, rather nervous, and streaked with those elements of guilt and anxiety that we usually associate with writers of the twentieth century. To see Sholom Aleichem in this way seems a necessary corrective to the view, now prevalent in Jewish life, that softens him into a toothless entertainer, a jolly gleeman of the shtetl, a fiddler cozy on his roof. And insofar as we reject or at least complicate this prevailing view, it’s especially important to remark that Sholom Aleichem is not a “folk writer,” whatever that might mean. No, he is a self-conscious artist, canny in his use of literary techniques, especially clever in his use of the monologue, which in his stories may seem to be meandering as pointlessly as an unemployed Jew on market day in the shtetl but which actually keeps moving toward a stringent and disciplined conclusion.
Still we should not go too far in trying to revise the common view of Sholom Aleichem. He came out of a culture in which the ferment of folk creation was still very lively, and in which the relationship between writer and audience was bracingly intimate, certainly different from what we have come to accept in Western cultures. A good many of Sholom Aleichem’s stories are drawn from familiar or once-familiar folktales and anecdotes. One of his best stories, “The Haunted Tailor,” is based on such materials, though as Sholom Aleichem retells it, the story emerges intellectually sharpened and complicated. It moves in its tone toward both the grotesque and the satiric, and in characterization it progresses from folk figure to individual. Tevye the dairyman, probably Sholom Aleichem’s greatest character, emerges from the depths of Jewish folk experience in Eastern Europe, yet he is far more than a representative type. Tevye is a particularized Jew with his own nuances and idiosyncrasies, even as we also recognize in him a shtetl Everyman.
In Sholom Aleichem, then, the balance between collectivity and individual, between Jewish tradition and personal sensibility, is very fine. Coming at the point in the history of the Eastern European Jews where the coherence of traditional life has been shattered, only to let loose an enormous, fresh cultural energy, Sholom Aleichem stands as both firm guardian of the Jewish past and a quizzical, skeptical Jew prepared (as the unfolding of the Tevye stories makes clear) to encounter and maybe accept the novelty and surprise of modern Jewish life. It’s just this balance, so delicate and precarious, that I find enchanting in his work. And this may be one reason that I think of him as a “culture hero,” in the sense that Dickens and Mark Twain were culture heroes in their time and place. For Sholom Aleichem embodies the culture of the Eastern European Jews at a high point of consciousness, at the tremor of awareness that comes a minute before dissolution starts.
He embodies the essential values of Eastern European Jewish culture in the very accents and rhythms of his language, in the pauses and suggestions, the inside jokes and sly references. This relationship between the writer as culture hero and the culture itself is something so intimate and elusive we hardly have a way to describe it—except to say that every Jew who could read Yiddish, whether he was orthodox or secular, conservative or radical, loved Sholom Aleichem, for he heard in his stories the charm and melody of a common shprakh, the language that bound all together. The deepest assumptions of a people, those tacit gestures of bias which undercut opinion and rest on such intangibles as the inflection of a phrase, the movement of shoulders, the keening of despair, the melody of a laugh—all these form the inner substance of Sholom Aleichem’s work.
Take as an example the brilliant little story, “A Yom Kippur Scandal.” Wit and cleverness turn upon one another; the bare anecdote on which the story is based becomes an occasion for revealing the deepest feelings of a culture. Yet Sholom Aleichem’s own quizzical voice is also heard at the end. There are at least two scandals: one that a stranger, a guest of the synagogue on the holiest of days, Yom Kippur, is robbed of a substantial sum of money (or pretends that he has been robbed); the other that a youth is a violator of the fast, discovered at the service with chicken bones hidden away. Both scandals are serious, but in the eyes of the rabbi, one of Sholom Aleichem’s innocents, the first seems a sin against man, the second a sin against God, and thereby the second is the greater. Sholom Aleichem doesn’t stop there, for he leaves the story up in the air—it is a characteristic narrative strategy of his—so that we don’t know whether the stranger really was robbed, who did it, or how the problem was solved. As if that matters in the light of the greater scandal of the chicken bones, wildly funny as it struck many of the congregants! The story follows the Jewish habit of answering a question with another question: all life is a question, and if you ask me why, I can only answer, how should I know?
The dominant quality of Sholom Aleichem’s work, then, seems to me not his wit or verbal brilliance or playfulness, remarkable as all these are; it is his sense of moral poise, his assurance as both Jew and human being, his ease in a world of excess. The image of the human, drawing upon traditional Jewish past and touching upon the problematic Jewish future, has seldom received so profound a realization as in these stories. His controlling voice tells us of madness, to be sure; but so long as we can hear that voice, we know the world is not yet entirely mad.
So I’d like to keep in balance the two Sholom Aleichems, the traditional and the modern, who, as we read him, are of course really one.
RW TO IH
I’ve been thinking about your emphasis on the cultural balance and “moral poise” of Sholom Aleichem, wondering how much of what you describe derives from the historical moment, and just what is specific to him. The end of the nineteenth century, that very critical period for East European Jews, when they were still thickly rooted in their traditions but freshly vulnerable to social and political changes, provided great artists with a unique literary opportunity. Yiddish, the common language, was ripe for the kind of harvest yielded during the Renaissance, when Western European writers in an analogous period of secularization and rising national awareness, plowed their vernacu
lars with heady expectations of gain. There are periods when the culture and its language seem to be at just the right point of tension between maturity and untried possibilities. No accident that all three of the Yiddish classical masters—Mendele Mocher Sforim (Abramovitch), I. L. Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem (Rabinowitz)—flourished almost together.
But of the three, Sholom Aleichem alone really struck the note of balance. Mendele and Peretz were both embattled writers, fiercely critical of their society, and only gradually softened by pity, doubt, and age. As underpaid employees of the Jewish community—Mendele was a school principal and Peretz a bureaucratic official—they spent most of their adult years torn between the daily routine of duty and the personal drive for literary self-expression. The strain of this divided existence, and the resentment, shows in their work. Their writing has a strong dialectic tendency, pitting the old and new, the impulses and ideas against one another in sharp confrontations. Peretz’s favorite literary arena is the law court. As for Abramovitch-Mendele, his fictional autobiography literally splits his personality in two and has the critical, crotchety intellectual facing the kindly philosophic book peddler with no middle ground between them.
Sholom Aleichem is different. Though he too felt the impending break in the “golden chain” of Jewish tradition, and felt the cracks in his own life, he makes it his artistic business to close the gap. In fact, wherever the danger of dissolution is greatest, the stories work their magic in simulating or creating a terra firma. Maybe this, in part, is what the Yiddish critic, Borukh Rivkin, had in mind when he wrote that Sholom Aleichem provided the East European Jews with a fictional territory to compensate for their lack of a national soil.
