by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
The Tevye stories, of which we include a few, provide the most striking instance of stability where one would least expect it. If you follow the line of the plot, it traces nothing less than the breakup of an entire culture. At the beginning Tevye “makes a fortune,” becomes a dairyman, and begins to provide for his large family. By the end he is a widower, supporting a destitute widowed daughter. A second daughter is in Siberia, a third is a convert, a fourth has committed suicide, the fifth—who married for money—has fled with her bankrupt husband to America. Tevye is attacked (albeit mildly) by his peasant neighbors and forced to flee from the land to which he feels he has as good a claim as anyone. He says, “What portion of the Bible are they reading this week? Vayikro? The first portion of Leviticus? Well, I’m on quite another chapter. Leykh lekho: get thee out. Get going, Tevye, they said to me, get out of thy country and from thy father’s house, leave the village where you were born and spent all the years of your life and go—unto the land that I will show thee—wherever your two eyes lead you!” Pretty bitter stuff! God’s mighty prophecy to Abraham of a promised land is applied by Tevye to himself with the caustic inversion of all the terms. This is Lear on the heath, but as his own jester. Tevye, who is actually defenseless against the barrage of challenges and attacks that lay him low, should have been a tragic victim. Instead, balancing his losses on the sharp edge of his tongue, he maintains the precarious posture of a comic hero.
All Tevye’s misquotations, puns, and freewheeling interpretations that cause such hardship to even our best translators have been offered as proof of his simplicity and ignorance. Ridiculous! Tevye may not be the Vilna Gaon, but he is the original stand-up comic, playing to an appreciative audience of one: his impresario, Sholom Aleichem, who then passes on this discovered talent to us readers. Tevye has been endowed with such substantiality, so much adaptive vigor of speech and vision, that the dire events he recounts almost cease to matter. He gives proof of his creative survival even as he describes the destruction of its source. (I thought it was very fine when the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof placed Tevye, in the finale, on a revolving stage, as though he were taking his world along with him wherever he went.)
This character worked so well for Sholom Aleichem it’s not surprising that he created other versions of Tevye, including the narrator of “A Thousand and One Nights” whom we’re introducing here. Yankel Yonever of Krushnik is another sturdy father, telling Sholom Aleichem the sorry tales of his children—only here the events are uglier and deadlier. The Jews are trapped between the anti-Semitic Cossacks and the invading Germans in the murderous chaos of World War I. The survivors, Yankel the narrator and Sholom Aleichem his listener, are in flight from Russia, suspended aboard ship in midocean with no ground at all underfoot. Yet even here the effect is one of moral and psychological balance, though the author has gone as far as he can go in achieving it. Yankel describes how the venerable rabbi was murdered by the Cossacks and left hanging for three days in the public square. This is the kind of brutal reality Sholom Aleichem had always avoided, and, in fact, Yankel says that at first he refused to pass the square, unwilling to witness the shame with his own eyes. When he finally goes, though, what does he see? Not the terrifying symbol of Cossack might, but the rabbi “hanging shimenesre,” the eighteen benedictions. Whereas ordinary Jews stand in their daily recitation of these blessings, the rabbi sways back and forth in an ultimate act of devotion. The image is so comfortingly homey; it domesticates the violence and shows us the rabbi as we can bear to look at him. Without inflated rhetoric, it also transforms a vile humiliation into triumphant martyrdom. It’s just the turn of the phrase that does it, the simple substitution of “hanging” for “standing” shimenesre in one of the commonest Yiddish terms for praying. The English, because of the need for explanation, has to work almost too hard for the required effect, pressing on consciousness as a deliberate interpretive act. In Yiddish the redemption seems effortless.
Reading the last chapters of Tevye and this ironic version of Sheherezade, the tales of “A Thousand and One Nights,” all written during Sholom Aleichem’s final years, I wonder whether he could have kept the “comedy” going much longer. It is almost impossible to avoid sentimentalizing on the one hand or falling into cynicism on the other when attempting a balanced humanism in the face of this kind of barbarity.
IH TO RW
I know we have to be moving along to the literary aspects of Sholom Aleichem’s work: his inventiveness with language, his fondness for the monologue as a narrative form, his curious habit of seeming to end a story before it comes to climax. But I can’t resist a few more words on the matter of “moral poise”—by which, of course, we mean not some abstract doctrine but a vibrant quality of the stories themselves, communicated through details of language. It’s when you come to Sholom Aleichem’s stories about children that you see how balanced, at once stringent and tender, severe and loving, is his sense of life.
Some of the children’s stories, like “Robbers” and “The Guest,” are not at all carefree. Their dominant tone is nervousness and fright, their dominant theme, the enforced discovery, at too early an age, of the bitterness of the world. Sholom Aleichem does not hesitate to register the psychic costs of traditional Jewish life, costs in denial, repression, narrowness. But there are other stories, happier in voice, where the life-force, the child’s sheer pleasure in breathing and running, breaks through. In the group translated as “Mottel the Cantor’s Son,” from which we’ve taken a few self-contained portions, the tone is lighthearted and playful. If Tom Sawyer could speak Yiddish, he’d be at home here. It’s as if Sholom Aleichem were intent upon reminding his Jewish readers that we too deserve a little of the world’s innocence.
Mottel represents the sadly abbreviated childhood of the traditional shtetl, where life does not flow evenly from one phase of experience to another, but all of them, childhood, adolescence, and manhood, are compressed into one. But Mottel does not yet know this, or pretends not to know it—who can be sure which? He is a wonderful little boy, celebrating his friendship with a neighbor’s calf and stealing apples from the gardens of the rich. He is full of that spontaneous nature which Jewish upbringing has not yet suppressed (“Upon one leg I hop outside and—naturally straight to our neighbor’s calf”). But he has an eye for the life about him; he is beginning to seep up that quiet Jewish sorrow which is part of his life’s heritage (“That’s an old story: a mother’s got to cry. What I’d like to know is whether all mothers cry all the time, like mine”). Perhaps in a kind of tacit rebellion against the heaviness, the weighted ethicism, of Jewish life, Sholom Aleichem makes Mottel into something of a scamp, especially in the breezy chapters we’ve excerpted here, where Mottel, after the death of his father the cantor, becomes a little businessman, selling the cider and ink that his overimaginative brother manufactures (“Jews, here’s a drink: Cider from heaven / If you order just one / You’ll ask for eleven”).
The Mottel stories are notable because the note they strike is heard infrequently in Yiddish literature. The hijinks of an adventurous boy, so favored in American and English writing, is something (I would guess) that Sholom Aleichem chose to write about only after conscious deliberation, as if to show his fellow Jews in Eastern Europe and in the American slums what life might be, or in their long-lost youth might once have been. In his autobiography Sholom Aleichem writes about childhood pleasures: “. . . this is not meant for you, Jewish children! Yellow sunflowers, sweet-smelling grass, fresh air, fragrant earth, the clear sun—forgive me, these are not meant for you. . . .” Mottel shows us what has been lost.
Still, even in the saddest and most burdened Yiddish writing, there is something else shown about the life of Jewish children, and now, in retrospect, this seems to form an overwhelming positive contrast to the literatures of our century. In Yiddish literature the family is still a cohesive unit; fathers may be strict, mothers tearful, brothers annoying, but love breaks through and under the
barriers of ritual. If there are few carefree children in Yiddish literature, there are few unloved or brutalized children.
Perhaps all that I’m saying is that in the world of Sholom Aleichem there are still some remnants of community. And this gives him strength and security as a writer; simply because he is so much at home with his materials, he can move from one tone to another. The Mottel stories can be casual, offhand, charming, even mischievous, but then suddenly Sholom Aleichem will drop to a fierce irony, a harrowing sadness. At the end Mottel and his family are aboard ship for America. All is fun, pranks, jokes, and then comes a brief lyrical description of a Yom Kippur service in the hold of the ship, “a Yom Kippur,” says this Jewish little boy, “that neither God nor man would ever forget.” And it is a token of Sholom Aleichem’s genius, his “moral poise,” that we are entirely prepared to accept the claim that these words come from the same boy who sells cider and ink and hops on one leg toward the neighbor’s calf.
RW TO IH
The other day I came across a 1941 essay by Max Weinreich that runs oddly parallel to some of our main concerns. I say “oddly” because as a linguist Weinreich was dealing strictly with Sholom Aleichem’s language and linguistic influence: yet he too concludes that the folksiness of Sholom Aleichem received undue attention and had a deleterious effect on its imitators, while the hard precision and richness of his language have gone almost unnoticed. Weinreich argues that the compulsive association of Yiddish with joking—an unfortunate tendency among modern Jews—has prevented a deeper appreciation of the master’s verbal craftsmanship and artistic range.
It does seem that in its literary imitations of the voices and mannerisms of ordinary Jews, Sholom Aleichem’s oral styles were almost too effective. Even sophisticated readers were so amused and dazzled by the natural flow of the language that they considered the writer to be a ventriloquist, his art a superior form of realism. As if Sholom Aleichem had anticipated the tape recorder!
This may be a compliment in its way, but in fact, the “artless garrulousness” of the characters is under surprisingly tight control, and in ways that translation may sometimes have to sacrifice. What, for example, can we do with the opening sentence of “Dos tepl” (“The Pot”)—that famous Sholom Aleichem monologue: “Rebbe! Ikh vil aykh fregn a shayle vil ikh aykh!” Natural English can’t attempt much more than “Rabbi, I’ve come to ask you a question.” But the original circles back on itself, rather like this: “Rabbi, I want to ask you a question is what I want to do.” The woman’s circular style is the most accurate literary expression of the closed circle of her thoughts and her life. She labors within the same rounds of work and obligation set out for her by her mother; her son is dying of the very illness that claimed her husband; her poverty traps her in such narrow constraints of time and space that she cannot grasp those very possibilities that might mitigate her poverty. Above all, her mind is imprisoned in its own obsessive circularity, unable to come to the point even long enough to pose her question. Though her speech may be generally “true to life,” it is actually used to give truth to her particular embattled consciousness, self-protecting and self-defeating in equal measure, and preoccupied with impending death.
At some point we would also have to admit that Sholom Aleichem’s success as a stylist has frustrated our editorial choices, at least in part. The sly mockery of American Jewish assimilation, rendered through the crude, overeager borrowings of Yiddish immigrants fresh off the boat, falls flat in English, the host language. It’s also difficult to distinguish in translation, as Sholom Aleichem does in the original, the many degrees of social climbers who oil their Yiddish with Russian phrases to ease the way up, and then slip comically on their malapropisms and mistakes. Sholom Aleichem’s speakers are characterized as much by the quality of their language as by its apprehended meaning. I doubt that any translation can get this across.
In addition to being a marvelous tool, Yiddish is also Sholom Aleichem’s metaphor for the culture. While many of his contemporaries and even some of his successors were hampered by the novelty of Yiddish as a modern literary language, Sholom Aleichem turned the fluidity and newness of Yiddish prose style to penetrating advantage. What better medium for conveying the critical changes of East European Jewish life than a “language of fusion”—to use Max Weinreich’s term—in which the sources of fusion are still identifiable and in active flux? Sholom Aleichem uses the nuances of Yiddish to communicate the degree to which a speaker is integrated into the traditional culture or deviates from it in any direction—toward the “German” enlightenment, the Slavic identification with the folk, or the higher pretensions of St. Petersburg society. From the speaker’s tendency to use certain aspects of the German or Slavic components of the language, one can determine his origins and aspirations, his relation to the values of his home, and the lure of the environment.
Yet too extreme an emphasis on the Hebraic element, the most indigenous component of Yiddish, is not a good sign either. Characters who affect too traditional a language are either sanctimonious hypocrites, like the members of the Burial Society in the story “Eternal Life,” or con-artists of whom Sholom Aleichem provides a peerless variety. The positive characters are those who tend neither inward nor outward but speak a perfectly balanced tongue.
For Tevye, the most trustworthy of Sholom Aleichem’s speakers, the fused elements of Yiddish are an eternal delight. Like a true musician, he enjoys showing the speed and grace with which he can skip from one note or one tone to another. His best jokes and quotations are polyglot, drawing attention to their mixture of high and low, old and new, indigenous and imported. He can use these combinations to achieve both comic and sentimental effects.
Even this technique of linguistic crosscutting, however, does not automatically guarantee a reliable character. Shimon-Eli, the haunted tailor, is like Tevye, a man who loves to speak in quotations which he translates, or mistranslates, or occasionally invents. His level of speech, like Tevye’s, reveals his limited cheder education, his easy familiarity with the tradition, and an intellectual reach that exceeds its grasp. But Shimon-Eli uses quotations and linguistic jokes as clichés, the same stock phrases reappearing whoever the listener and whatever the situation. He moves instinctively back and forth through his repertoire, just as he passes through the same phases of his journey over and over again without reflection or insight. At the end, his failure to adapt, his application of tried explanations instead of fresh, deductive questions, dooms him to madness. Tevye’s movement through levels of speech is the manifestation of his adaptive intelligence. Shimon-Eli’s automatic movement through a similar set of paces is the surest sign of his stultification.
By the end of the nineteenth century, I. L. Peretz, who was quickly becoming the dominant influence in Yiddish literature, tried to stabilize a literary language for the purposes of normal narration. He drew attention away from the specificities of Yiddish, away from its folk expressions, the interplay of its source languages, the different dialects and levels of its various speakers. In Peretz’s stories a Lithuanian rabbi and a Polish Hasid speak the same Yiddish.
But for Sholom Aleichem the unfixed nature of Yiddish was its greatest attraction, and its infinite range of dialects and oral styles the best literary means of capturing the dynamic changes—or the resistance to change—in the culture. There are times, reading Sholom Aleichem in the pulsating original, when I think we ought to have put out a Yiddish reader for the fortunate few who can use it, leaving translation to the gods.1*
IH TO RW
In talking about Sholom Aleichem’s stories, we both remarked on the seeming oddity that many of them do not really end. Especially in those told by an internal narrator (a character who is seen and heard telling a story either to other characters or to “Mr. Sholom Aleichem”), there is roughly the following sequence: the stories move toward climax, they arouse suspense, they bring together the elements of conflict, and then, just when you expect the writer to drive toward resolut
ion, they seem deliberately to remain hanging in the air. They stop rather than end. And this happens often enough to make us suspect that it cannot be a mere accident or idiosyncrasy. Sholom Aleichem is a self-conscious artist and he must have had something in mind. Thus, in “A Yom Kippur Scandal” we never really find out who stole the money; in “The Haunted Tailor” we are spared following the central figure to his fate; and in “Station Baranovich” the story teller provocatively refuses to complete his story. What is this all about? I have a few speculations:
1. Sholom Aleichem is persisting in the old tradition of oral story telling (though, in fact, he is a literary artist and not an oral story teller) which takes pleasure in leading the listener on, teasing him further and further. Then, as if to demonstrate the emotional power of the narrator or the moral perplexities of existence, there is a sudden, abrupt blockage—as if to say, figure out the rest for yourself, make up whatever denouement you can, it’s all equally puzzling. . . .
2. Sholom Aleichem is suggesting rather slyly that, really, there are far more important things in the world than the resolution of an external action, suspenseful and exciting though it may be; indeed, what one learns along a narrative journey matters more than the final destination. Thus in “A Yom Kippur Scandal” the question of the visitor’s money—was it ever really there? did someone steal it? is he a confidence man?—counts for very little in comparison with the scandal, the shocked laughter, when it is discovered that one of the shtetl’s pious young favorites has been secretly nibbling on chicken bones during the fast day of Yom Kippur. And the reasoning is obvious once you ponder it: the money is merely a worldly matter, while the behavior of the youth raises an issue of faith.
