by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
3. Sholom Aleichem often uses in these stories a narrating figure that might be called “the clever Jew,” one who is rather worldly though still tied to some of the old ways of piety. This narrator has “been around,” as merchant or traveler. In his ambiguous person he seems to straddle old world and new. Almost always there is a duel between the narrator and his audience of gullible and / or skeptical listeners within the story; or between the narrator and the readers of the story, who are in effect challenged to figure out what to make of him; or sometimes, one ventures to say, between the narrator and Sholom Aleichem himself, who stands somewhat bemused by his own creation. The puzzlement this narrator spins out in a story like “A Yom Kippur Scandal” becomes a trail toward evident laughter and possible wisdom. In “Eternal Life” the narrator is now an experienced man, one of those solid but still reasonably pious merchants that Yiddish writers liked to use as the center of their fictions. He recalls the foolishness but also the charming innocence of his youth; and if he now flees from the prospect of seeking “eternal life,” is that, within the bounds of the world view by which he purports to live, so entirely a gain in maturity and rightness? In “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke” the narrator is placed within the action; he tells his “stories” (the reports he reads in the paper about the Dreyfus case) to other Jews in the little shtetl of Kasrilevke. At the end they refuse to believe him; they cannot credit so gross an injustice. In their “rejection” of this narrator figure, Sholom Aleichem has created an overpowering moment, a deeply poignant image of the Jewish refusal to believe in the full evil of the world. The “clever Jew” is thus shown in many aspects—complicated, quizzical, problematic.
4. Sholom Aleichem uses, as I’ve said, traditional devices of oral story telling, but he is also a sophisticated writer very much aware of his departures from that tradition. He can no longer regard a story as something that is always fixed, secure, knowable (e.g., the rebellious clock in “The Clock That Struck Thirteen,” a wonderfully appropriate and homey image for the sense of collapsing order). Sholom Aleichem lived at a time when stories could be begun but not always brought to an end. Before him stories could be brought to an end; after him they could hardly be begun. What, then, one wonders, would he have made of Cocteau’s remark that “Literature is a force of memory that we have not yet understood”? Perhaps he would have amended the last clause to “that we can no longer understand.”
5. Sholom Aleichem knew intuitively that the boundary between comedy and tragedy is always a thin and wavering line—and for Jews, often nonexistent. Almost all of his best comic stories hover on the edge of disaster. All exemplify the truth of Saul Bellow’s remark that in Jewish writing “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two.” Reading Sholom Aleichem is like wandering through a lovely meadow of laughter and suddenly coming to a precipice of doom. At the end of “The Haunted Tailor” we have a vista of madness, at the end of “A Yom Kippur Expropriation” a prospect of social violence, at the end of “A Yom Kippur Scandal” the shame of Jewish disintegration. Sholom Aleichem takes us by the hand, we are both shaking with laughter, and he leads us. . . . “And would you like to hear the rest of the story?” asks one of his narrators. “The rest isn’t so nice.” Assuredly not.
RW TO IH
I appreciated your speculations on Sholom Aleichem’s endings and narrative art. As a mundane footnote, one could also note the influence in this—as in every conceivable linguistic, stylistic, and narrative aspect of Sholom Aleichem’s work—of Mendele Mocher Sforim, the man he dubbed the grandfather of modern Yiddish literature, the man who was really his own artistic progenitor. Indeed some of Mendele’s finest work, also in the oral tradition, does not seem to end; but Sholom Aleichem draws attention to the inconclusiveness of his conclusions in a way his forerunner did not. It’s as you say: he actively challenges our notion of the denouement or solution and avoids the verdict, the finality, of what would usually be an unhappy fate.
In general, Sholom Aleichem did not do very well with a direct approach to the great, climactic, and decisive moments of plot. When he did attempt a big love scene, or a tough social confrontation, he could be surprisingly inept. You have only to look at one of his earliest efforts, the thinly disguised autobiographical novella where the wealthy young heroine, who has been playing fantasias by moonlight, rushes through the garden and into the arms of her indigent tutor to the following momentous dialogue:
HE: Polinka!
SHE: Rabovsky!
Impossible to read the scene without laughing—at the author’s expense.
Lest this seem just the failure of a novice, one could turn to a ripe novel, like The Storm (1905), where Sholom Aleichem depicts the ideological clashes among the Jews in pre-Revolutionary Russia. At the moment of intended climax, when the Zionist hero is to win over the uncommitted heroine to both his politics and himself, he can do no better than to stop in the middle of the street, whip from his pocket a famous poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik, and read her its text for the better part of the chapter! It is not that Sholom Aleichem avoided the romantic subject, the heroic possibility, the grand style of the novel: he was simply unconvincing and demonstrably uncomfortable in this mode, especially at the high points of resolution, and of course, conclusion.
No, his mastery is of quite the opposite order. Beginning with no more than an anecdote, sometimes an item that his adoring readers sent him, sometimes a joke that already had whiskers on it, he would invent a speaker, give him a story to tell and the merest pretext for a tale—the amusement of a fellow passenger, the enlightenment of a stranger to town, etc. The story would be either about himself, or more often, about a third party, someone from his shtetl perhaps, more of a character type than a differentiated personality. And if that were not layered and indirect enough, the speaker would tell the story not to the readers, but to an intermediary who was often the author’s invented self, this all-embracing soul called “Sholom Aleichem.” Veiled, then, like Salome, the anecdote begins its tantalizing, captivating play, a dance of words that is meant to leave you, as the author boasts, laughing your head off!
The kernel “story” of “On Account of a Hat,” one of your favorites, I know, was once told to me as a regional Jewish joke, in about ten seconds. Out of this insubstantial matter, Sholom Aleichem has woven a masterpiece with a dozen interpretations: it is the plight of the Diaspora Jew, an exposure of rootlessness, a mockery of tyranny, the comic quest for identity, a Marxist critique of capitalism, and, of course, an ironic self-referential study of literary sleight of hand. . . . It’s easy to mock the highfalutin readings this story has received, but those who catch its serious import are not wrong either. Magically witty and unpretentious as it is, the story leaves you with an eerie, troubling sense of reality that begs attention. (Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose anecdotal style owes much to Sholom Aleichem, occasionally forces the serious mien of his stories with sermonettes on good, evil, and the meaning of existence. In Sholom Aleichem, you get no such prompting.)
What we have is an author who works best by indirection, in the smaller modes of fiction, from the worm’s angle of vision, and with apparently flimsy materials. Even the main, archetypal figures of Sholom Aleichem are not full-blown heroes of novels, but characters or speakers in short story sequences, written over a period of years and later assembled in book form. The stature and personalities of Tevye, Menachem-Mendel, Mottel the Cantor’s Son, as well as the town of Kasrilevke (Sholom Aleichem’s fourth, collective “hero”), emerge from a run of episodes, each only slightly different from the one before it, that cumulatively establish their dimensions. As distinct from the normal novel, which develops a single architectonic structure, growing from introduction to a central point of resolution, Sholom Aleichem’s major works beat like waves against a shore, one chapter resembling and reinforcing the last in variations of a theme. The normal novel lays human destiny out as a one-way trip, with important encounte
rs, intersections, and moments of decision that determine one’s rise or fall, success or failure, happiness or misery. The major works of Sholom Aleichem have no such suspenseful vision. A man is what he is to begin with—even Mottel, the child. He confronts all the things that happen to him and forces himself upon life again and again, and the sum of these trials shape the rhythm, constitute the meaning, of his existence.
It’s the old literary knot of form and content. Sholom Aleichem’s admiration for the stubborn ruggedness of Jewish faith and the surprising vitality of the people comes to expression not just thematically, in story after story, but in the resilient, recuperative shape of all his major works.
Before ending, I should tell you that this serious correspondence of ours about Sholom Aleichem appeared to me the other day in a comical light. I was lecturing about Sholom Aleichem to a nice synagogue audience, and every time I illustrated a point with a quotation or the plot of a story, the audience broke into happy, appreciative laughter. After a while I must admit I found myself adding quotations and dramatizing more stories to elicit that laughter, and when the lecture was over, people came over to tell me what a good story teller I was!
You see the point. Expostulate on Kafka or Dostoevsky and people are fairly begging for your explanations and interpretations. Lecture on any other Yiddish writer—Mendele, Peretz, Asch, Grade, the brothers Singer—and your words will illumine, clarify, edify. But set out to discuss the “narrative structure” or “comic techniques” of Sholom Aleichem, and he undercuts your very best attempt. I have the uncomfortable feeling that readers may look through these letters not for any insights, but for their illustrative examples. And Sholom Aleichem would be right behind, egging them on. Consider the deliberate irreverence of his literary memoir, Once There Were Four, and contrast this mountaineering saga of Jewish writers with all the high, serious climbs of other European literati. He gives us no disquisitions on literature, no pen portraits of his contemporaries, no contemplative philosophy from the heights. Just four “anecdotes” on the subject of forgetting, in which three of the greatest Jewish writers of the age, and one choleric literary companion, are revealed as ordinary, anxious Jews, faltering and trembling in ordinary, if not humiliating circumstances. He deflates intellectual and artistic pretentiousness, and even undercuts the grandeur of the Alps!
We set out—I think justifiably—to take a serious new look at a well-known but not well-appreciated author. What confronts us, finally, is the quizzical smile of the author, compulsively skeptical about everything but the story.
Note
1* The difficulties of translating Sholom Aleichem are almost beyond recounting. They go far deeper than the problem of rendering Yiddish idiom into English, a problem sometimes solved by finding enough English equivalents, and more often acknowledged as beyond solution because the Yiddish idiom is so deeply planted in Jewish tradition it is virtually untranslatable. A more serious problem is that of rendering the Hebraic component, which in some stories like “The Haunted Tailor” and “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” is crucial to the development of both narrative and meaning.
Previous translators have simply evaded this problem by omitting the Hebrew, either in translation or transliteration, and the result has been a serious impoverishment of the work. In the present volume such gifted translators as Leonard Wolf and Hillel Halkin struggle heroically with this difficulty, each employing a different approach. What compounds the difficulty here is that the relationship between the two languages, Hebrew and Yiddish, is so complex: at some points they are two separate languages, though historically linked, but at other points they form a linguistic continuum. Yet we may also be certain that for some of Sholom Aleichem’s Yiddish readers these Hebrew passages, many of them taken from the Bible and some cleverly distorted for comic effect, were almost as inaccessible as they are for most English readers. The jokes, then, are not only on one or another character, but also on us, readers who have lost or abandoned the tradition.
The 1980s
Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai
{1982}
AS THE MEREST BEGINNER and very much a latecomer, I started recently to look into Japanese fiction. What I can report is fragmentary, a record of uncertainties, confusions, and probable mistakes such as many Western readers are likely to share upon encountering Japanese fiction.
My first response was a shock of pleasure. Even through the dim channel of translation one can quickly see that contemporary Japanese fiction contains a large body of distinguished work. Much of it is marked by psychological finesse, and still more by a formalism of manner occasionally broken by thrusts into the sensual and perverse. My second response was a sense of anxiety, since nothing seemed to fall into place or settle into clarity. The forms, subjects, and even voices of gifted writers like Tanizaki, Dazai, Mishima, and Endo seemed reasonably familiar, so much so that I would ask myself: is it possible that Tanizaki, before writing the “Firefly Hunt” chapter in The Makioka Sisters, had read Virginia Woolf? Did Dazai know Dostoevsky? Or Endo, Silone? But soon such questions came to seem pointless, as I found myself sinking into a chasm of strangeness or, to put it differently, suffered a break in the premises of understanding that bind reader to writer.
Part of the strangeness may be due to no more than differences in literary method. There is, to start with a small matter, a greater tolerance for repetition of incident and remark in Japanese fiction than in Western. Japanese novelists appear to be less concerned than those in the West with devices that make for tension and foreshortening; they favor a more even pace of narrative; they do not seem to try nearly so hard for radical variations of stress from one part of a novel to another. The verbal surfaces of the Japanese novels I have read struck me as more pacific, perhaps more laconic than our fiction has trained us to expect. And in Japanese fiction there are often stretches of material, apparently flat detail and routine transcription of events, that a Western reader is likely to find puzzling. Even as sophisticated a novelist as Tanizaki includes such “nonfunctional” segments, causing one to wonder what thematic or dramatic purpose they may have.
These difficulties are still fairly simple and can be negotiated with a little impatience (skip a page or two). A greater obstacle in reading Japanese fiction, even as one may be steadily engrossed by it, is that the norms of expectation regarding conduct and judgment are often subtly and therefore radically at variance with our own. Least available are those cues to systems of manners through which Western fiction helps us release quick intuitions.
In Japanese novels the characters are often finely portrayed, in part because the autobiographical narrative has been popular and in part because the entrance of a culture into modernity creates the grounds for psychological nuance. But the concept of individuality seems elusive, as if it only gradually entered Japanese fiction and continues to meet resistance from traditionalist codes. Even among consciously “modern” Japanese writers there is, it seems to me, rather less tolerance than among us for strong assertions of will or virtuosities of self; and still more alien is our notion that achieving an absolute selfhood is a primary human goal.
Equally hard to grasp are various rituals depicted or recalled by Japanese writers, especially in novels written by more traditionalist figures like Kawabata. Some of these rituals are public, so that one can try to bone up on them, but others form a half-hidden skein of suggestion which, in their refinements, come to seem almost impenetrable.
Reading Kawabata’s admirable novel Thousand Cranes, one can hardly fail to recognize that the tea ceremony plays an important part, but only an expert Western reader is likely to know that the novel, as Kawabata said in his Nobel Prize speech, “is an expression of doubt and warning against the vulgarity into which the tea ceremony has fallen.” A Japanese reader learning about the importance of the death watch in certain of Emily Dickinson’s poems might feel similar puzzlements.
But what troubles one most in reading Japanese fiction is a nagging
sense that one is missing something; it may seem close at hand yet quite elusive; and no Japanese, you may be sure, will ever explain. Reading Kawabata or Tanizaki, I could detect faint signals—a smile? a mild irony? a clarifying allusion?—but could not shape them into coherence. It’s as if there is always some undervoice, the true voice, overheard but not grasped.
In a fine little book called In Praise of Shadows Tanizaki confirms some of these impressions: “In conversations we [Japanese] prefer the soft voice, the understatement. Most important of all are the pauses. . . . Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows.” And a “mystery,” at least in part, it remains.
No doubt, with greater knowledge and prolonged reading, some of these difficulties fade away. They are, after all, not very different from the obstacles to understanding that an American may encounter in reading Latin American fiction. But I suspect that there must always be a residue of intractable difficulties, signaling the really great distance between Japanese culture and our own. The only solution for the beginning reader, I have found, is to abandon any irritable quest for certainty and take pleasure in one’s experience of strangeness and uncertainty. Accept that one must fumble, guess, wonder.
The novels of Shusaku Endo seem at first to be free of many of these problems. Surely one of the most accomplished writers now living in Japan or anywhere else, Endo is a Catholic who after the war studied in France and there came under the spell of Mauriac and Bernanos. The exact nature of this influence is hard to know: I suspect it has less to do with literary matters than with an attachment to Catholicism gaining its intensity from a persuasion that in our time any serious religious commitment must also be a questioning one.
