This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by David Stromberg
Interior illustrations copyright © 2018 by Aitch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stromberg, David, editor.
Title: In the land of happy tears : Yiddish tales for modern times / collected and edited by David Stromberg.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2018] | Summary: A collection of stories from the early- and mid-20th century Yiddish literary tradition, in a variety of genres, by Eastern European writers such as Moyshe Nadir, Jacob Reisfeder, and Sonya Kantor.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015386 (print) | LCCN 2018022073 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-2035-3 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-2033-9 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-5247-2034-6 (library binding)
Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Juvenile fiction. | Children’s stories, Yiddish—Translations into English. | CYAC: Jews—Fiction. | Conduct of life—Fiction. | Short stories. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fairy Tales & Folklore / Anthologies. | JUVENILE FICTION / Religious / Jewish. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Values & Virtues.
Classification: LCC PZ5 (ebook) | LCC PZ5 .I377 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781524720353
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
What Is Yiddish, Anyway?
Bravery
In the Land of Happy Tears
An Autumn Tale
Broken In
The Moon and the Little Boy
Rebellion
The Little Boy with the Samovar
The King Who Licked Honey
The Kingdom of Ants and Mushrooms
The Wise Hat
The Diamond Prince
Justice
The Bird Catcher
The Paper Kite
Two Sisters
A Fight
The Broken Mirror
Wonder
A Squirrel’s Diary
Gur Aryeh
A Treasure in the Snow
The Enchanted Castle
Glossary of Untranslatables
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
About the Translators
About the Editor
YIDDISH: A CULTURE OF RESILIENCE
When people think of Yiddish, what usually comes to mind is an Old World Jewish language that today is used mostly to be funny. Humor actually is one of the more conspicuous elements of Yiddish that have passed from old Europe into American culture. Part of the explanation is that to most American ears, Yiddish sounds funny. Yiddish words like klutz, futz, putz, schmooze, schmaltz, schmuck, chutzpah, tchotchke, bupkes, glitch, schlep, nosh, kvetch, kibitz, and kitsch are in English dictionaries and often find their way into jokes. Yiddish sometimes also offers ways of describing actions with a twist. It’s one thing to have a talk with someone, but something else to schmooze them—even though, in the original Yiddish, shmues just means having a chat.
Yiddish was brought to America during the immense wave of immigration that took place from the 1880s to the 1920s, when over two million Eastern European Jews entered the United States. Many came from cities and towns where they had been peddlers, merchants, and tradespeople. Escaping persecution, they were pursuing a new start in America and settling in urban centers like New York City’s Lower East Side, where many ended up leaving their trades and working in emerging industries—like the garment industry. Most of these Yiddish-speaking Jews did not have the time or means to go back to school, instead learning English on the street. And as they did, they incorporated the untranslatable parts of Yiddish into their adoptive language, creating new meanings that had not existed before. These Yiddish words were picked up by other English speakers, enabling them to describe aspects of city life that did not yet have their own expressions. Together with the beginnings of the Great Migration, when over a million African Americans moved from the rural South to urban centers and introduced language that became a dominant part of American English, the immigration of Yiddish speakers influenced the language in ways that have remained to this day. The result was an urban English inflected with Eastern European Jewish life, picking up its humor but also its gravitas—since life in the Old World, with its pogroms and poverty, drove not just the need to immigrate but also the appetite for humor.
Life in America—with its factories, sweatshops, and tenements—was not necessarily easier. But at least it offered hope for greater prosperity and social acceptance. As Jewish immigrants integrated into modern city life, they also left behind their traditional lifestyles, making Yiddish seem like a language from the past. This shift was similar to adaptation processes in many immigrant communities. But Lower East Side Yiddish was no more a language of the past than the Chinese of Chinatown or the Italian of Little Italy.
Compared with those languages, actually, Yiddish was quite young, having begun to develop only in late medieval times. Yiddish had its roots among the Jews of southern Europe, who—speaking Old Italian and French—moved northward and settled along the major rivers of German lands. Their religious language, incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic texts, was fused with Middle High German, which they wrote out in Hebrew letters. In the Late Middle Ages, persecution and expulsion pushed Jews farther east to Slavic lands, and Yiddish began to be filled with Slavic words and grammar, while continuing to be written in the Hebrew alphabet. It soon developed into a language unlike any that had ever existed: a Semitic-Germano-Slavic tongue that traced a thousand years of Jewish life in Europe.
This history and culture were wrapped in the bundle of a unique language, alive in its people, who brought it along with them when they immigrated to America. And just as Hebrew, German, and Slavic words had made their way into Yiddish, Yiddish words now made their way into English. This may be partly because Yiddish and English share Germanic roots. Yiddish also changes the stress patterns of words with different linguistic origins—like schvitz or tchotchke or meshugah—in a way that allows them to also work in English. Even the Slavic ending -nik, which in German or English would be -er (as in swimmer), made its way into English with a word like Beatnik.
As Yiddish words move into English, they take on additional meanings, but also lose parts of their original meanings, which are often slippery. In Yiddish, a kibets is a group or community, from which the Hebrew word kibbutz, or collective farm, is derived, while a kibetser is an interfering onlooker, someone we call in
English a kibitzer. Kibets and kibetser sound similar, but their linguistic roots and Yiddish spellings are different—the first word comes from Hebrew and the second from German—which is why someone from a kibbutz can be both a kibbutznik and a kibitzer. When the great children’s author-illustrator William Steig needed a name for his lovable green ogre, he harked back to the Yiddish of his Jewish immigrant roots, calling him Shrek—which in English is simply Terrible.
But there is more to Yiddish humor than funny-sounding words. Yiddish has a long and rich history of storytelling that goes back in print to the Mayse Bukh (1602), a collection of tales and legends. Many tales were told about the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, better known as the Baal Shem Tov—a Hebrew phrase that can be interpreted to mean both Master of the Good Name (of God) and a kind of faith healer—turning him into a living legend, who made his way from oral tales to written collections. In the early 1800s, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the Baal Shem Tov’s great-grandson, reinvented Yiddish storytelling through deceptively simple stories that had religious, mystical, and political themes. These tales, written down by one of his students and later circulated in printed copies, are considered the prototype for modern Yiddish storytelling. After Rabbi Nachman came three secular writers—S. Y. Abramovich, who wrote under the pen name Mendele the Book Peddler (1836–1917), I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), and S. N. Rabinovich, best known as Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916)—often called the founders of modern Yiddish literature. These authors, unlike generations before them, had left religious life, using both humor and parody to depict the transition from the old to the new—which Jews, like people of many other cultures, were facing at the time. They sometimes harnessed the rhetorical style of Talmudic argumentation but applied it to the secular world—exposing the gap between traditional and modern life, which increasingly split Jewish culture and society.
These great writers developed a modern Yiddish literary tradition, incorporating new themes and genres, including literature for younger readers. The first such story is generally considered to be Sholem Aleichem’s “The Penknife” (1886), though it was originally written for adults and was only later adapted for a younger audience by the author. This approach set a tone for Yiddish literature—relating to young people as readers in their own right, worthy of the highest literary standards, with a moral compass of their own. A variety of periodicals and booklets were published in the first half of the twentieth century, full of tales portraying experiences to which younger Yiddish speakers could relate. While stories for adults exposed social conditions, sometimes in a parodic light to help readers laugh about their circumstances, tales for younger readers also aimed to pass on Old World values at a time of quickly changing realities. They sought to equip young people in Yiddish-speaking communities with tools to face circumstances that were then driving millions of Jews—whose forebears had lived in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years—to move halfway across the world in search of a better life.
Abramovich and Peretz never made it out of Europe, but in 1906 Sholem Aleichem arrived in New York City, where he was received as a living icon of Yiddish culture. But he was not as successful in America as he had hoped, and despite failing health, he returned to Europe a year later—only to flee again after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His second stay in New York was as unsuccessful as his first, but Yiddish readers still loved his early stories. His premature death in 1916 revealed the immense significance he held for Yiddish culture, with a funeral procession estimated at well over a hundred thousand people—about a quarter of all Jews living on the Lower East Side. Reporting on the procession, the New York Times wrote that “extra precaution by the police prevented a repetition of what occurred at the funeral of Rabbi Jacob Joseph”—when, in 1902, a procession estimated at fifty to a hundred thousand mourners attracted anti-Jewish violence and ended in a riot. Sholem Aleichem’s procession, managed by a police force of two hundred, came to a peaceful end in a show of cultural community unlike any seen before in New York City. And it reflected a change in the cultural makeup of American Jews. For the Jews of the Lower East Side, Yiddish literature, now apparently even more than religion, was their great binding force.
Sholem Aleichem was never forgotten. And neither was the humor he brought to Yiddish speakers in America—which was translated into English as Jews developed a local identity of their own. As they became established in American society, Jewish cultural producers re-created images of the past, recasting Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the dairyman—his now-beloved village character—into the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Some saw this as the victory of Yiddish culture in America, while others saw it as a defeat. The struggle for better social standing had created a disconnect from what life in Eastern Europe had been like. The poverty that had led to Jewish immigration, the persecution suffered by earlier generations, and the increase of anti-Semitism in the period before World War II—all these were largely eclipsed by the aim to achieve prosperity, accompanied by a romanticizing nostalgia. The grittier aspects of life in Eastern Europe were lost and, with them, some of the values and lessons that had been passed down through the generations.
Yet traces of this past survived in tales for young readers, published in booklets that were sold across Eastern Europe and America. These booklets preserved the art of Yiddish storytelling, along with and the Eastern European Jewish imagination, conveying traditional principles while taking into account the world’s new realities. They were written for young readers both in the Old and New Worlds, reflecting their lives while aiming to instill in them the values that had been lost with modernity. Some of the stories portray harsh realities that are difficult to imagine, but they are authentic indications of what it meant to be a Jewish child in Eastern Europe. The stories were authored in the interwar years by women and men who spoke to young readers about a cultural environment in transition from the past to the present—with everlasting dangers that were growing to an unprecedented scale.
The morals in their stories are both noble and practical. They deal with the powers we don’t always know we have, and prepare us for all kinds of circumstances—helping us think about unexpected situations and reminding us that this world, no matter how difficult or scary, is our own. The stories help us examine our behavior—and that of others—while repeatedly showing that dialogue, tolerance, and compassion are our best tools when dealing with conflict. They may not always be funny in the way we expect of Yiddish tales, but they embody the strength that Yiddish showed throughout the twentieth century.
The death blow to Yiddish culture, which was already threatened by cultural adaptation in America, came with World War II, when the Holocaust—also called the Shoah, or “catastrophe” in Hebrew—destroyed millions of lives and decimated most of the Yiddish-speaking communities in Europe. The Jews who were murdered have often been considered passive victims, but they were actually quite resilient, losing their lives only to the worst of modern history. Nothing could prepare them for the coming disaster, but the stories on which they grew up make tangible the culture of resilience with which they faced their destruction.
The realities that led Jews to immigrate to the United States, no less than the atrocities that annihilated most of those who remained in Europe, have become part of the collective history that makes Americans—and the English language—what they are today. But some of the powerful aspects of Yiddish storytelling have been muffled during its adaptation into American culture. The stories in this collection, which are as vital now as they were a hundred years ago, give voice to the broader spirit of Yiddish, helping young people become aware of something they are often made to forget: their own powers.
Since these powers have interconnected aspects, the stories have been grouped to highlight several core principles: bravery, rebellion, justice, and wonder. These principles have deep roots in the Eastern European Jewish tradition—in both Hasidic and non-Hasidic teachings—as
found in concepts like tikkun, which strives to correct the wrongs of the world; in bitul, which reaches beyond the material world toward higher values; in musar, the study of Jewish ethics; and in hitpa’alut, wonder and awe at the great mystery of life. Together, the stories show us what it means to put these powers into effect, both in the realm of the spirit and in the world where we live.
The collection points back to a time that is closer than people think, a shared past that was almost lost but can be experienced one story at a time. Whether in the real world of the heder (literally “room”), where boys studied Hebrew and religion from an early age, or in fantastical worlds of kings, queens, and forest animals, where women turn from flesh to stone and back again, these tales reveal the mind-sets of their writers and readers, and the culture of resilience exemplified by Yiddish. The collection puts flesh onto the Jewish imagination of Eastern Europe—which America inherited and nearly forgot—offering a chance to experience the world in which these stories were created. In this busy era, when senseless events take up most of our daily attention, this collection gives readers a chance to dip in and out of a world that is oddly familiar—reminding them of a past that is always about to be forgotten but that always feels somehow so similar to the present.
These tales, carefully collected and translated, appear in English for the first time. Their authors, some writing while still in Europe and others after arriving in America, conveyed an impressive array of Yiddish powers that have stood the test of time. By portraying the images and values of a traditional life that was being upended, these authors created entry points into the past, not only for Jewish children of the time, but for all future readers. The world reflected in their stories is not always simple, but its manifold inhabitants are never altogether discouraged. Theirs is a land where happiness comes with tears—and where even tears are happy.
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