Life was pure hell for the Jews in Russia under Czar Nicholas, then eased up a bit under Czar Alexander, whose assassination in 1881 brought the government fist down even more heavily on the five million Jews living within the Russian Pale of Settlement. Everything possible was done to stop Jews from maintaining lives of dignity and calm. From the early 1880s on, the Russian government incited pogroms in Kiev, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhni-Novgorod, Kishinev, Odessa, and elsewhere. Strict Jewish quotas were set for Jews entering secular Russian schools. Many towns in the Pale of Settlement were reclassified as villages, forcing Jews to evacuate them, while at the same time Jews were expelled from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Black Hundreds, with the complicity of the Czarist police, incited peasants to maraud Jewish neighborhoods and towns without fear of punishment. In 1905, with the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, Jews were conscripted into the Russian army in vastly disproportionate numbers. Earlier, under Czar Nicholas, Jewish boys, when they turned eighteen, were drafted into the Russian Army for twenty-five years, during which time they generally either died or gave up their religion; most lost all connection with their families.
In “Eighteen from Pereshchepena,” one of Sholem Aleichem’s railroad stories, a character asks:
How can anyone expect us to survive so many troubles, so many quotas, so much discrimination? Every day, every blessed day, there’s some new regulation against us. Why, there must be a regulation per Jew already!
Maurice Samuel, the chronicler of Eastern European Jewry, writes that “it was a principle of Russian law that everything was forbidden to Jews unless specifically permitted.”
Jews in Russia were shaken from within by great cultural changes underway during these years. The most emphatic of these changes was found in the conflict between conventionally religious Jews and those Jews who, under the banner of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, wished to modernize traditional Judaism by broadening Jewish education. Although the Haskalah was never about assimilation, but about widening the boundaries of Jewish ghetto and shtetl life, it nonetheless stirred strong emotions among Jews, often within the same families. As Sholem Aleichem notes in his autobiography, during the era of the Haskalah, “to show piety was humiliating,” and to be “a fanatic was worse than a libertine.” Many younger Jews became political, revolutionary even, abandoning Jewish worship, which they viewed as mired in retrograde superstition.
The first question facing the young Sholem Aleichem was whether to write in Yiddish or Hebrew. The Haskalah favored Hebrew, and the maskilim, as intellectual advocates of Haskalah were called, looked down on Yiddish as the Jargon, even though it was the language of 98 percent of the Jews living in the Pale of Settlement. Sholem Aleichem’s father, though pious in his religion, nonetheless reflected this split; favoring Hebrew over Yiddish as proper language for Jewish literature, he wanted his son to write in Hebrew, which he did at the beginning of his career.
Sholem Aleichem came to recognize that the Yiddish-speaking Jews who were his subject were best written about in their own language. “For Sholem Aleichem,” Ruth Wisse wrote in her introduction to the collection of his stories called The Best of Sholem 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.” Writing in Hebrew, when he thought in Yiddish, as Jeremy Dauber notes, meant for Sholem Aleichem essentially translating himself from one language to another.
Yiddish at that time also gave Sholem Aleichem much the larger potential audience. Scholem Aleichem was never interested in being a small-public writer. His stories were published not in quarterlies, or what the Russians used to call the “thick” magazines, but in Yiddish-language newspapers, where they were read by Jews all over the world. He wanted the largest possible audience for his writing, and through his dazzling stories won it at a relatively early age.
In From the Fair, his autobiography, written toward the end of his life, Sholem Aleichem remarks on his early gift for mimicry. Skill at mimicry may be the first sign of the verbal artist in the making. For Sholem Aleichem, it would prove indispensable. His speciality in fiction was the monologue, as in the Tevye stories, or epistolary fiction, as in the exchange of letters between Menakhem Mendl letters and his properly complaining wife Sheineh-Sheindl. In his railroad stories, it is rarely the author speaking; instead he records the stories Jews packed into third-class recount on long rail trips. Sholem Aleichem’s literary ventriloquism was flawless.
A Jew without irony is probably not fully a Jew, but Sholem Aleichem’s irony was never contentious, never superior to its subject, never malignant. The Yiddish poet Itzik Fefer described it as “lyrical irony.” Sholem Aleichem found what was extraordinary in the most ordinary Jews, highlighting their oddity, comedy, sadness, and endurance. The standard cliché about Sholem Aleichem’s writing is that he provokes laughter through tears. In No Joke, her recent book on Jewish jokes, Ruth Wisse comes closer to capturing it where she characterizes Sholem Aleichem’s irony as “more accurately understood as laughter through fears.”
If one is searching for influences on Sholem Aleichem, one thinks first of his fellow Ukrainian, Nikolai Gogol, the only authentic comic genius among Russian writers, and an artist who, like Sholem Aleichem, was always playful but never shallow. Cervantes and Laurence Sterne were two other novelists he delighted in. He admired Tolstoy above all the Russian novelists, crediting him with being the only Russian writer who understood Jews. He thought well of Maxim Gorky, for both his socialism and his philo-Semitism, and for a time, in imitation of Gorky, he grew his hair long and went about in a loose tunic.
Like Dickens, whose writing he loved, Sholem Aleichem had the copiousness, the unending flow, the inexhaustible inventiveness of the natural writer. He rewrote, cut, polished his prose, but ideas for stories seem never to have been in short supply. He produced a story a week for the Yiddish press for roughly twenty-five years. At various times in his later years, physicians had to ask him to cease writing as part of their plan for his recuperation, but he found himself unable to do so. He was writing the stories that went into Mottel, the Cantor’s Son up to a few days before his death.
“I feel a kind of bond exists between me and the people, that is, between all the people who read jargon,” Sholem Aleichem wrote. “It seems to me like I need them and they need me.” Through his stories, he showed the pressures under which they lived, the rich complicatedness of their lives, and through the force of his art he authenticated them. “What kind of extraordinary, yet plausible, Jewish work of literature could be created that would ironically juxtapose the past and the changing present,” Jeremy Dauber writes, “and, for good measure, include doses of playfulness, disruption, along with the occasional self-referential or autobiographical excursion?” This was precisely the kind that Sholem Aleichem created, over and over again.
He do the Jews in different voices, to wring a change on T. S. Eliot’s famous line from The Waste Land. In his various stories, Sholem Aleichem did schnorrers, hondlers, yentes, luftmensches, ganevs, nudniks, petty tyrants, children, and dreamers, above all dreamers. Sholem Aleichem describes himself in his autobiography as “the constant dreamer,” and so he remained all his days; to the very end of his life he was hoping for a big score on the stage of the New York Yiddish theatre. Only the women in Sholem Aleichem are landed, grounded, anchored in reality, burdened with the unpleasant task of bringing their husbands, sons-in-laws, children back down to earth. Their chief weapon in doing so is the combined curse and aphorism: “As mother says, God bless her,” Menakhem-Mendl’s wife Sheineh-Sheindel says, “the worm within the radish thinks there’s no sweeter place.”
Sholem Aleichem was able to create characters who are garrulous without becoming tiresome. Part of the pleasure of the performance is in his picking up the different tics that repeat themselves in his characte
rs’ speech; the character who fastens on the phrase “in plain Yiddish,” as we today should say “the bottom line is”; the character who is always making “a long story short,” but doesn’t, not really; the character who in recounting his own troubles says over and over that they should only be visited on “Purishkevich,” a right-wing anti-Semite of the day; the character who cannot get through four or five sentences without falling back on “etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” His stories can begin at the beginning, the end, or in media res. “‘Speaking of the Drozhne fire’. . .” one story begins, when of course no one was speaking of it.
In From the Fair, Sholem Aleichem repeats a story that his grandfather told him. The story is about a Jew who approaches his nobleman landlord for the renewal of his lease on an inn he runs that brings him a minimal profit but is his sole income. He finds the nobleman drunk among friends. When he makes his request, the nobleman says that he will accede to the request if the Jew will climb up to the roof of his house and allow him to shoot at him as if he were a bird. The Jew, with great trepidation, does so, reciting the Shema Yisroel as he climbs the ladder to the roof. “Jews of the old school,” Sholem Aleichem writes. One might think the prayer will save him; one might think the nobleman, even in his drunkenness cannot be so brutish as actually to shoot the poor Jew. Once the Jew attains the roof, the nobleman asks him to spread his arms, bird-like, and he fires and hits the Jews in the forehead, killing him. Afterward the nobleman, a man of his word, renews the lease for ten years, at the same rent, despite his having had higher offers. “Noblemen of the old school,” writes Sholem Aleichem. Nothing about this story is as one might have expected. Everything about it is believable. The two capping comments— “Jews of the old school,” “ Noblemen of the old school”—couldn’t be more perfectly placed. “I, loving my people with warm heart and cold reason,” Sholem Aleichem wrote, “. . . tell the truth.”
Sholem Aleichem dedicated his first novel, Stempenyu, to S. M. Abramovich, better known under the penname Mendele Mocher Sforim, and considered “the grandfather of Yiddish Literature”; Sholem Aleichem addressed him as zeide. Abramovich told him that the novel was not his form; that, as a writer of great comic gifts, he did best to work in shorter literary forms. Sholem Aleichem continued to turn out the occasional novel, and he also attempted with great financial hope, to write for the stage, but Abromovich was correct. The 1,500 to 5,000-word sketch or story was where he shone.
More skillful with character than plot, Sholem Aleichem, when his writing centered on the same character in different stories, produced what in effect were the equivalent of novels. Such is the case with the stories about Menakhem-Mendl, the so-called Railroad stories, the stories about Motl the Cantor’s son, and of course the stories about Tevye the Diaryman. Religion forms the background but culture is the true subject of these various works – the culture of Jewish life at a time of constant change and perpetual peril.
As for his religion, Sholem Aleichem lived the Jewish life of the miskilim. He wore no yarmulke, did not observe the laws of kossruth. He was sentimental about Jewish holidays, and always wanted his family around him at holiday times. In his own household, he spoke not Yiddish but Russian. Yet in his will he beseeches his descendants not “to guard their Jewish descent” and specifies that those who fail to do so “have thus erased themselves from my will, ‘and they shall have no portion and inheritance among their brethren.’”
Jewish stories are without happy endings. The standard Jewish story, it has been said, is about disaster avoided. The closest to hope these stories come is in the recognition that things could have been worse. Critics have noted that Sholem Aleichem’s stories do not have true endings; they merely conclude. “. . . The stories move toward a climax,” Irving Howe wrote, “and then, just when you expect the writer to drive toward resolution they seem deliberately to remain hanging in the air. They stop rather than end.” Howe, who took Sholem Aleichem to be a highly self-conscious literary artist, posits various reasons for this, all tenable. Jeremy Dauber’s view is that by doing away with endings that explain “what it all means” Sholem Aleichem “yanks away our security blanket as readers.” I would only add that the want of conventional endings in so many of these stories feels aesthetically right.
Sholem Aleichem left Russia in 1905, when, from the window of his hotel room, he witnessed a pogrom in the streets of Kiev. (The Mendel Beilis trial for ritual murder in 1911 convinced him he could never live in Russia again.) He would be a permanent transient for the remainder of his life: living in Lemberg, London, Geneva and Montreux in Switzerland, the Italian Riviera, New York, and other places.
Dandaical in dress, expensive in his tastes, Sholem Aleichem was, as Dauber has it, “a spendthrift.” He was the sadness kind of spendthrift, one with a worried conscience. However much money he earned, he always needed more. Living in permanent transience with his large family on the road was costly. Dauber recounts his unending negotiations and disputes with Yiddish newspaper and book publishers over fees, advances, and copyrights; his attempts at a theatrical bonanza. (He had two plays mounted on the same night in New York—one under the direction of Boris Thomashevsky, the other by Jacob Adler, the great figures in the New York Yiddish theater—and both flopped.) When S. M. Abramovitch accused him of extending his series of Menakhem-Mendil stories merely for the money, Sholem Aleichem was much offended. His pen, he argued, was never for sale. He claimed he “always writes for writing’s sake.” But the money was nice—and needed.
He gave readings throughout Eastern Europe at which thousands attended. An authentic hero of culture to his Yiddish readers, he was met at train stations by admiring crowds. The large Eastern European Jewish emigration to America, begun in 1881. When Sholem Aleichem first arrived in New York, in 1906, a crowd awaited him at the dock, including editors of the leading Yiddish press and theater, academics, readers who adored his writing. Even the yekkes, the German Jews well settled and financially successful in America, the Warburgs and the Schiffs, invited him into their homes. But it was all downhill from there. Along with his theatrical failures, he made the wrong newspaper contracts for his writing, his readings were not always well attended. He would later refer to America as “the land of cultural servitude and senseless humiliation,” where an “author is a schlimazl.” He returned to Europe the following year.
On one of his reading tours, in 1908 in the town of Baranovitch, in Ukraine, Sholem Aleichem’s health broke down. He was found to have acute pulmonary tuberculosis. The last eight years of his life would be spent in expensive convalescence undergoing ultimately unsuccessful recuperation. He continued working, even tried turning some of his stories into scripts for silent films. (He was a great admirer of Charlie Chaplin.) World War I drained much of the hope left in him. He returned to America in 1914, to much less acclaim than on his first voyage, and here he remained, living in the Bronx. He now seemed, as Jeremy Dauber puts it, less a visiting celebrity than a refugee. He died in 1916 at the age of fifty-seven. Estimates of the number of people who attended his funeral vary between 30,000 and a quarter of a million.
If Sholem Aleichem is remembered today he is so generally as a figure through whose stories the nostalgia for a long lost way of shetl life is reflected. Of his writing, very little of which had appeared in English while he was still alive, today only the Tevye stories are known, and these through the adaptations of the Broadway musical and movie versions of Fiddler on the Roof. To be remembered, appreciated, world famous for something one didn’t quite do would have been an irony not lost on that great ironist Sholem Aleichem.
The Tevye stories represent Sholem Aleichem at his best. David Roskies, a professor of Yiddish at the Jewish Theological Seminary, calls Tevye himself “the greatest storyteller in Jewish fiction.” Another critic, Itzik Manger, has called Tevye “a comic Job.” He is one of the half dozen or so great comic characters in western literature—with Don Quixote, Falstaff, and Mr. Wilki
ns Micawber. Tevye is a great comic character because, like these others, he is not comic merely. He is in fact fully as tragic as he is comic, perhaps more so.
In Tevye, Sholem Alcheim found the perfect character—the vivid objective correlative—to describe the plight of the Jew in Russia in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Tevye is the poor Jew who does not let his poverty detract from his dignity. He is also a fine vessel for purveying Sholem Aleichem’s ironic vision. “‘We’ve heard, Tevye,’ they [some peasants] tell him, ‘that you’re an honest man, even if you’re a rat-Jew.’ I ask you, do you ever get such compliments from Jews?”
When we first encounter him, Tevye is a laborer, married, with seven daughters. He is given to endless quotations from the Pentateuch and the rabbinical literature known as the Mishnah. (“‘You Bible a person half to death,’ he wife Golde tells him, ‘and think you have solved the problem.’”) He prides himself on his erudition; he is, he says, a man “who reads the fine print.” With his aged horse and cart he drags logs and lumber between his village of Anatevke and Boiberik, the rich Jewish suburb of Yehupetz (Kiev). One day in the forest he picks up two lost women and returns them to their opulent dachas in Boiberik, for which he is rewarded with food, a cow, and thirty-seven rubles. With this money he buys more livestock, and, with the aid of his wife Golde, becomes the moderately successful Tevye the Dairyman.
Tevye talks chiefly to three others: himself, as he makes his rounds between Anatevke and Boiberik, where he sells his milk, butter, and cheese; the scribbler Sholem Aleichem, to whom he recounts his troubles; and God, with whom he for the most part argues. The story of Tevye is the story of his daughters, who are all comely and, in differing ways, fiercely independent. In the stories of each of the five older daughters one is meant to discover the departures from Jewish tradition that confronts Tevye but also Russian Jewry generally. Each is a love story but told from the point of view of the girls’ father, Tevye.
The Ideal of Culture Page 41
