The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  The first of his daughters, Tsaytl, goes against his wishes, and turning away from a marriage with a wealthy widower butcher, marries Motl Komoyl, a poor tailor without prospects, whom she loves. “What do you have against my daughter,” Tevye asks Motl, “that you want to marry her?” In the end Tevye relents, deciding that his future son-in-law may only be a tailor, but he is honest and of his love for Tsaytl there can be no doubt. He concludes that “if everyone acted sensibly, there wouldn’t be a Jewish wedding in the world.” He determines to reconcile himself to the marriage. “Tevye, I said to myself, stop hemming and hawing and sign on the dotted line.” There remains only to convince his wife Golde, who, in a nice touch of Jewish snobbery even among the poor, laments that until now there has never been a tailor or shoemaker in the family.

  Tevye’s daughter Hodl takes up with a tutor, one Pertchik, who turns out to be a political radical. They plan to marry, and it becomes clear that Tevye’s permission means little to them. Pertchik’s secret political work will take him away from her for a good while, but Hodl is ready patiently to stand by him. Eventually Pertchik will be sent off to Siberia, where Hodl will join him. The night before her departure to meet her husband, she and her father spend alone, saying little, feeling everything.

  “What a mistake it was,” says Tevye, “to go and have such daughters.” What makes the mistake complicated is his fathomless love for them. They might very well, indeed, have taken their strong independent strain from him. As Tevye says in another of his monologues with Pani Sholem Aleichem, “Trust no one but God. Just leave it to Him. He’ll see that the worms are exiting you like fresh bagels and you’ll thank him for it, too.” Still, he adds, “there’s a great God above and . . . a man must never lose heart while he lives.”

  Tevye’s problems are not alone with God, with whom he claims somehow to have made his peace. “My problem,” he says, “was with men. Why did they have to be so bad when they could as well have been good?” Which is of course another question for God, who seems to be deficient, as Tevye sees it, in a sense of justice.

  A Jew must have confidence and faith. He must believe, first, that there is a God, and second, that if there is, and if it’s all the same to Him, and if it isn’t putting Him to too much trouble, He can makes things a little better for the likes of you.

  Another of Tevye’s daughter’s will marry a temporarily wealthy four-flusher named Podhotzur, with whom she will eventually run off to America. Yet another has her affections trifled with by the son of a rich family who eventually deserts her, causing her, in her heartbreak, to drown herself.

  Most drastic of all, Tevye’s daughter Chava marries a Gentile, a Russian from a peasant family, causing him to think, “Was I really the world’s greatest sinner, that I deserved to be its most punished Jew,” and “was it for this that I had been such a good Jew all my life?” Easily the most poignant moment in the Tevye stories occurs when the apostate Chava appears out of the forest to cry out that she needs a word with her father, and he, with so much love in his heart for her, but already having declared her dead, drives off in his cart without deigning to recognize her.

  The Tevye stories recapitulate the chronicle of the Jews in late nineteenth century Russia: the break with tradition, the politicization of the young, intermarriage, and finally, in the last Tevye story, their dispossession from their shtetl homes, to depart for . . . Odessa, America, Israel, who knew? Tevye is a widower at the close, and he reminds Pani Sholem Alecheim that he used to tell his wife that the mishna holds that life is no different with or without children. “Either way,” he says, “there’s a great kind merciful God above. I only wish I had a ruble for every dirty trick he’s played on me. . . .”

  Although he wrote many brilliant stories—“Drefuss in Kasrilevke,” “On Account of a Hat,” “A Yom Kippur Scandal,” and others—Sholem Aleichem’s right to a posthumous reputation is based upon, and justified by, the Tevye stories. The nature of that reputation, it turns out, has varied wildly. For a while in the Soviet Union, Sholem Aleichem was valued as an anti-Tsarist writer. In Israel, where the old shtetl life was viewed more with revulsion than nostalgia, he was regarded chiefly as the author of children’s stories. In America, Sholem Aleichem’s reputation was most complicated of all.

  The complication set in and quickly thickened with the production, first on stage and then on film, of Fiddler on the Roof. The great Yiddish actor Maurice Schwartz earlier had a success playing Tevye on stage. But the musical, with music by Jerry Block and Sheldon Harnick, choreography and direction by Jerome Robbins, produced by Hal Prince, swept the boards. By 1971 Fidder on the Roof, Dauber notes,

  approaching its eighth year [on Broadway], . . . blew by Hello, Dolly! to become the longest-running musical in Broadway history to date . . . by that time an estimated 35 million people had seen the show.

  Eventually the musical ran for 3,242 performances, setting the record for the longest running stage production in the history of Broadway.

  On the question of what the play and film did to the American sense of Sholem Aleichem’s art, Dauber concludes that the musical rendered Sholem Aleichem, at least in the public mind, that vague entity a folk artist, and a writer who kindled a nostalgia for old world shtetl life. (Nostalgia, the sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote “is the rust of memory.”) Despite its high quality as entertainment, despite its many charming songs—“If I were a Rich Man,” “Tradition,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Miracle of Miracles”—Fiddler on the Roof softened and sentimentalized Sholem Aleichem. In a review of the play that appeared in Commentary in 1964, a review predicting its enormous box-office success, Irving Howe made plain the difference between the musical and the literary work from which it was made.

  Marianne Moore once spoke of Ireland as the greenest land she’d never seen; Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof is the cutest shtetl we’ve never had. Irresistible bait for the nostalgia-smitten audience, this charming little shtetl is first shown in the style of Chagall—itself a softened and sweetened version, sharply different from Sholem Aleichem—and then prettified still more. It all bursts with quaintness and local color, and the condescension that usually goes along with them. The condescension is affectionate, though not innocent, for while the creators of this play clearly want to do right by their subject, they must pause now and again, as [the drama critic] Walter Kerr has remarked, “to give their regards to Broadway, with remembrances to Herald Square.” For they too work in a tradition, and it is a fatal one: the pressure to twist everything into the gross, the sentimental, the mammoth, and the blatant. And since everyone connected with this play is very sophisticated, they make allowance in advance for all the obvious points of danger: there are quarrels among the Jews, not everything in Anatevka is idyllic, and there even occurs a papier-mâché pogrom. Yet none of these “touches of realism” matters very much, for the spirit of Broadway proves invincible.

  The movie, which I recently watched for the second time and which has the magnificent Israeli actor Topol in the part of Tevye (Zero Mostel played him—and I have no doubt over-played him—on Broadway) suffers the same want of reality. As Jeremy Dauber writes: “It would have been—and has been—difficult for any filmmaker to shoulder the enormous moral and aesthetic responsibilities of representing a vanished Eastern European Jewry.” The movie suggests an order and grandeur to shtetl life that it could scarcely in reality have possessed. The director, Norman Jewison (who despite his name isn’t Jewish) also clarified what in the Tevye stories was properly left ambiguous: He had Tevye and his family, after being expelled from Anatevke, headed for New York; he allows Tevye to give his daughter Chava his final blessing, which in the story he doesn’t. He has him demand of the Russian military officer in charge of the village that he leave his land, when in the story Tevye merely relates how he ironically expressed his anger to the officer, and in his own account is probably exaggerating. Finally, neither the stage nor the movie versi
on allows Tevye to grow older, as he does in the stories. At one point, upon reporting his having to depart his home, he tells Sholem Aleichem,

  Had I been twenty years younger, and still had my Golde—had I been, that is, the Tevye I was—oho, I wouldn’t have taken it lying down: why, I would have settled his [the Russian officer’s] hash in a moment.

  Fiddler on the Roof won seven Tonys and three Oscars. But it won for the long dead Sholem Aleichem an even grander prize—the recognition among people who know the Tevye stories that the highest literary art can never be altogether successfully transferred either to the stage or to the screen without losing the full quality that makes it truly great. And the highest literary art, indubitably, is what Sholem Aleichem produced.

  Jokes: A Genre of Thought

  (2017)

  Epicurus (341–270 BCE), the Greek philosopher and founder of the school of Epicureanism, may also have been the world’s first shrink. Along with a cosmology and an ethics, Epicurus had a program for stemming anxiety, a four-step method for achieving serenity. Here are the steps:

  1. Do not believe in God or the gods. Most likely they do not exist, and even if they did, it is preposterous to believe that they are watching over you and keeping a strict accounting of your behavior.

  2. Do not worry about death. Death is oblivion, a condition not different from that of your life before you were born: an utter blank. Not to worry either about heaven or hell; neither exists—after death there is nothing, nada, zilch.

  3. As best you are able, forget about pain. Two possibilities here: Either it will diminish and go away, or it will get worse and you will die. Should you die, hakuna matata, for death, as we know, presents no problem, being nothing more than eternal dark, dreamless sleep.

  4. Do not waste your time attempting to acquire luxuries, whose pleasures are certain to be incommensurate with the effort required to obtain them. From this it follows that ambition generally—for things, money, fame, power—should also be foresworn. The game, quite simply, isn’t worth the candle.

  To summarize: Forget about God, death, pain, and acquisition—and your worries are over. I’ve not kitchen-tested this program myself, but my guess is that, if one could bring it off, it might just work. “Live the unnoticed life,” as Epicurus advises, and serenity will be yours—unless, that is, you happen to be Jewish.

  I have known brilliant, stupid, flashy, dull, savvy, foolish, sensible, neurotic, refined, vulgar, wise, nutty Jews, but I have yet to meet a serene Jew, and I’m inclined to think there may never have been one. Marcus Aurelius, on visiting Palestine in 176 ce, remarked: “O Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatae, at last I have found people more excitable than you.”

  Jewish habits of thought, featuring irony, skepticism, and criticism, taken together, further preclude serenity. These habits derive from Jewish history and personal experience. An Irish friend then in his nineties once asked me if there were any Yiddish words that weren’t critical. I told him there must be some, though I did not know them. Even words that might seem approbative, like chachem for wise man, with the slightest turn take on an ironic twist. “No great chachemess, Hannah Arendt,” my friend Edward Shils used to say when Ms. Arendt’s name came up.

  The quest to grasp Jewish character, both on the part of Jews and on that of others, has been endless, and is probably unending. What is it about the kind of jokes Jews tell and appreciate, and about jokes featuring Jews as well as their appetite for humor, that is notably, ineluctably Jewish?

  Great though the Jewish penchant for jokes is, Jews are of course not alone in joke telling. In one of her essays, the classicist Mary Beard cites the joke anthology Philogelos (Laughter Lover), a fourth-century work written in Greek but widely promulgated in Rome. Included in the Philogelos, according to Professor Beard, are “jokes about doctors, men with bad breath, eunuchs, barbers, men with hernias, bald men, cuckolds, shady fortune tellers, scholars and intellectuals and more of the colorful (mostly male) characters of Roman life.” Keith Thomas, in a lecture titled “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” notes that “jokes are a pointer to joking situations, areas of structural ambiguity in society itself; and their subject matter can be a revealing guide to past tensions and anxieties.” About past—also present—tensions and anxieties, Jews know a thing or two.

  The English philosopher Simon Critchley, in his book On Humour, writes that jokes help us to see our lives “as if we had just landed from another planet.” Critchley adds that “the comedian is the anthropologist of our humdrum everyday lives,” who helps us to see them in effect from the outside. He calls every joke “a little anthropological essay.” I have myself long thought of jokes, at least the more elaborate and better ones, as short stories.

  Here is a joke told me by Saul Bellow:

  Yankel Dombrovsky, of the shtetl of Frampol, is 42 years old, unmarried, shy generally, frightened of women in particular. Recently arrived from the neighboring shetl of Blumfvets is Miriam Schneider, a young widow. A Jewish bachelor being a shandeh, or disgrace, a meeting is arranged between Yankel and Miriam Schneider. Terrified, Yankel turns to his mother beforehand for advice.

  “Yankel, darling son, please not to worry. All women like to talk about three things. They like to talk about family, about food, and about philosophy. Bring these up and I’m sure your meeting will go well.”

  Miriam Schneider turns out to be 4’8”, weighs perhaps 230 pounds, and has an expressionless face.

  Oy, thinks Yankel, oy and oy. What was it Mama said women like to talk about? Oh, yes, food. “Miriam,” he asks in a quavering voice, “Miriam, do you like noodles?”

  “No,” says Miriam, in a gruff voice, “I don’t like noodles.”

  Veh es meer. What did Mama say? Family, that’s right, family.

  “Miriam,” he asks, “do you have a brother?”

  “Don’t got no brother,” Miriam replies. Worse and worse. What was the third thing Mama said? Philosophy. Oh, yes, philosophy. “Miriam,” Yankel asks, “if you had a brother, would he like noodles?”

  Three people are required to perfect a joke: one to tell it, one to get it, and a third not to get it. For those who might have missed it, the object of this joke, of course, is philosophy, especially contemporary academic philosophy. Saul Bellow told me this joke when we were discussing the career of an Oxford philosopher. Bellow had a strong taste for jokes, but, unlike me, he had the patience to hold back telling them until the occasion arose when they made or underscored a point. His wit was generally more free range, sparked by the occasion. Once, walking together through the Art Institute of Chicago we passed Felice Ficherelli’s painting Judith with the Head of Holofernes, about which Bellow remarked, “That’s what you get for fooling with a Jewish girl.” I, upon hearing what I take to be a good joke, am more like the yeshiva boy running through the village exclaiming, “I have an answer. I have an answer. Does anyone have a question?” I need to tell the jokes to friends as soon as possible. Freud, about whose thought there cannot be too many jokes—the best is Vladimir Nabokov’s characterization of it as “Greek myths hiding private parts”—once said that a fresh joke is good news. The good news is that someone is thinking. Jokes, superior ones, are a genre of thought.

  As such the genre is best maintained in the oral tradition. When I tell the “if you had a brother, would he like noodles?” joke, I do so, when speaking in Yankel’s voice, in a tremulous greenhorn English accent, and, when speaking in Miriam’s voice, in a tone of gruff insensitivity. I like to think performance improves the joke by perhaps 20 percent. Without voice and gesture to accompany them, jokes on paper, or as is now more common on a computer or cell phone screen, are a distant second best.

  The first joke in S. Felix Mendelsohn’s The Jew Laughs: Humorous Stories and Anecdotes (1935) is about the result of telling a joke to a muzhik, a baron, an army officer, and a Jew. In different ways the first three fai
l to understand the joke, and the Jew, who alone gets it, replies that “the joke is as old as the hills and besides, you don’t know how to tell it.” Michael Krasny, early in his Let There Be Laughter: A Treasury of Great Jewish Humor and What It All Means, notes that “there is an old saw about how every Jew thinks he can tell a Jewish joke better than the one who is telling the joke.” Old saw it might be, but one with a high truth quotient. Alongside several of the jokes in Krasny’s collection, I noted, “my version is better.”

  I made similar markings in the margins of William Novak’s Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks, a collection of jokes about aging and about being older generally. Many of these, in the nature of the case, are variants of gallows humor. They touch on too lengthy marriage, what the French call the désolation générale of the body, sexual diminishment, physicians, the afterlife, and more. In 1981 Novak had produced, along with Moshe Waldoks, a collection called The Big Book of Jewish Humor. The jokes in Die Laughing have, perhaps out of fear of redundancy with his earlier book, been de-Judenized, some to less than good effect. The punchline of the joke about the fanatical golfer who returns home late from his regular golf date because his partner and dearest friend died on the golf course early in the round is a case in point. In his explanation to his wife for his tardiness in returning home he explains that for several holes after his friend’s death “it was hit the ball, drag Bob, hit the ball, drag Bob.” The joke is much improved if Bob is named, as in the version in which I originally heard the joke, Irving. Novak tells the joke about the parsimonious widow who, learning that the charge for newspaper obituaries is by the word, instructs the man on the obit desk to print “O’Malley is dead. Boat for sale.” The joke is better, though, in the Jewish version, as “Schwartz dead. Cadillac for sale,” and is even one word shorter, thereby saving Mrs. Schwartz a few bucks.