No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  The reader can guess the rest. Another Jewish salesman enters the compartment, but unlike Max, this one, Patti Nyemchik by name, can’t get enough of his fellow Jews and enjoys entertaining them with funny stories. Here he has stumbled on to one in the making! Taking in the scene—“during his sleep, the newspaper had slipped off Max’s face to reveal his stigma”—Patti steps out on the platform to buy his own copy of the Bessarabian; once back in the compartment, he assumes Max’s identical position on the opposite bench.

  After a night of torturing dreams, Max wakes up, disoriented. He touches his nose and finds it gone—with a copy of the newspaper in its place. When he catches sight of the person on the opposite bench, he thinks it must be himself, but is at a loss to grasp the meaning of his out-of-body self. As he slowly comes to, his stirring wakes Patti, who smiles across at his fellow “anti-Semite” and tentatively starts whistling a popular Yiddish tune. Soon they are both singing it aloud, Afn pripetchik brent a fayerl …, a little fire burns in the old woodstove, and the teacher sits reciting with the children the sounds of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph and kometz-aleph. The comedy of errors resolved, the two Jews continue on their journey, the more secure for being in harmony.

  Is it any wonder that by the time of this story’s publication, Sholem Aleichem—the Hebrew-Yiddish pen name means “peace be upon you,” or in a word, “welcome!”—had become the Jews’ most beloved writer, overcoming their increasing internal factionalism with his near-universal appeal? Like Patti, he enjoyed entertaining his fellow Jews with stories and jokes—a kind of company salesman whose product line was comedy. But this was a comedy that fed off the disquiet that it temporarily seemed to dispel.

  Modernity, in the form of increased economic opportunity and social mobility, had simultaneously undermined Jewish social cohesion. Gentiles, meanwhile, were channeling some of their insecurities into violence against the “stranger in their midst.” The comforting harmony of “Afn Pripetchik” was itself based on a flimsy premise, since the song was a fairly recent composition by the Kiev lawyer Mark Warshawski (1848–1907), and Sholem Aleichem, who had helped to popularize it, knew that no one could possibly mourn the antiquated Jewish education it sentimentalized. What is more, educated readers would have recognized in Max’s dream the dark humor of Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol’s Russian story “The Nose,” in which the feature in question is unaccountably shaven off a client’s face to assume a life of its own. While the crisis in Sholem Aleichem remains safely on this side of grotesque, in actual life the Jewish presence in Russia was evoking hostility more disturbing than anything in Gogol’s fiction.

  On the basis of this story and others like it, more than one critic has described the effect of Sholem Aleichem’s humor as “being awakened from nightmare,” a kind of self-soothing that parents try to develop in their children to calm the terrors of life. In her study of child development, the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg introduces us to “Laughing Tiger,” an imaginary companion invented by a two-year-old to calm her fear of animals. The creature never scares children and never bites, and you see its teeth only because it is laughing benignly. Fraiberg speculates that the transformation of a wild into an obedient beast “is probably a caricature of the civilizing process the little girl is undergoing,” and that her make-believe gives her a kind of control over a danger that had left her helpless and anxious.2 The U.S. comedian Mel Brooks offers a similar connection between fear and “civilization” in his comic routine of the two-thousand-year-old man. Asked about the principal means of transportation in his younger days, Brooks answers, “Fear. An animal would growl, you’d go two miles in a minute.”3 Along the same lines, Sholem Aleichem’s humor, often called “laughter through tears,” is more accurately understood as laughter through fears.

  Born in 1859 in one Ukrainian Jewish town and raised in another, Sholem Rabinovich turned his given name into a term of common greeting as though he were standing on the doorstep welcoming one and all into his world. Thanks to the language in which he wrote, he remained bound to the Yiddish-speaking society. But there was also something of Max in him: the author was not identical with his fictional persona.

  At the age of seventeen, Rabinovich was hired by a wealthy Jewish landowner to serve as a live-in secretary and tutor to the man’s only daughter. Within a few years, pupil and instructor married, at first against the father’s wishes. Happily, reconciliation ensued, and when his father-in-law died, the aspiring and now-wealthy writer was able to take up residence in Kiev, a city that was legally out of bounds to all but a privileged minority of Russian Jews. There he began a serious literary career while enjoying, albeit briefly, an affluent life. His longtime literary associate Yehoshua Ravnitski recalls that at their first meeting, he had trouble reconciling the homespun author he had been reading with the dandy in white spats who stood before him. Incongruities were the stuff of Rabinovich’s life.

  The man who became known as Sholem Aleichem liked to trace his comic genius to a childhood talent for mimicry; his earliest work, he said, was an alphabetized list of his stepmother’s curses that won her over by making her laugh. His audience was meant to believe that in similar fashion, he had continued to pick up from commonplace Jews the sayings, anecdotes, and stories that he then artlessly repackaged for their enjoyment. And indeed, his male and female monologists, speaking “in their own voices,” became beloved personalities in their own right. His fellow writer Yosef Haim Brenner called him a unique amalgam, a poet who was “a living essence of the folk itself.”4 He played the role so well that the extent of his influence on the folk’s perception of itself went largely unnoticed.

  In fact, Sholem Aleichem revolutionized Jewish culture more profoundly than any figure of his time. Almost single-handedly, he invented a Jewish people that laughed its way through crisis and an imaginary Jewish town, Kasrilevke, whose very name connoted merry pauperdom. His comic protagonists Menahem-Mendl, Sheyne-Sheyndl, and Tevye the Dairyman became national prototypes like the biblical Abraham, Esther, and Job. What Heine had celebrated as the “sabbath spirit” of the Jews was now presumed to function not as a sacred interval from the rest of the week but rather as an innate capacity for transmuting humiliation, subjugation, misery, and dread into funniness. This image would later be used in film and story to deactivate even the horrors of the Holocaust, though the salvific properties of laughter had clearly failed to save the population that allegedly sought refuge in it. Sholem Aleichem was not merely the alchemist but also the inventor of a putatively magical people.

  Historians of the so-called Age of Nationalism that culminated in the First World War point to the heightened importance of a sustaining national culture in the struggle for the sovereignty of ethnic minorities like the Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The national cohesion of Jews, who lived outside their ancestral territory, was even more dependent than those others on the nonpolitical underpinnings of peoplehood such as common language and literature. Sholem Aleichem’s “fictional territory” of Jewish towns and cities with train compartments as their mobile prayer houses was a brilliant surrogate for national autonomy, and it was duly harnessed by all the emerging Jewish national movements of the time—including Zionism, which he actively promoted. The consummate insider and virtuoso of the insider’s language, Sholem Aleichem seemed to offer a complete contrast to Heine—and so he did, until he was forced into exile from the Russia he had so ingeniously reimagined as his own. At that point, the homey language that had been his insulation betrayed the degree of his displacement. Once Jews abandoned Yiddish, they could no more understand the intricacies of his humor than could any Gentile.

  Sholem Aleichem’s spirit avowedly influenced the art of Marc Chagall, who later brought a modernist touch to the scenery and costumes he designed for the dramatic productions of Sholem Aleichem. Chagall’s paintings of a fiddler, including this one of the violinist on a rooftop, became the iconic image for the Broadway musical that was based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories of
Tevye the Dairyman. Marc Chagall, The Green Violinist. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris and CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

  To understand where Sholem Aleichem sprang from, I need to make a brief excursion into eastern European Jewish history as an incubator of modern Jewish humor.

  Forays into the sources of Jewish comedy usually focus on institutions like the Purim shpil—a skit or performance marking the festival of Purim—and the badkhen or marshalik—the master of ceremonies called into service at celebrations and weddings. Both date from about the sixteenth century, when Jewish communities began selectively incorporating entertainments adapted from surrounding populations. Both provided opportunities for mostly amateur musical, poetic, and thespian performers. Some of the Purim scripts and badkhen songs became standard folk repertoire, and were later adapted by modern playwrights, poets, musicians, and writers who likewise worked in Yiddish, the everyday language. Studies and compendiums of this material show boundaries between folk and individual attribution remaining fluid well past the invention of the rotary printing press.

  In western and central Europe, Jews had begun to speak and study in local languages by the end of the eighteenth century. The case was otherwise in the more populous Jewish communities of the Russian Empire, which remained mostly Yiddish speaking for about another century. There, Jews were concentrated mostly in towns, or shtetlach (singular, shtetl), where they formed substantial fractions, if not majorities, of the population. “Literacy” continued to refer to literacy in traditional Hebrew-Aramaic sources, studied mostly by boys in Jewish elementary schools and yeshivas.

  This is not to say that Jewish society was immune to change. Whereas in France and Germany the impulse for change came mainly and directly from without, among eastern European Jews it could bubble up in autochthonous form in towns and cities where Jews constituted significant minorities. At the risk of compressing what scholars have gone to great lengths to distinguish and develop in detail, we can trace at least three powerful indigenous movements that vied for influence, each of them enriching Yiddish humor with mockery of the others.

  Pressing in from the West, the Enlightenment, in the specifically Jewish form known as Haskalah, was a reformist movement requiring Jews to undertake the behavioral and ideational changes that could make them worthier of citizenship, were it ever to be on offer. In common with other modernizers, Maskilim, “Enlighteners,” believed in progress, sometimes at the expense of inherited traditions and assumptions. Because they advanced their arguments in Jewish languages—Hebrew and Yiddish—they formed part of the cultural renaissance that transformed Jewish life from within. Almost all Maskilim favored Hebrew and used Yiddish only when stooping to conquer. Traffic between Hebrew and Yiddish characterized the Haskalah along with its humor throughout.

  Warding off this Westernizing trend was a second movement, Hasidism (roughly, pietism). Originating in the eighteenth century, it had much in common with the Romantic movement in culture, typified by a rebellion against traditional authority—in this case, the authority of the rabbinate—and the elevation of intuition or emotion over reason. Revivalist and fundamentalist rather than progressive, Hasidism drew men together around charismatic leaders, the first of whom, and the acknowledged founder of the movement, was Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760). It also took inspiration from Jewish mysticism, popularizing the latter’s elitist and esoteric emphases by encouraging unmediated, joyous apprehension of the divine.

  The third group—Misnagdim, literally “opponents”—upheld traditional standards of Jewish self-discipline, observance, and study against Hasidic populists, on the one hand, and Maskilic enlighteners, on the other. The leading exponent of Misnagdic thought was Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97), known as the Gaon of Vilna. His attempt to excommunicate Hasidim points up the intensity of friction among the warring factions; his failure to stop the spread of Hasidism indicates that the historical processes were beyond any Jewish authority’s control.

  Rivalry among these movements was fueled not only by vying ideas of what was best for the Jewish people but also by deep cultural divisions. When sociolinguists in the twentieth century began marking dividing lines, or isoglosses, on the dialectic map of the Yiddish language, they discovered an almost-exact correspondence between the boundaries that separated Hasidic from Misnagdic strongholds and much older ones separating southeastern from northeastern or “Lithuanian” dialects of Yiddish. Even today, among Jewish descendants from different regions of Russia, Poland, and Galicia, the skilled observer may recognize ancestral traces of their respective cultural dispositions. Nonetheless, while various strands of Jewish humor may still be distinguished at their source, there was obvious interpenetration among them: much of what time has joined together is here retroactively drawn apart.

  Haskalah Humor

  It was to be expected that Jewish Enlightenment satire would draw on the literary genres and tropes of its European counterpart. The hypocrites skewered in the plays of the French dramatist Molière turn up as the villains of Jewish bourgeois comedy, concealing their cupidity and malice under the guise of pious discourse and dress. The withering critique of the Catholic Church by French Enlightenment thinkers like Denis Diderot and Voltaire is redirected to the rabbinic oligarchy and its Hasidic challengers alike. Do Hasidic rebbes—as opposed to learned rabbis—presume to inspire rather than instruct? They may be cultivating ignorance in order to exploit the credulity of their followers. Do they comfort barren women with promises of fertility? It instead may be their physical interventions that guarantee the efficacy of their prophecies. In Yiddish Enlightenment comedy, German-speaking medical students outwit Hasidic charlatans in their bid for the daughters of the Jewish bourgeoisie, while earthy servants flirt and find their natural partners without the services of matchmakers. Sartorially, linguistically, politically, and domestically, this kind of comedy delights in upending established orders.

  The title of Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets (1819) telegraphs its intention of demystifying the hocus-pocus of Hasidic wonder rabbis. Composed as an epistolary novel (in Hebrew, subsequently transposed by the author into Yiddish), the work details the scheme of several Hasidic enthusiasts to gain possession of a seditious anti-Hasidic book—which happens to be an exposé of Hasidism by a certain Joseph Perl. Since the fictional correspondents quote from genuine Hasidic texts, and since their letters allude to an actual conflict involving the author, the work invites readers to mistake at least part, if not all, of its satire for truth. The mockery ranges from crude devices for deflating exaggerated reputations, as when one Hasid writes to another that he was privileged to accompany their sainted leader to the outhouse, to sharper critiques of Hasidic obduracy, deviousness, immorality, and criminality.

  Perl (1773–1839) was among the most intriguing and disturbing figures of the Jewish Enlightenment, exemplifying the creative potential as well as moral hazards of that transitional moment. Had he not, as a teenager, been attracted by the fervor of Hasidism, he might not later have tried so aggressively to expose its seductive appeal. Committed to educating Jews as useful citizens, he received government help to establish a school that introduced science, the study of language, and a modern approach to traditional sources. Yet he was prevented from publishing some of his writings during his lifetime, just as he tried to prevent Hasidim from publishing theirs. He was denounced to czarist authorities, and in turn he denounced others—including the Hasidic rabbi Israel of Ruzhin for alleged complicity in killing a Jewish informer. His Yiddish translation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, unpublished during his lifetime, provides the model for some of the dodges and subterfuges of his own fiction.

  Perl was flirting with one kind of danger by provoking reprisals from Hasidim, but with another kind by exposing his fellow Jews to hostile Polish scrutiny:

  One nobleman asked if he knew the reason why the Jews sway during the Tfile, and the agent said,
“I don’t know.” The nobleman said to him, “I’ll tell you the reason—because the Tfile is like intercourse. That’s what’s written in the book Likutey Yekorim.5

  The fictional nobleman, alluding to a common devotional practice during the central Amidah prayer in Jewish religious services, quotes accurately from a treasury of sayings by Yekhi’el Mikhl of Zlotshev (1726–81), whose mystical fervor is conveyed in the image of cleaving to the Lord. Such erotic tropes, though unexceptional in Hasidic literature, might appear depraved to those controlling their political fate. Perl’s satire exploits his intimate knowledge of Jewish life and lore without apparent thought for corresponding failings on the part of those in power—or their failure to distinguish between the progressive Jew, represented by Perl, and his allegedly reactionary coreligionists.

  Indeed, Maskilim varied greatly in how much they trusted local authorities over fellow Jews; by the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially after the pogroms of 1881–82, few were as prepared as Perl to side with the Gentile perspective. Gentler in this respect was the Maskilic comedy of Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), affectionately known as the father of the modern Yiddish theater, whose career had its improbable start when he was a student at the Zhitomir rabbinical seminary and starred as the female lead in a school production of a newly circulating Yiddish drama. This was before the advent of a Jewish theater, and the play was never produced during its author’s lifetime.6 The government-run seminary was meant to educate modern Russian-speaking rabbis and teachers, but on graduating Goldfaden saw greater opportunity for cultural advancement in Western-style literature and dramatic entertainment.