Theater historians date the birth of the professional Yiddish stage from the evening in 1876 when Goldfaden performed comic sketches in a beer garden in Jassy, Romania. By the following year he was touring with his own Yiddish troupe, performing a repertoire of his own plays. Goldfaden was unlikely to overestimate the benevolence of the czarist government, which imposed an official ban on Yiddish productions in 1883 that forced him to light out for London and later New York.
One of Goldfaden’s best creations was Kuni-Leml, in the comedy The Two Kuni-Lemls (leml being a little lamb)—the male equivalent of the old maid in the marriage-broker joke I cited earlier, “She’s ugly and old, she squints, and has bad teeth … You needn’t lower your voice … [since] she’s deaf as well.” In a culture that hadn’t yet learned to call cripples “disabled,” and a theater that represented moral imperfections as physical defects, no caricature could have been crueler than Goldfaden’s description of Kuni-Leml, a twenty-year-old Hasid blind in one eye, lame in one foot, and a stutterer.
And Kuni-Leml was simple to the point of idiocy. When handsome Max, a university student, disguises himself as Kuni-Leml in a plot to secure parental approval for his, Max’s, marriage to their daughter Khayele (aka Carolina), he deceives not only the parents but also the infatuated and clueless Hasid, who lets himself be persuaded that Max is the “real” Kuni-Leml. Their encounter is a manic version of the ageless routine that Sholem Aleichem evokes in “Two Anti-Semites,” where disguise tests the very notion of identity.
KUNI-LEML: I m-meant to ask … for example, if I walk down the street and someone calls out to me, “Reb K-kuni-Leml! Reb K-kuni-Leml!” should I answer or not?
MAX (in an angry tone): No, you m-mustn’t answer, since you’re not K-kuni-Leml! Now r-run along home!7
By thus exposing his rival, Max convinces Carolina’s father to recognize the religious folly represented by the young Hasid. In the final scene, a chorus of university students chases the Hasidim off the stage, completing the triumph of modernity over obscurantism.
Even though Goldfaden’s original title, The Fanatic, almost certainly took aim at the obscurantists, the operetta he based on his play moderated the severity of the critique. When the curtain falls in the musical version, Kuni-Leml, having secured a bride of his own, is singing along with the chorus, and the hubris of Max the modernizer is shown up as almost equal to the stubbornness of the religious believer.8 A 1977 Israeli film adaptation, Kuni Leml in Tel Aviv, is similarly ambivalent toward easy assumptions of progress, and for similar reasons, suggesting that the threats to Jewish life from the temptations of modernity almost outweigh the perceived corruptions of entrenched tradition. Ultimately in both versions, music and dance sweep up the antagonists in familial as well as cultural comic harmony.
Hasidic Humor
Less obvious than the role of the Haskalah in the development of modern Jewish comedy is the role of the Haskalah’s favorite target, Hasidism. We may not customarily associate Hasidic ecstasy with laughter, but we should consider how, like ecstasy, laughter too overcomes indignities through an altered state of mind. The believer subordinates the material considerations of earthly life to the quest for divine perfection; the ironist makes fun of the gap between the two. To elevate the spiritual over the material, transcendence over immanence, Hasidic teachers employ paradox, contradiction, and incongruity—the very features that Freud identifies as staples of joking. Both mystic and comedian aspire to get the better of a world they are powerless to reform.
The Tales of the Hasidic master storyteller Nahman, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, are compendiums of inversion whose narrator tries to wean us from trust in manifest reality to allegedly profounder levels of perception. In Nahman’s most famous story, seven beggars bless a newly married couple with the words, “May you be as I am.” That is, the blind beggar confers the gift of insight, the hunchback the ability to shoulder the world, the stutterer—following Moses in the Bible—the key to cosmic mysteries, and so forth. Beggars become benefactors, presenting ostensible deformities as moral advantages while implicitly showing the pursuit of sensual pleasure as corrupting the senses. As in comedy, Nahman upends our expectations through dramatic reversals. In another tale, featuring a contest between a simple man and a wise one, we see how the latter cannot achieve through his merits what the former attains by trust. The wise man, an ideal Maskil, is exposed as a restless, compulsively miserable perfectionist, misled by his skepticism into self-destruction; the simpleton takes on honor and authority by joyously obeying the summons of “the King.”
One scholar has compared this dialectic tactic to the Talmudic expression adraba—ipkha mistabra, yet the opposite (of what was just stated) is the more reasonable. “It is the signal that the student must awaken to a logical reversal, … reconsider everything, distinguish anew between truth and falsehood.”9
The aphorism attributed to Nahman, “Nothing is as whole as a broken heart,” invites us to experience language itself as paradox; indeed, Hasidic storytelling occasionally severs altogether the relation of language to meaning. Deficiencies of conventional prayer are conveyed in the story (that has analogues in other cultures) of a boy whose whistle pierces the gates of heaven during the closing service of Yom Kippur, after the entreaties of the rabbi have failed to do so. In a more extreme version of this anecdote, a pious but ignorant water carrier prays passionately by intoning a single word, tamei—meaning “impure,” “unclean.” To protect the man from public mockery, and in deference to religious propriety, the rabbi of Kotsk asks him to substitute the contrasting word, tahor, meaning “pure,” as in pure of heart. The water carrier tries to follow this advice but fails; when he reports back to the saintly Kotsker that his prayer has been ruined in the attempt, the latter gives him permission to return to tamei. Sincerity trumps significance.10
Such habits of inversion in Hasidic storytelling were transmitted from redemptive fools to their successors, zany comedians. Through this same kind of verbal inversion the Marx Brothers would later overturn polite society, refreshing its language and puncturing the pretensions of people who think they are in command.
Another spring of corrective humor welled up from within Hasidism itself—this one aimed at the movement’s own excesses. A rich fund of stories arose around Hershele Ostropolier, hailing from the town of Ostropol in the Hasidic heartland. Hershele, a semilegendary prankster in the universal tradition of the trickster, is alternately on the right and wrong side of morality. He is capable of devouring a dish of dumplings that a mother begs him to leave for her hungry children, or instructing a browbeaten husband to reform his wife—with a whip. In this respect he owes much to Germany’s famed jester Till Eulenspiegel, who tricks the stingy out of their money, insults the high and mighty, and pays back other mischief-makers in kind. But cultural differences play their part. Where the German trickster is an archetypal social outcast, Hershele supports his wife and children. Intent on exposing the underside of his society, Eulenspiegel often has other people (including Jews) eat his excrement.11 Hershele, much more reserved, substitutes scatological rhetoric for the thing itself:
A wealthy Jew refuses Hershele’s appeal for a handout. Instead of a curse, Hershele rewards him with a blessing: “You and your children and your children’s children will remain prosperous until the end of days.” The tightwad wants this sanction explained, so Hershele obliges him: “When a pauper goes to the outhouse and accidentally drops a kopek into the pit, he would probably not reach in to pick it up. If a wealthier man attending to his needs dropped even a ruble into the excrement, he would almost certainly not stoop to recover it. Since it is said of the Lord of Hosts, “The silver is mine and the gold is mine,” having once dropped, say, fifty thousand rubles into you, would He be likely to dirty Himself by stooping to retrieve it?”12
Hershele pulls the comic lever here by means of a quotation from the prophet Haggai (2:18) to the effect that prosperity—all the silver and gold—is God
’s to bestow, which would be familiar to the average synagogue goer. The semantic drop from high to low, from Haggai into the pit, corresponds to the deflation of the miser—although whether the vulgar Hershele is offending religion or acting as its worldly standard-bearer is left ambiguous. In this connection, it is worth noting that according to Chaim Bloch (1881–1973), a scholar of Jewish folklore who assembled a well-researched collection of Hershele stories, those who had known the man attested that of his two miens—the pious and roguish—the former was dominant.13
Trickster humor was by no means confined to Hasidic territory. Among other wits who became known by name, one might mention Shmerl Snitkever and Leybenyu Gotsvunder in Hershele’s Podolia (Ukraine), Motke Chabad of Lithuania, and Shayke Fefer of Poland. Jewish beggars, or schnorrers, endorsed by a religion that requires high levels of giving, generated a brand of comic insolence by demanding gratitude from their benefactors. In the previous chapter, we saw how Heine’s Moses Lump invites a compliant Rothschild to polish his sabbath lamp. In Yiddish joking, a beggar turned away because the master of the house has suffered a financial reversal retorts, “So because he’s had a bad week, why should my family go hungry?” Asked to return the following day because of a lack of money at hand, the schnorrer objects, “If only you knew what a fortune I’ve lost by extending credit.”
When the twentieth-century Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91) began speaking before U.S. audiences, he developed a routine that contrasted the scarcity of English terms for poor person (pauper or beggar) with the abundance of its Yiddish equivalents: accompanying the plain oreman and evyon are the burned-out nisrof, the farshpiler who has gambled away his money, the once-wealthy yored who has lost his fortune, the betler and schnorrer who have turned poverty into a profession, the “mistress over a head of cabbage,” the “doyenne of shovel and poker,” or “one for whom the whole year is Passover—he hasn’t enough for a slice of bread.” In this comedy of inversion, U.S. prosperity is put to shame by the inventive richness of Jewish poverty.
Misnagdic Humor
In addition to Enlightenment satire and Hasidism’s multipronged comedy of inversion, a long tradition of rabbinic wit continued strong in the yeshiva circles of eastern Europe. Just as Samuel Johnson’s educated male society of London became known for its table talk, rabbinic scholars were touted for their sikhes khulin—their demonstrations of rabbinic wit. The appetite for this sort of humor in Lithuanian Jewish circles matched the Hasidic taste for the magical exploits of their leaders. Indeed, early collections of Yiddish humor contain as many stories about clever rabbis as they do about tricksters and matchmakers.
The microscopic examination of texts that is the hallmark of Talmudic learning produced, in addition to centuries of creative exegesis, an appetite for verbal ingenuity and appreciation for subtleties of the language. Since Hebrew was not vocalized, rabbis could frequently pun on a word to make a point. In one famous (and nonhumorous) example from the Talmudic Tractate Berakhot 64a, Rabbi Elazar says in the name of Rabbi Hanina, “ ‘Students of the sages increase peace in the world,’ as it is written, vekhol banayikh limudey adonay, verav shlom banayikh, And all your children shall be disciples of the Lord, And great shall be the happiness of your children (Isaiah 54:13). Do not read, ‘your children’ (banayikh) but rather ‘those who build you up’ (bonayikh).”14 This idea—that scholars spread peace—was later often cited ironically. But the formula, “do not read X but rather Y,” opened the door to myriad creative misreadings.
Another subgenre comprises anecdotes of how scholars refuse unwelcome petitioners and squelch impertinent critics:
“But you approved my earlier commentary on the Book of Job,” complains an author who has just been refused a rabbi’s endorsement of his new book. “Well, you see, Job is different,” replies the rabbi, “I thought that having already withstood so many hardships, he could survive another.”
A skeptic challenges the Malbim [acronym of the rabbi and scholar Meir Leibush ben Jehiel Mikhel Weiser, 1809–79] to tell him whether among all their ingenious legal fictions, the rabbis could not find a way of allowing smoking on the Sabbath. The Malbim replies, “Of course. If the burning end of the cigarette is placed in your mouth.”
A lawyer taunts the rabbi with a mock predicament: if the wall between heaven and hell collapses, which side should bear the cost of reconstruction? The rabbi replies: justice favors those in heaven, given that the fires of hell destroyed the wall. But the smooth-talking lawyers in hell would probably win the case.15
It goes without saying that the conservative purposes served by this wit were turned by opponents of the rabbis against what they took to be the absurd logic chopping of its practitioners.
In his study of jokes, the philosopher Ted Cohen highlights a special category of hermetic humor, which is accessible only to those versed in an arcane subject.16 Much rabbinic, or “yeshivish,” joking likewise rewards only insiders and shuts out Jews (let alone non-Jews) who are insufficiently steeped in Talmudic culture. The following joke’s punch line is visual:
At the height of a pogrom [a standard opening for modern Jewish joking], drunken thugs break into a house of study and make a rush at the boys who are at their prayers. When one of the thugs raises his axe over a yeshiva student, the intended victim utters the prayer for kiddush hashem—sanctification of the Holy Name—said by someone about to be killed for his faith. Momentarily spooked, his attacker demands that the other yeshiva boys tell him what his victim is saying. With lips compressed, they mutely motion the killer to continue what he is doing.17
Even supposing that listeners appreciated this subspecies of gallows humor, the person who laughs at the unspoken punch line would need to know, first, that Jewish law prohibits a blessing uttered in vain (brokheh l’vatoleh), and second, that one may not speak between the utterance of a prayer and its fulfillment. That obedience to these requirements would here result in the boy’s murder is the morally absurd twist that scares up the laughter.
The familiar theme of this joke is the Jews’ predilection for compounding the trouble they are in, but since part of the pleasure of jokes is intellectual, its hermetic nature heightens the pleasure of those who get it. In another version of the same story, a circumciser who is past his prime pronounces the blessing for circumcision and then mistakenly cuts the hand of the person holding the infant boy. When the man yelps in pain, the circumciser moans, “Oh, woe! A brokheh l’vatoleh!”
Those familiar with Yiddish joking—or for that matter, with any kind of male joking—may marvel that I have scanted eroticism and sex. Were these Jews so chaste, so observant of the commandments of modesty, that they avoided what dominates humor elsewhere? Yes and no. One evening in the 1970s when I dropped in to visit Professor Khone Shmeruk in Jerusalem—such visits were among the favorite evenings of my life—he and several guests who had assembled earlier, all male, were gathered around a thin book that they rapidly put away when I entered the room. Their schoolboy gesture piqued my curiosity. At my insistence, Khone later showed me Ignatz Bernstein’s collection of Yiddish sayings, only not the huge classic volume with which I was familiar. It seems that in an effort to satisfy both his scholarly obligation and sense of propriety, Bernstein issued a separately published edition of erotic and scatological material.
Wouldn’t you know that among all of Bernstein’s efforts, this offprint alone has been rendered into English—though not everything turns out as funny in translation. Vayber haltn, vos es shteyt is rendered in English as “Women grasp what stands,” but the Yiddish expression “as it stands” ordinarily applies to the text of the Bible. Fraytik, iz der tokhes tsaytik, “Friday, and the behind is ready,” conflates the alleged custom of spanking Jewish elementary students on Fridays (so that they will behave over the sabbath) and prescribed pleasures of intercourse for the sabbath.18 Anyway, you get the idea. Yiddish humor ventures into common male territory, but perhaps with more than the usual compunction. This is re
ason enough for me to honor the Yiddish scholars’ tact.
This New Year’s greeting card shows a Jew reciting the blessing of kaparoth before Yom Kippur: “We ask of God that if we were destined to be the recipients of harsh decrees in the new year, may they be transferred to this chicken in the merit of this mitzvah of charity.” The atonement fowl would then be ritually slain, and its equivalent value given as charity. Nicholas II’s face superimposed on this impending sacrifice would have amused Russian Jews in New York, where the card was printed, and recipients in Russia, if censorship did not intervene. Rosh Hashanah Postcard. © C. Stern. Russia, Early 20th Century. Collection of Yeshiva University Museum.
Women’s or Folk Humor
The masculine realms of Yiddish humor that I have been describing were complemented by a fourth, largely female domain where Sholem Aleichem claims to have gotten his start. As I mentioned earlier, in his autobiography he presents an alphabetical list of his stepmother’s curses as his first literary work. The inventory keeps getting funnier, as common slurs like donkey, fool, and idiot cascade into lists like this one for the letter pey: paskudniak (nasty man), partatsh (bungler), parkh (scab head), pustepasnik (wastrel), pupik (belly button), pipernoter (viper), pletsl (small pastry), petelele (buttonhole), pempik (fatso), pere-odm (savage), and pritchepe (quarreler or sponger). Torrential diatribe may not be experienced as funny by its target but certainly makes for great comedy at secondhand.
Though Yiddish cursing was by no means the exclusive preserve of women, the culture ascribes to them a special talent for verbal abuse. This can range from simple expletives, like a shvarts yor af dir (“may you have a black year”—a year of misfortune), to such ingenious maledictions as, “May you lose all your teeth, except the one that torments you,” or (to a man), “May you grow so rich that your widow’s second husband never has to work for a living,” whose pretzel twists show off their comic invention over and above the insult they deliver. With less formal education than men, women may have developed more freewheeling oral aggression. Men were wont to say that a hen that crows, a Gentile who speaks Yiddish, and a woman who studies Torah are not good merchandise.19 Perhaps, then, as a way of getting even, the woman with “nine measures of speech” became a staple of Yiddish folklore, and the harridan housewife an archetype of Yiddish theater. The latter tradition was still going strong in the Yiddish-accented, tough-talking Bessie Berger of Clifford Odets’s perennial U.S. favorite, Awake and Sing! (1935).
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