No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  The relatively innocent trickster of Yiddish joking becomes, in Singer’s stories, the demon luring a bored young wife into one kind of sin and a coarsened butcher into another. Professional male and female liars are caught in their respective snares and destroy each other more completely than they could a naive victim of their trade. A final demon survives the destruction of the Jews, asking rhetorically, “Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced?” Singer did not think that one could find a new kind of moral balance outside the code of Jewish law while doubting that modern man could “return” to the tradition’s discipline.

  The best known of Singer’s stories, “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Saul Bellow in 1953, serves up this dilemma as if in the familiar Jewish comic tradition. Gimpel is the name of a Yiddish cartoon character, while the Hebrew word tam, Singer’s term for fool, designates the simpleton among the Passover Haggadah’s four sons and the “simple man” of Nahman of Bratslav’s iconic story. We might also imagine the simpleton as the straight man of a burlesque team. Although the cuckold is a universal butt of comedy, none before Gimpel ever allowed himself to be married off to the town prostitute, or was ever complicit in his wife’s adultery to the point of “siring” and raising six children, none of who proves to be his own. The laughingstock of the town, he remains trusting because he worries lest doubting his wife may lead to doubting God. The posture of faith is indistinguishable from gullibility.

  Gimpel is not without his comic resources. When the Spirit of Evil comes to tempt him and asks, “Why do you sleep?” he replies, “What should I be doing? Eating kreplach?”29 But once the story has milked this comedy, something in it seems to snap, moving it from comedy to another plane of fiction. Gimpel’s unwarranted trust in others is credited with keeping him purer and happier than he would have been otherwise, and worthy of God’s grace, if such were to be had. The joke, in other words, becomes a fable. Singer first mines the humor of his protagonist’s excessive credulity, then shows its implications for a Yiddish-speaking Jewry that had just been massacred in Europe. His final sentence consigns the innocent to a heaven “where even Gimpel could not be deceived”—or where he learns that he has been the ultimate dupe.

  Yiddish was inherently contradictory: a mongrel language to preserve Jewish distinctiveness, “secondary” language that became mother tongue, and in the modern period, vernacular that generated a world-class literature. Jews were a people exiled from a promised land and the chosen people of an elusive God. They were untroubled by such contradictions. They required forms of speech that incorporated incongruity and sought out expressions that bordered on absurdity. They epitomized the betrayal of good in a world of evil—and for that reason, if no other, Yiddish humor knew that it dared not succumb to the weight of evidence militating against its very existence.

  Ultimately, however, even Sholem Aleichem could not always bear that weight. He admits as much in “The Haunted Tailor,” which retells a familiar story about a hapless teacher of Chelm who is sent by his wife to a nearby town to purchase a goat so that their starving children may have some milk and returns instead with a billy goat—never having noticed the difference. (In alternate versions of the story, the goat’s milk is required to heal the ailing rabbi.) The legendary Jewish fools’ town of Chelm—on par with Britain’s Gotham or Germany’s Schilda—is noted for unworldly scholars and rabbis who habitually propose absurd solutions to straightforward problems as well as manifest hopeless innocence in the face of evil. In all these ways the story recorded as “The Chelm Goat Mystery” was typical of the genre.30

  In Sholem Aleichem’s version, the poor man is a patchwork tailor from the fictional town of Zolodievke, Shimen-Eli by name, an otherwise-ordinary soul with a slightly inflated sense of his own importance along with a liking for drink that prompts him to stop at a wayside tavern on both the outward and homeward legs of his journey. His mission accomplished, Shimen-Eli boasts of his purchase to the innkeeper, a rogue who surreptitiously substitutes a male goat for the milking animal. Naturally, the incensed wife berates her schlemiel husband and sends him back to correct his folly, but also naturally, he stops again at the inn, where the innkeeper once again exchanges the animals so that the original seller is able to milk the nanny goat and send Shimen-Eli back home with his original purchase. As in the Chelm folktale, the tailor walks through the same process a second time, and Maskilic criticism has no better target than this Jew who repeats the patterns of his life without investigating their causality.

  But a joke stops being funny at the point that its consequence becomes fatal. Whereas the folktale ends with the rabbi’s pronouncement, “Such is the luck of Chelm that by the time a nanny goat finally reaches our town, it’s sure to turn into a billy!” Sholem Aleichem’s version does not stop with this outcome. A local council of rabbis takes up the tailor’s cause with its counterpart in the neighboring city; local crafts-people do the same and come to blows. But Shimen-Eli himself becomes convinced that the goat is a transmigrated soul of some dead antagonist, goes mad, and dies. The goat skips away scot-free. Sholem Aleichem concludes:

  Russian Jewish artist Anatoli Kaplan (1902–80) created lithographic editions of a number of works by Sholem Aleichem, including “The Haunted Tailor.” In this image, the tailor’s wife berates her husband for bringing home a goat of the wrong gender: “That is a nanny goat as I am a rabbi’s wife!” The children join in the mockery. The neofolk style of illustration is characteristic of Kaplan’s interpretation of Sholem Aleichem.

  “What is the moral of this tale?” the reader will ask. Don’t press me, friends. It was not a good ending. The tale began cheerfully enough, and it ended as most such happy stories do—badly. And since you know the author of the story—that he is not naturally a gloomy fellow and hates to complain … then let the maker of the tale take his leave of you smiling, and let him wish you, Jews—and all mankind—more laughter than tears. Laughter is good for you. Doctors prescribe laughter.31

  This tagline, on its own, would come to serve as a plug for the palliative benefits of Jewish humor. But as I observed in the introduction, prescribing doctors must constantly be mindful of the dangers of overdose. The careful reader of this tale cannot help noting that in it, Sholem Aleichem issues a powerful warning against just those dangers.

  For their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Montreal friends of ours decided to entertain friends who knew Yiddish with readings from Sholem Aleichem by a local Yiddish actor. We gathered eagerly in the improvised comedy club. The actor had chosen a funny story and performed it well, but there was less and less laughter with every sentence. The humor was simply too dense—too intimate, too good. Rather than continuing with the second Sholem Aleichem story, our entertainer switched to a sketch by the American Yiddish humorist Moishe (Mark) Nudelman (1905–67)—a tale that was thinner in substance and heavily doused with English. This went off much better, inadvertently showing us how much was gone from our culture as opposed to how much of its richness had been retained. As though he had foreseen this, Sholem Aleichem’s last will and testament instructed his family to gather for the anniversary of his death, his yortsayt, and read from his work in whatever language they understood.

  Sholem Aleichem’s influence on Yiddish was so strong that his language was mistaken for humorous in its essence. But though New York Jews may have accorded him the city‘s largest-ever funeral when he died there on May 13, 1916, his Yiddish writings never did go over big in the United States. The advent of hybrid Yinglish, like Spanglish, made it harder to appreciate intricate humor. In order to win new laughs from new audiences, Sholem Aleichem adaptations like Fiddler on the Roof—the musical version of his stories of Tevye the Dairyman—are obliged to alter at least as much as they retain.

  3

  The Anglosphere

  Let me entertain you

  Let me make you smile

  —From the musical Gypsy1

  When
and under what circumstances did Jewish humor become a marketable commodity, leaving the synagogue and Jewish study-house to take the public stage?

  With their entry into European society, Jews began making their mark in the arts; we have seen how writers like Heine and Kafka exploited the doubled perspective of outsider-insiders and insider-outsiders for comedy. This chapter charts a further step: namely, the penetration of non-Jewish society, first in England and then in the United States, by Jewish humor and Jewish humorists—to the point where, by 1975, an estimated three-quarters of U.S. comedy professionals, from Woody Allen to Henny Youngman, were Jewish. Moreover, much (though not all) of their comedy was itself perceptibly Jewish in its references and style.

  Jews had traditionally earned their keep in host societies by supplying necessary services and goods. How did they create a demand for Jewish joking?

  That they had often been the targets of humor is not surprising, given their long-standing political dependency and the delight taken by satirists in ridiculing alleged inferiors. The Roman writer Juvenal lampooned the Jews’ squatting and sponging; his compatriots derided their religious credulity; even the generally sympathetic fourth-century emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (Julian the Apostate) taunted their weakness:

  But now answer me this: Is it better to be free continuously and during two-thousand whole years to rule over the greater part of the earth and the sea, or to be enslaved and to live in obedience to the will of others? No man is so lacking in self-respect as to choose the latter in preference. Again, will anyone think that victory in war is less desirable than defeat? Who is so stupid?2

  One can see Julian’s point. Jews prided themselves on being the people chosen by God, “Lord of Hosts,” yet they boasted not a single general of the stature of Alexander or Caesar. The discrepancy between Jewish claims of election and their unhappy experience in other people’s lands provoked many sallies of this kind at their expense, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and many in between. All too many Western writers enjoyed ridiculing the Jews.

  Nor is it surprising that among themselves, Jews should have encouraged some merriment alongside their rituals of mourning. In the previous chapter I highlighted the ritualized cheer on the holiday of Purim, mandated by the Book of Esther with its portrait of a clumsy king and tale of triumphant political reversal. Many Jewish communities traditionally celebrated Purim as a funfest of inversions; over time, they cultivated entertainers like the Purim rabbi, wedding joker, and other roguish wits. But all these were strictly for internal consumption. The question, again, is at what point Jews undertook to turn their own brands of humor to the task of amusing their fellow citizens.

  I think the answer lies in the very concept of fellow citizens. The profession of Jewish comedy arose in societies where legal barriers separating Jews from their neighbors were leveled, but without necessarily establishing instantaneous trust between them. Liberal democracy invites free expression, including of the discomfiting sort. Already targets of mockery and adept at self-mockery, Jews had only to forge a new combination of the two for the titillation of a general audience that could, perhaps nervously, laugh along with those whom it did not yet fully trust. The process then proceeded apace: once liberal culture began ascribing a positive value to a sense of humor and comedy became king, the toleration of humor was overtaken by the expectation of humor, and Jews rushed in where they could earn their bread.

  One of the first to exploit the potential of Jewish comedy for an emerging liberal public was Israel Zangwill (1864–1926). Born in London to Jewish immigrants (his father was from Russia, and his mother was from Poland), Zangwill became a bar mitzvah in 1877, a year after the appearance of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—a book that both charted and quickened Britain’s removal of social barriers against Jews and Judaism. In this last of her novels, Eliot replaced the prevailing demand of full assimilation and Anglicization with a different ideal, which would come to be known as Zionism. Her hero discovers that he is a Jew, and that he wants to remain one, marry a Jewish woman, and help reclaim the land of his ancestors. So, too, Zangwill discovered that conversion to Christianity was no longer required as a ticket of admission to British culture and became for a time a British Zionist. In his fiction, inventing or perfecting a brand of integrationist humor that accorded well with the genteel satire of his milieu, Zangwill contributed to debates over what it meant to be an Englishman and a Jew.

  No one could have hoped to displace Shakespeare’s Shylock as the most memorable Jew in British literature, or in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, the despicable Fagin, who trains boys in the arts of stealing and deception. One way or another, as bankroller or pawnbroker, the shyster Jew of English literature would always be present in the British imagination, scheming to “jew” cultivated Christians out of their innocence and cash. Rather than fight this stereotype, Zangwill’s 1894 comic masterwork King of the Schnorrers turns it inside out, inviting the British to enjoy what they had reviled and feared. So you think Jews care only for money and contrive to get it by nefarious means? That they use their cleverness to exploit others without ever earning an “honest” penny through hard work? Very well (Zangwill seems to be saying), I will show you how charmingly they get it done—and in the process, how similar their scams are to ones practiced in the higher reaches of British society.

  King of the Schnorrers transposes the repertoire of schnorrer joking into a British milieu. Shylock’s hauteur doesn’t hold a candle to that of Manassah Bueno Bazillai Azavedo da Costa, every syllable of whose name recalls a Spanish Jewish ancestry that (at least in fiction) puts him atop the pecking order of British Jews. Indeed, refugees from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century had been the first Jews to “return” to Britain after the community’s expulsion by the edict of Edward I in 1290. They were followed by German Jews, fleeing persecution in central Europe, and lastly by the Russian immigrants who were pouring into England in Zangwill’s time. In this hierarchy of first arrivals, the impecunious da Costa lords it over his nouveau riche German Jewish compatriot Joseph Grobstock (thick stick), while both of them outrank the Polish newcomer Yankele, who wants to marry da Costa’s daughter. Collectively, the three Jews—da Costa the fallen “nobleman,” Grobstock the insecure bourgeois, and Yankele the penniless invader—parody their British equivalents in, respectively, the aristocratic, moneyed, and working class.

  To put readers at their ease, Zangwill situates his comic novel a century earlier, when Jews suffered from British liabilities that had since been overcome.

  In the days when Lord George Gordon became a Jew, and was suspected of insanity; when, out of respect for the prophecies, England denied her Jews every civic right except that of paying taxes; when the Gentleman’s Magazine had ill words for the infidel alien; when Jewish marriages were invalid and bequests for Hebrew colleges void; when a prophet prophesying Primrose Day would have been set in the stocks, though [William] Pitt inclined his private ear to Benjamin Goldsmid’s views on the foreign loans—in those days, when Tevele Schiff was Rabbi in Israel, and Dr. de Falk, the Master of the Tetragrammaton, saint and Cabbalistic conjuror, flourished in Wellclose Square, and the composer of “The Death of Nelson” was a choir-boy in the Great Synagogue, Joseph Grobstock, pillar of the same, emerged one afternoon into the spring sunshine at the fag-end of the departing stream of worshippers. In his hand was a large canvas bag, and in his eye a twinkle.3

  The chain of clauses in this opening paragraph of Zangwill’s novel recalls a time of prejudice and discrimination, or a period when British hypocrisy limited competition from those whose wealth it exploited. The historical drumroll stops at Grobstock emerging from a synagogue service that happens to be honoring a British monarch: “The congregation was large and fashionable—far more so than when only a heavenly sovereign was concerned.”4

  We come on Grobstock in the act of distributing coins of various denominations in a lottery system of his own
devising. As Grobstock tries to make a kind of game of his charity, the ostentatiously shabby da Costa exposes his philanthropy as no more than self-indulgence. (Indeed, superficial do-gooderism was then coming under fire in Britain as a disguised form of do-nothingism.) Contriving to have himself invited for a sabbath meal, and promised a gift of Grobstock’s cast-off clothing so that Mrs. Grobstock will not know they have a beggar at their table, da Costa begins to treat it as his own while it is still on its owner’s back. “Take care, you are sputtering sauce all over that waistcoat, without any consideration for me.”5 Nor does he then deign to wear the clothes he is given, selling them instead to a secondhand dealer.

  Manassah and his Polish sidekick Yankele examine a theater poster of a London play they then see from box seats—without purchasing tickets. Drawings by George Hutchinson accompany almost all editions of King of the Schnorrers, which has been in print since 1894.

  “Why did you sell my clothes?” Grobstock asks, insulted by the beggar’s disdain for his own finer attire. “You did not expect me to wear them?” da Costa replies. “No, I know my station, thank God.” Thus does the king of the schnorrers deliver a stunningly aggressive rebuke to the man who has tried to ingratiate himself with his alleged betters and ends by trembling before the judgment of his inferior.

  Here it is worth contrasting Zangwill with Heine when it comes to portraying Jews making their unorthodox way in a Gentile world. Whereas the German poet presents the Jew as a bewitched canine who gets to feel human only once a week, Zangwill’s Jew has never lost his regal bearing. Unlike Gumpelino and Hirsch-Hyacinth, who have traded in their names to climb the social ladder, da Costa flaunts every feature of his Jewish inheritance. The more expertly he works the system, the more we relish his challenge to its hypocrisies and abuses, and such conventions as working for a living or abiding by local institutional rules. It is the essential benignity of British society, despite its prejudices, that establishes the gentler tone of this social satire in which the worst thing one suffers is loss of dignity.