No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  The German Sphere

  Though Jewish humor in the late 1930s crossed otherwise-sealed frontiers, it responded differently to the two regimes. Nazism was unlike Soviet Communism in offering no enticements to Jews. Since it aimed at their elimination and held no promise of a better world for all, it attracted no Leon Trotskys to its cause. The increasing threat to Jews under German rule brought greater moral clarity. Jews were targeted as Jews, humiliated as Jews, denounced as Jews, and finally forced into Jewish ghettos and murdered as Jews. Under Nazism, therefore, Jewish humor went mainstream only among a small liberal constituency and only until the war. In the ghettos and concentration camps, under German rule, Jewish humor became more internal, hermetic, contorted, and intense than what had once circulated outside their walls.

  In 1985 I joined a study trip through Poland with professors of the Hebrew University, several of whom had fled the country before the Second World War. One day, on a street in the town of Kaziemerz, as they were talking in Hebrew among themselves, they overheard one Pole remark to another, “That’s how they used to speak before the war.” One of the Israelis corrected him, “Not exactly. Before the war, ‘we’ spoke Yiddish, and now we were speaking Hebrew.” The Pole replied, “But that’s how you used to speak when you didn’t want us to understand.” This perceptive witness was accurately describing what the linguist Max Weinreich calls the linguistic style of yehudi beloy (Jew, beware), a way of speaking Yiddish that incorporates as many Hebrew loanwords as possible so that Gentiles who understand some Yiddish or German will be left in the dark. As Weinreich puts it (with the Hebrew in italics), “Zay shomea vos der orl iz magid [listen to what the Gentile is saying]” had less of a chance of being understood than the synonymous “her vos der goy zogt!”3

  Germans and Jews both developed furtive languages—the same strategy of secretive speech being put to opposite uses by predators and intended victims, respectively. Whereas Nazism specialized in what George Orwell called doublespeak to conceal its murderous intentions, Jews under Nazi rule used yehudi beloy to clarify their situation. Jews developed code words to warn of approaching Germans or their henchmen, to express the horrors of death and dying, starvation and deportation. A signal that a moment of danger had passed was nirtzeh, the heading of that part of the Passover seder when the major part of it is over; the festive term served a practical and psychological conspiratorial function, uniting celebrants of Passover against a new pharaoh:

  A bomb explodes at a meeting of Horowitz, Moyshele, and Shtolener.

  Who survives?

  Mankind.

  It helps to know that Horowitz was a code name for Hitler, Moyshele for Benito Mussolini, and Shtolener for Stalin, the man of steel.

  In common ghetto speech, Hitler was routinely referred to as Haman, villain of the biblical Book of Esther, and on the festival of Purim, when Jews eat hamantaschen to mark the evil schemer’s inglorious end, ghetto Jews looked forward to devouring Hitlertaschen.

  Jewish irony darkened with Jewish fate. Jews in hiding were called lamed-vovniks, an acronym for the legendary thirty-six (Hebrew: lamed-vov) saintly men for whose sake God keeps the world alive. In folktales, these anonymous just men escape notice as a feature of their humility; in ghetto irony, they escape notice in order to save their lives.

  A reliance on Aryan papers (arishe papirn) was mocked by the addition of the consonant “n” (narishe papirn, meaning “foolish papers”), as though to suggest that the subterfuge was bound to be exposed.

  Maxims were adapted to local conditions. To the motto inscribed over the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei, Jews added fun lebn: “Work liberates you—from life.”4

  Wit became drier and more compressed. Ghetto Jews quipped that they had turned religious: they fast every day as on Yom Kippur, they sleep in makeshift quarters as on Sukkoth, they are riddled like matzo on Passover, and so forth. Cleverness scored the victories that the victims could not. Habits of self-deprecation persisted, but under ghetto conditions it was sometimes hard to distinguish between condemnation and reassurance. Four things are unconquerable: the German army, the British fleet, the American dollar, and Jewish smuggling. Though the fourth of these symbols of power obviously subverts our expectations, Jewish smuggling in the ghetto was a form of triumph over those who allowed no traffic in or out.

  We owe our knowledge of ghetto humor to contemporary diarists and chroniclers—among others, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the team he assembled to preserve a record of Jewish life within the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of the joking recorded by Ringelblum was hermetic in the extreme, as in the wit of the candle seller who used the peculiarities of local pronunciation—in which lakht could mean either “light” or “laugh”—to advertise his wares:

  “Lakht, Jews, lakht for 20 groschen. They burn day and night without mercy. Lakht, Jews, lakht …” While a smiling crowd gathers in the narrow lane, the peddler shouts louder: “Buy, Jews, and may they burn on memorial days and during festive occasions, on days commemorating the dead, and God be willing, on days to commemorate the scoundrels! Lakht, Jews, lakht for 20 groschen and may Jews at long last be able to celebrate!”5

  The dialect makes it impossible to know whether the seller is asking to be rewarded for his humor or actually expected Jews to buy candles for the named purposes. Analogously, the hallowed nature of Ringelblum’s archival project, euphemistically called Oyneg Shabes—“celebration of the sabbath”—makes us reluctant to pluck comic items out of what was designed to be a comprehensive documentation of Jewish society and all that transpired within it. Some have even questioned the moral valence of discussing humor during the hurbn (Holocaust). But their worry is pointless: the Jews whose catastrophe it was could no sooner have dulled their wit than altered the fundamental powerlessness of their condition.

  Vilna, for example, resembled Warsaw in boasting an extraordinarily rich prewar repertoire of folk humor, some of it playing on the several languages Jews spoke in tandem. The Vilna proverb “Three things come too late: wisdom, regret, and the fire brigade” was funnier in Yiddish, where the first two terms, der sekhel and kharote, were borrowed from Hebrew, and the final, deflationary one, di pozharne komande, from Polish. Similarly, by a mere flick of consonants, Vilna Jews turned a call for progress, di tsaytn baytn zikh—the cliché “the times they are a-changing”—into its riposte, di baytn tsaytn zikh—“innovations grow stale.” No surprise, then, that along with songs and sayings, the Vilna Ghetto should have produced comedy revues like Di yogenish in fas, punning on “Diogenes [here, in two words, ‘the hustle’] in a barrel.” The title yoked the legendary Greek thinker, who was said to have lived in a barrel, to the reality of ghetto Jews chasing around frantically in their cramped space.

  Having forged their humor to express the paradox of a chosen people repeatedly devastated by history, Jews could hardly give up their trademark invention in the hour of their greatest need. To be sure, I have no record of either a Jew facing the gallows who actually indulged in gallows humor or any Jews joking while they undressed beside the pit in which they would be shot. Humor was never the main strategy of Jewish survival, but only a chronic habit of mind. When rumors began circulating in late 1942 about the uses that Germans were making of the human fat of their victims, people said to one another, “Here’s hoping we meet up on the same shelf,” or “Don’t worry so much about not eating. So the Germans will have a little less soap!”

  Some ghetto humor acknowledged that it was playing a zero-sum game. The ghetto saying “Jews, how fortunate you are that you don’t know how unfortunate you are!” congratulates Jews for the ignorance that will help to destroy them. Recorded as ghetto folklore in the Ringelblum archives of the Warsaw Ghetto is the sentiment I’ve quoted earlier, Opgehit zol men vern, di milkhome zol azoy lang doyern, vi lang yidn kenen oys’haltn, “God forbid that the war should last as long as Jews are able to endure it.” To the ghetto wit who coined the joke, the vaunted Jewish capacity for sur
vival can only be proved by constant testing, making Jewish resiliency both a response to hardship and its reinforcement. I take this expression as an acme of Jewish humor and recognition of its fatal potential. The merciless irony acknowledges that Jews had long since exceeded the bounds of normal existence.

  The historian Samuel Kassow notes that the vigorous wit of the early days of the Warsaw Ghetto became more and more attenuated toward the end.6 Avrom Karpinovitch, who assisted Dzigan in writing his autobiography, recalls the first appearance of Dzigan and Schumacher on their return to Lodz in 1947, two years after the end of the war. In the performance hall were remnants of the almost quarter-million Jews who once constituted this second-largest Jewish community in Europe. When the duo entered from opposite sides of the stage, Dzigan opened with the usual, Abi men zet zikh!, “As long as we meet again!” but instead of the usual laughter in response, the audience wept. On that occasion it took some time before the humor took hold.

  The Soviet Sphere

  When Poland was attacked simultaneously by the Nazis and Communists, Dzigan and Schumacher were among the relatively fortunate Jews who fled to the Soviet sphere. Since they could no longer perform in bombed and besieged Warsaw, they made their way to Kharkov and then Moscow, where they were welcomed and for a short time allowed to perform. Trained to recognize and exploit discrepancies between propaganda and reality, they were surprised to discover that so great was that gap in the so-called Worker’s Paradise, Soviet Jewish folk humor was way ahead of them.

  “What is the difference between Kolkhoz, the collective farm, and Kol Nidrei, the Yom Kippur prayer?”

  “Kol Nidrei means you don’t eat for a day; Kolkhoz means you don’t eat for a year.”

  Another witticism had it that there were three categories of citizen: those who sit, those who sat, and those who have yet to sit, the Yiddish zitsn meaning to sit in prison. In still another, Russia was likened to a streetcar where some can sit while the rest stand shaking. Even as they picked up these nuggets, the comedians were warned against ever indulging in such comedy, not only on stage, but also even among trusted friends. When Dzigan once privately joked about local conditions to the noted Yiddish poet Peretz Markish, he was scolded, “When you escaped the Germans you saved your skin. Now you must save your life.”7

  Jewish experience was never as contorted as under Soviet rule. All universalizing ideologies, whether regressive or progressive, oppose Judaism for its refusal to comply with their transcendent or homogenizing plans, but the Communist International expected Jews, because they had “no country of their own,” to lead the way in dissolving their collective identity. Communists with a Jewish past, like Karl Marx and Trotsky, were often the most extreme in forcing compliance on their own kind. The practice of religion was prohibited for all Soviet citizens, but Jews were forbidden, in addition to synagogue attendance and prayer, such religious-national markers as circumcision, kosher and Passover diet, observance of sabbath and the Jewish calendar, the use of Hebrew, and Talmudic study. As elsewhere in the world the modern Zionist drive for Jewish national self-liberation gathered strength, Stalin established a “Jewish autonomous region” that was supposed to provide an alternative Jewish homeland on the Manchurian border. Meanwhile, anti-Semitism, officially outlawed, persisted among the leadership and public at large.

  The contradictions of Communist life may well have been experienced by Jews more acutely than by other Soviet citizens, all of whom were instructed to adjust to a new concept of humankind. When Marx identified capitalism with the Jews, he was inadvertently acknowledging the strengths of Jews and capitalism alike. The Jewish way of life did indeed encourage many of the same features that exemplify capitalist society, described by one scholar as “innovativeness, willingness to take risk, and willingness to defer gratification through savings and education.”8 To these might be added another characteristic: gratification though humor. If Jews enjoyed a certain advantage in adapting to liberal democracies with their free market economies and incentives for initiative, the same features of Jewish life also helped them adapt to Soviet rule—except that adaptation in this case required undoing the way of life that had given Jews their skills of adaptation in the first place. Humor battened on contradictions like the one attributed to Moscow’s Rabbi Jacob Mazeh, playing on the Bolshevik leader’s change of his family name: “The Trotskys make the Revolution; the Bronsteins pay the bill.” The new totalistic faith would prove disastrous to Judaism, just as previous such challenges had done.

  Yiddish, the Jewish vernacular, created further complications. As I have already noted, Yiddish became differentiated from German and other European languages to the degree that Jews followed a way of life distinct from that of their Gentile neighbors. The separate language then reinforced the separateness that brought it into being. Yet Soviet rulers declared Yiddish the national language of the Jews at the expense of Hebrew so that it could serve as the vehicle of Sovietization and help to expunge their Jewishness. While this predicament applied to all Russia’s ethnic minorities—whose languages remained irreducible proof of the separate identities they were being asked to abjure—Yiddish was simultaneously the language of Jews throughout the world, many of whom retained close ties to Russia and Russian Jewish culture. For a time the Communist International used this Jewish international language to spread its message, providing Yiddish with government support that gave Soviet Yiddish writers an advantage over Yiddish writers in non-Communist Poland and the Americas. Several important Yiddish writers returned to Russia on that account. But the apple was poisoned: once the regime had more to hide than to advertise, the Yiddish writers were denounced as counterrevolutionaries on account of the foreign contacts they had been encouraged to establish. Soviet advantage worked the way that Yiddish enhances blessings as a prelude to aggravating the curse: “May you have the juiciest goose, but no teeth; the best wine, but no sense of taste; and the most beautiful wife, but be impotent.”9

  In one respect, however, Communism did accomplish its egalitarian and integrationist aims. The common experience of Sovietization turned Jewish humor into a popular Russian genre, and certain anthropological affinities between Jews and Slavs made for an easier interpenetration of their humor than was ever possible between Yiddish and German. The Jewish glaykhvort morphed into the Russian anekdot: “A Muscovite boasts of having been hired as a lookout in one of the Kremlin towers, keeping watch for the dawn of the world revolution. Asked if he isn’t bored in that occupation, he replies: ‘Yes, but it’s the ultimate in job security.’ ” This is adapted from a Yiddish joke about the shtetl Jew who is hired for a few kopeks a day to keep watch for the messiah. Asked about the paltry salary, he replies, “Yes, but it’s permanent work.” The crack has been attributed to the Hebrew poet Micah Joseph Lebensohn (1828–52), when as a young prodigy, he was jokingly offered this same job by the Vilna scholar Matthew Strashun.10 The joke crossed cultural boundaries with no apparent self-consciousness; in each case, the promise of eternal security undermines the system’s redemptive claims.

  To judge from their prominence in its creation, dissemination, and interpretation, the percentage of Jews in the making of Russian humor may have approached U.S. levels. Odessa was considered its capital:

  “How many Jews are there in Odessa?”

  “Five-hundred thousand.”

  “And the rest of the population?”

  “Jewesses.”

  “What’s the population of Odessa?”

  “One-and-a-half million.”

  “How many Jews?”

  “What are you, deaf?”11

  The overrepresentation of Jews in Russian comedy became so embarrassing that at a national gathering of Soviet humorists, Jewish delegates were urged to make jokes about other nationalities. One of them began to improvise, “Two Chinese are walking along the shores of the Yangtse River and one says to the other, “Listen, Haim …”

  Joking aside, however, Soviet rulers may have initially permitt
ed humor as an escape valve—a common explanation for the toleration of comedy in dictatorial regimes—but by 1927 they had imposed laws making satire punishable by imprisonment or worse. Joking in Russia became much more dangerous than drinking in the United States during Prohibition. Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the doomed poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled the first time that the couple heard the expression “Give us a man, and we’ll make a case.” It was in 1928 at a health resort, where two of their fellow guests were playing at Interrogation, a game of their own invention.12 One of the men had served in the “exterminating profession” (the CHEKA); the other was a so-called Nepman who had taken advantage of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s New Economic Policy to engage in petty trade, only to be arrested, as so many were, once the policy was repudiated. Reconstructing the roles they had performed in real life, the two men derive quite a thrill from their playacting.

  Mandelstam’s own 1933 parodic poem on Stalin, the barely disguised “Kremlin mountaineer,” elicited a similar thrill when he shared it with a circle of friends. Oral forms of humor were somewhat protected by anonymity and their ephemeral nature, but the literary species enjoyed no such protection. Some satirists, like Ilya Ehrenburg (The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, 1927) and Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov (The Twelve Chairs, 1928), managed to escape retribution. But most, including Mandelstam, did not. He was exiled twice, and the second time, in 1938, he succumbed to the intended consequence.

  Phases of Russian Jewish Humor

  Soviet Jewish humor evolved over its seven decades in response to political changes. The first phase was the brightest, despite the catastrophic ruin that had overtaken so many Jewish communities during the First World War, the Russian civil war, and the Russian-Polish war of 1919–20. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, many young Jews were more captivated by the innovative spirit of the times than troubled by the toll it was taking on their coreligionists.