No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  The narrator, speaking autobiographically as “Isaac Babel,” recalls a time about 1910 when he, a Jewish boy from a respectable family, stood at the perilous intersection of art and commerce—scalping tickets for opera and melodrama. At the center of the action is the performance of a Sicilian melodrama starring Di Grasso himself in the role of a village shepherd whose true love betrays him with Giovanni, the proverbial handsome man from town. Only about fifty people have shown up at the premiere, and until this point, the performance has been a dud. But then:

  In the third act, Giovanni, the visitor from town, met his fate. The village barber was shaving Giovanni as he sat with his powerful masculine legs sprawled out over the proscenium. The pleats of his vest shone beneath the Sicilian sun. The stage set portrayed a village fair. The shepherd stood in the far corner. He stood there silently, among the carefree crowd. He hung his head, then raised it, and under the weight of his burning, fixed gaze, Giovanni began to fidget and squirm in his chair. He jumped up and pushed the barber away. In a cracking voice Giovanni demanded that the policeman remove all shady and suspicious-looking people from the village square. The shepherd—played by Di Grasso—hesitated for a moment, then smiled, soared into the air, flew over the stage of the Odessa City Theater, alighted on Giovanni’s shoulders, and sunk his teeth into his neck. Muttering and squinting at the audience, he sucked the blood from the wound.26

  It was at this spot in my reading that my muscles gave way. That malevolent smile and catapult across the stage was funnier than anything I had expected. Behind the actor’s lunge was the author’s glee: he had drawn the bow and fired the shot that sank the poor villain, setting off the helpless reader. The irrepressible joy of that revenge was like the improbable reversal of superior jokes. In fact, at that point the whole story turns a corner. The troupe’s next performances are sold out. The boy’s precarious situation is resolved: he had lifted his father’s watch and pawned it with his unreliable boss, Shvarts (Black), who will not return it until Shvarts’s wife persuades him to do so. Relations between this Shvarts and this wife, “a woman as robust as a grenadier and as drawn out as a steppe, with a crinkled, sleepy face peeking out at its borderland,” are as mysteriously passionate as those played out on the theater stage. This laughter-inducing art compresses the swoon of melodrama into the vise of wit and makes us feel, like the boy, that we are seeing life for the first time “as it really was.”27

  Of course, had the audience laughed in the story, the performance would have bombed. Babel’s artistic catapult corresponds to Di Grasso’s leap but reverses the mood, so that a mortal injury onstage has a hilarious effect on those reading about it. The narrator is working at emotional cross-purposes to the subject, much in the same way that the cartoon mouse Jerry invites laughter when he wounds Tom the cat. Humor, a permissible form of aggression, can work at the expense of those being pummeled.

  But there is more to it than that. In “Di Grasso” the author’s relation to his enterprise and readership complicates the relation between the narrator and his subject. Babel the writer professes to be offering the same kind of merchandise as the scalpers—namely, salvaged seconds from Europe’s finery that seem better suited to the flea market than to the Temple of Art. The dramatic tension of the story derives from a high-stakes gamble: that great art can beat all odds. The comedy exposes how much is at risk where you least expect it.

  How much was at risk? At the time of writing, Babel was in danger of losing not his shirt in the way of the scalpers in the “dark year” of the story but rather his life in the Soviet Union purges that Stalin was then swinging into high gear.

  Beginning in 1928, and with increasing severity, the Communist state apparatus had been enforcing Stalin’s decree that writers and artists serve its political purposes. Writers like Kulbak and Babel could hardly have anticipated the penalties for perceived deviation. In a 1934 speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers, published in Pravda, Babel flirted dangerously with Stalin’s directives for art: “Respect for the reader. I am suffering from a hypertrophy of that feeling. I respect the reader so much that it makes me numb and I fall silent. And so I keep silence.”28 Babel’s listeners laughed, yet his irony was suspect. “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” with satire or mockery emphatically included under the same rubric, had been made punishable under Article 58/10 of the Soviet criminal code.29 The man with the bushy mustache had Babel killed on January 27, 1940. I have no doubt that my knowledge of Babel’s fate contributed to my tension and its release in reading the story, as though I felt, through Di Grasso’s lunge, the author’s joyous revenge on the man who stole away his sweet life.

  Postwar Humor

  The precarious function of humor under conditions of mortal threat is the subject of Jurek Becker’s novel Jacob the Liar, published in Communist East Germany in 1969—the same year as Portnoy’s Complaint in the United States. A contemporary of Roth, Becker (1937–97) was born in Poland, survived the war years in the Lodz Ghetto, and afterward remained in East Berlin, trying to earn his living as a writer in the German Democratic Republic for media that were as strictly controlled as under Stalin.

  Becker’s father, who had survived with him, urged his son to write a work extolling the heroism of a ghetto acquaintance who had kept a radio in defiance of Nazi decree. Becker instead produced a comic study of a man, Jacob, who pretends to have a concealed radio. Having once heard—during his interrogation in the German police station—a snippet of news of the advancing Red Army, Jacob uses its promise of liberation to dissuade his friend Kowalski from rushing toward certain death. Jacob is made the unwitting source of hope for a widening circle of those let in on the “secret,” based on Kowalski’s assumption, that he owns a radio. He keeps supplying invented news, scoring an occasional miniature victory, as when he retrieves a scrap of newspaper from a German privy. Jacob dare not disabuse the ghetto inhabitants of their faith in his lies without puncturing the hope that his lies alone can supply. Deception becomes the ghetto’s lifeline much as Becker’s humorous inversions keep us enjoying a story about mass murder.

  In fact, Becker found in the tale of Jacob the Liar a means of subverting Soviet-German censorship. Camouflaging the parabolic application of the novel to repressive East German rule, he compared it instead to the Jewish condition before the war. Jacob reflects: “Had I been born more intelligent or imaginative like Sholem Aleichem—what am I saying, even half as much would have been enough—I would be able to invent ten times more and better than those who write in the newspaper.”30 This suggests that both Jacob and the author are in the tradition of the Yiddish humorist whose comic “inventions” for the readers of their day were likewise meant to obscure reality.

  But was this true? Whether or not Sholem Aleichem’s humor encouraged Jewish self-deception, at a time when there were still alternatives to the European constraints that were hemming the Jews in, the function of much of the joking under Hitler and Stalin was rather the opposite—to free some truth from within a punishing system of lies. In the spirit of what Germans called flusterwitze (whispered jokes), it expressed otherwise-forbidden feelings and knowledge.

  Freud describes galgenhumor (gallows humor) as the ego’s refusal to be compelled to suffer, to accept distressing reality. “It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”31 This may be insightful as far as it goes, and helps to account for the pleasure of a joke like the one about two Jews before the firing squad who are asked whether they have a final wish. One asks for a cigarette. The other says, “Shush, Moshe! Don’t make trouble.” Turning the occasion inward to mock the excesses of Jewish passivity and accommodation momentarily obscures the executioner’s threat, offering the ego the momentary pleasure of mastery over humiliation. More than supplying pleasure, joking in extremis could also speak truth where power was wielded through webs of deception and truth was forcibly prohibited.


  In the end, though, whether the exercise of wit made the best of a doomed situation or encouraged fatalism depended on the real possibilities of escape. If it accommodated a threat that might otherwise have been overcome, humor was lethal; if it was truly a last resort, it could be restorative. Becker’s post-Holocaust comedy evades the problem by describing an outcome that history had already determined. In his novel, Kowalski and Jacob do not escape death. To that degree, Becker’s depiction of creative lying and its (limited) uses may have alerted readers in the German Democratic Republic to the direness of their own condition.

  With the passage of time after the end of the war and absorption of the enormity of genocide, however, “Holocaust humor” came into its own, especially in the West. The passage of the years was bound to suppress moral inhibitions about handling this material, and reduce, if not eliminate, considerations of decency or truth. Every branch of art would sooner or later make use of the greatest massacre ever staged—and before long, political demagogues would be denying that any such mass murder had taken place, aiming not for humor but rather for intensified damage to Jews and the Jewish state. That has left it to the exercise of sound judgment to distinguish good taste from bad in fiction, film, and other genres and media.

  Feel-good comedy about the murder of European Jewry is almost inevitably reductive kitsch, as in, for example, Roberto Benigni’s movie Life Is Beautiful (1997). But what about films like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942), or Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968)? As satires of Hitler and Nazism, their appeal depends on our removal from the scene. The first two films, produced just before and during the war that the United States fought against Hitler and Nazism, were too raw for contemporary critics and audiences. They did not find it funny when the actor playing Hitler in the Lubitsch comedy says, “Heil me!” Although Lubitsch considered this kind of humor a weapon in the war, exposing the weakness of those who claimed German invincibility, critics accused him of making fun of the tragedy.

  “Springtime for Hitler” number from Mel Brooks’s production of The Producers. In the film, the audience slowly moves from horror to laughter as it realizes the show is a send-up, and this same process was reenacted in the script’s reception as humor about the Holocaust became more acceptable. Courtesy MPTV images.

  The Producers was not originally popular at the box office, either, even though it won Brooks the Academy Award for best original screenplay. But both the film and its spin-off musical gained traction over time, just as, in the movie itself, an audience watching a performance of “Springtime for Hitler” is initially shocked by its audacity, then confused and uncertain about how to react, and finally relieved and amused to discover that they are expected to laugh. Timing matters not only in these films but also in relation to the events they spoof, indicating that certain satire turns funny only after time has dulled its sting. Ecclesiastes (3:4) is right about this as about so much else: there is a time to laugh, and there is a time to refrain from laughing. Blessed is the society that learns to distinguish the difference.

  5

  Hebrew Homeland

  There is no subject in the world that the Jewish joke will not target.

  —Danny Kerman, Israeli artist

  “There is not a great deal of humor being created in Israel, and most of what exists is not very funny, at least not to non-Israelis.” Joseph Telushkin’s opinion is widely shared. So, too, is his explanation for the alleged dearth of Israeli wit: that Jews in Israel can deal with their problems directly and don’t have to settle for the substitute gratifications of humor. “Israelis, for example, don’t joke much about their Arab opponents; they fight them.”1

  This deduction is based on two interlocking assumptions: the relation of Jewish humor to powerlessness, and the relation of Israel to power. According to the first, one wouldn’t joke if one could get things done. Does not Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman rely on humor in inverse proportion to the control he wields over his life? At the loss of a daughter he fillips, “Whatever God does is for the best. That is, it had better be, because try changing it if you don’t like it!”2 Tevye mocks his failure to keep his daughters in line the way other cultures make fun of the cuckold for his inability to rule his presumptive domain. His comedy turns resignation into acquiescence.Along the same lines, Reik, writing after the Second World War, finds in Jewish humor “not only something serious, which is present in the wit of other nations too, but sheer horror.” By horror, Reik means the crushing forces that prevented Jews from determining their fate and turned them into the “marionettes of history,” unable to save their children from the lime pits and crematoriums. Reik believes that only through joking are puppets transformed into human beings. “Yehovah has forbidden the Jew of our time to express his tragic experiences in a way appealing to a world that is hostile, or, at best, indifferent. But by conferring upon him the gift of wit, his God has given him the power to speak of what he suffers.”3

  By this logic, the need for Tevye’s jokey acquiescence in his personal powerlessness or wit as creative compensation for political impotence would disappear once Jews gained independence in a land of their own. But this brings us to the second assumption—that Israel supplies Jewish power.

  Zionism was indeed built on the hope that Jews would control their destiny once they recovered their ancestral homeland. The Zionist project was daunting, envisioning a radical break with Jewish life in the Diaspora. National liberation required of Jews not merely political consolidation, as had occurred in nineteenth-century Italy and Germany, or the reclaiming of independence, as with Polish nationalism, but rather a complete geopolitical, cultural, and psychological reversal. Moving in the millions from communities they had come to regard as home, leaving ancestral graves behind, Jews would have to drain the swamps of the Land of Israel and make its desert bloom, turn the language of their sacred texts back into their everyday vernacular, and assume responsibilities for political functions they had been delegating to others for almost two millennia.

  Predictions of a humor-free Israel were in line with this vision of a radical break with Jewish life in exile. Herzl, we recall, in his imagined version of a Jewish homeland, saw no further use for the German Jewish jokesters Gruen and Blau. The image of the native Israeli became the sabra, a local fruit sweet on the inside but prickly on the outside, signifying a toughened, even aggressive exterior. The archetypal sabra was said to lack patience for introspection, ambivalence, and the attendant neuroses that had generated Jewish humor in the past.

  But der mentsh trakht un got lakht, a Yiddish expression whose English equivalent is “Man proposes and God disposes”—except that in the Jewish version, man proposes and God laughs. Once the Jewish state was actually established in 1948, both assumptions—the relation of Jewish humor to powerlessness, and the relation of statehood to power—were sorely tested. For one thing, “political normalcy” brought its own kind of limits. Before long, the Bible’s description of the angels in Jacob’s dream going “up and down” the ladder (Genesis 28:12) was being applied to the revolving door of Israeli immigration and emigration, the Hebrew terms for which (aliyah and yeridah) are inseparable from the moral connotation of ascent to and descent from the Land of Israel. Instructed to illustrate aliyah and yeridah, an Israeli art student drew a cartoon of Israeli schleppers hauling a sofa up the stairs of a Brooklyn home, pairing the associations of Jacob’s dream with the reality that some of the student’s compatriots had come to dominate a sector of the New York City moving business.

  Pretty soon, the unfunny Israeli became a target of humor. The Yiddish comedians Dzigan and Schumacher, who had “ascended to” to Israel in March 1950, developed a routine in which a young officer in the Israeli army is putting a new recruit, who happens to be his own father, through morning drill:

  “You have to forget you are a father! Here, I’m your superior. We are both soldiers, and you have to follow my comm
ands. Hakshev! Attention!”

  “Nahumke, when you want to shout at me, hold your tongue. When I was your age, you still had to wait seven years to be born. Show respect for your father!”

  “I’ll do that at home! Here, when you hear ‘hakshev,’ you have to stand straight as an arrow, without batting an eye.”

  “Oy, vey, the eggs want to be smarter than the hens.”

  “Father, you’re laughing? I’ll soon have you crying like a father.”4

  The skit, which upends the ever-haunting biblical story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, spoofs the young country’s attempt to impose the discipline needed for its protection. The Diaspora, represented by the father, mocks the attempt at regimentation, to which it also voluntarily submits. Yiddish balks at the superiority of Hebrew, but knows it must stop laughing and learn to soldier. The son abrogates the fifth commandment—or rather, relegates it to the home—but his threat to have his father “crying like a father” implies that he expects his parent to remain as tender toward him as ever. The Yiddish comedians use the perspective of the perpetually powerless to puncture the self-assurance of the Zionist project—of which they had become a part.

  Shimen Dzigan as Golda Meir. Dzigan survived the war in the Soviet Union, in prison and a labor camp. He arrived in Israel in March 1950, and his performances there adapted the irreverence he had practiced in Poland and Russia to the new Jewish state.

  As for the expectation that Jews would no longer need humor to the same degree as in the past, national self-emancipation tragically failed to produce the predicted political normalcy. Hostilities against Israel increased over time, and now there was no longer any place to run to. In an older joke that had circulated from one end of wartime Europe to the other, a Jew reports having received a visa for Argentina. His friend asks, “So far away?” The Jew answers, “Far away from what?” That joke could not work in Israel, the place where Jews had come home. Thus, the second assumption about the demise of Jewish humor in an independent homeland was not only disproved but also stood on its head, as Israel became the target of the most lopsided war in history.