No Joke

by Wisse, Ruth R.

  “Sometimes things here are so surreal we have to laugh at them,” says one of the writers of Eretz Nehederet. Yet in confronting the elements that make life “surreal,” many of those in the business of Israeli comedy are reluctant to see the connection between earlier Jewish humor and theirs. Much as Bellow and Roth flaunted their Jewish origin yet balked at being labeled as Jewish writers, creators of comedy in Israel freely admit their indebtedness to the United States but are skittish about their Jewish affinities. When I tell a couple of fans of Eretz Nehederet that I am studying the Jewish humor of Israel, they are taken aback, protesting that there is no Jewish humor in Israel. This reminds me of the banker Otto Kahn, who had converted to Christianity. Walking along the street one day with a hunchbacked friend, he passed a synagogue and confided, “You know, I used to be a Jew.” The friend replies, “And I used to be a hunchback.”

  And Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain did not know he was speaking prose.

  In 1988, a year before the sitcom Seinfeld was launched on U.S. television, the Israeli actor Shmuel Vilozhny produced a modest documentary film that used the same dramatic device of alternating between a comedy-club routine and the real-life situation on which the routine is based. Abaleh, kah oti l’luna park, translated as “Daddy, take me to the fair,” a line echoing a Hebrew popular song of the 1930s, is based on a trip that Vilozhny took to Poland in the company of his father and younger sister. In an opening monologue in the comedy club, Vilozhny describes his family of Holocaust survivors. It seems that there is a constant feud between his father, who refuses to buy any German-made products, and his uncle, who buys nothing but German-made products on the grounds that German goods are the best. How does he know they are the best? The uncle rolls up his sleeve to boast that the camp number engraved on his arm “never comes off.”

  This wins a laugh from the audience. Vilozhny evokes the strained relations between sabra-son and survivor-father in a tone that assumes his listeners share his impatience with the genocide that darkened their parents’ lives—and consequently, theirs. The comedian seems almost surly as he accompanies his father back “home”: “My only concern is that you’ll start speaking Polish.” The footage of the trio at the start of their voyage captures the discomfort of all involved.

  There are by now dozens of accounts of young people tracing their familial roots in eastern Europe, with or without their parents; Vilozhny’s footage of his own family’s visit to Auschwitz includes a tour group of young Jews on a similar pilgrimage. But in the way that comedy punctures factuality, what goes on between son and father breaks through the standard features of this journey with its obligatory visit to native town, family home, and intended final destination. At the heart of this film is a scene where Vilozhny senior describes how, as a boy, he would use fallen tree branches to play at dueling. Shmuel goes looking, and soon enough father and son have begun to fence, with the father teaching his son the rudiments of parry and thrust until they go at it for real, and the viewer starts to worry lest the game end in symbolic patricide or filicide. As the daughter observes, though, the sparring actually achieves the opposite effect, bringing each a momentary taste of the carefree childhood that only the father had ever truly experienced. The pressure of trying to spare his children the knowledge of what he had endured before becoming their Israeli parent had raised a wall of silence between the generations. Now they are convulsed in laughter, released by swordplay instead of wordplay.

  The town record book, which the family later consults, serendipitously reveals that the father is several years younger than he had thought—as if confirming what he had gained by introducing his children to his past. Conversely, Shmuel’s reaction to being at Auschwitz is to “want to stay silent for eternity.” The catharsis that releases spontaneous familial laughter allows this voluble comedian to be still.

  Abaleh, kah oti l’luna park broke through prohibitions about using the Shoah for comedy even as it deepened connections with the Jewish past. The child’s reference to his father in the diminutive—Daddy, rather than Dad—expresses this intimacy, with the Yiddish suffix yoking the Hebrew/Israeli noun to its Jewishness. To appreciate this accord, we need only think of the bitter letter written by Kafka to his father, and his even more haunting reflection that “I did not always love my mother as she deserved and as I could, only because the German language prevented it. The Jewish mother is no ‘Mutter,’ to call her ‘Mutter’ makes her a little comic.”21 The term Vater, too, is far from meaning the Jewish father, which leaves Kafka fatally and essentially alienated from his parents.

  For Kafka, the tragic component of life was less the threat from the Germans as enemy—though he takes full account of that as well—than the degree to which a foreign language had prevented what, in opposition, the Vilozhnys of the world have been able to forge. It is possible that Israeli immigrant parents were inhibited from speaking “freely” with their children as much by having to do so in an adopted language as by the trauma they hoped to suppress; this would give Jewish-style comedy and a Yiddishized Hebrew special importance in binding the generations—as happens in this film. The fact is that Shmuel’s father could not have taken his children on a trip with a happier outcome, or so his children have chosen to interpret it.

  Vilozhny’s embrace of the Shoah coincided with an upsurge of interest in the subject on the part of his generation that did not always result in the wry brand of Jewish humor he practices. By way of contrast, the writer David Grossman’s influential novel See Under: Love, published almost simultaneously with the release of Vilozhny’s film, elevated the trauma of an Israeli child doomed merely to imagine the Nazi beast above the trauma of those actually devoured by the beast in Europe. Despite concerted attempts by Israel’s leaders and cultural figure heads to reduce the traumatic aftereffects of the European genocide—among other ways, by emphasizing the dynamic potential of newly won political autonomy—survivors who reached Israel could not help but wish to record what they had witnessed, to memorialize the dead, and call for collective as well as individual mourning. The establishment in 1953 of Yad Vashem as a “living memorial to the Holocaust” and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 gave national expression to the attempts of citizens to cope with the losses as well as shocks that they had sustained. The Shoah cast a long, dark shadow over the country that had defied probability in its buoyant birth and development; many children of Israel’s pioneers and Europe’s refugees alike resented the burdens of history they were expected to bear.

  Yet Vilozhny was not alone in using humor to come to terms with an unwelcome past. Something even livelier occurs in Amir Gutfreund’s novel Shoah shelanu (Our Holocaust, 2001), an alternately heavy and lighthearted representation of Israelis who voluntarily assume the role of “grandchildren” of those who left no biological issue. Also a child of Polish refugees, the author creates a narrator who is removed enough from the unspeakable horrors experienced by survivors to investigate the ironies inherent in that term.

  Grandpa used to say, “People have to die of something,” and refused to donate to the war against cancer, the war against traffic accidents, or any other war. To avoid being considered stingy, he would occasionally burst into exemplary displays of tremendous generosity. He put on these shows with such proficiency that if not for us, his relatives, no one would have known the simple truth: he was a miser.22

  The children of those who came out of Europe had to piece together events that their elders were loath to describe, and determine what was theirs to avenge, redeem, or ignore. So, too, the narrator has to figure out the relative influences of inborn character and historical impact—nature and nurture—in the formation of those who surround him. Gutfreund’s narrator explains that his family’s Law of Compression was a wonderful invention of those who, “lacking brothers, uncles, fathers, and mothers, had done away with the requirement for precision,” and adopted as family anyone with a corresponding wish for adoption.23 Because “Grandpa” is not hi
s actual progenitor, the narrator can expose his foibles without an offspring’s rancor and figure out at his own pace where he stands in relation to his intriguingly quirky, murky inheritance. Gutfreund, himself a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli air force, saw no contradiction between his twin careers as officer and master of ironic fiction.

  Jewish humor remains, as it always has been, merely one of many possible responses to the anomalous experience of the Jews. But as long as it does remain one of those responses, suppliers will arise to meet the demand. Some of Israel’s most talented and popular writers—Meir Shalev, Haim Beer, and Etgar Keret—have developed individual styles of humor that stand at a philosophical remove from the exigencies of everyday life in the Jewish state. On my table are stacked books on Israeli humor, articles about Israeli humor, articles and books by Israelis on the humor of other nations, videos and DVDs of Israeli comedians and Israeli comedies, and assorted cartoons and clippings attesting to this comedy surge. One of Israel’s premier publishers recently issued a selection of anecdotes and jokes from a three-volume treasury collected by Alter Druyanov, who after his arrival in Palestine in 1922, anthologized Hebrew translations of Jewish humor, mostly from Yiddish. The editor and illustrator of the new volume of selections, the artist Danny Kerman, writes that Druyanov’s collections, the only books that his generation of Israelis needed no encouragement to read, informed his contemporaries’ idea of humor, period.

  And since comedy relies on immediate feedback, humor in Israel does have to satisfy Jews who constitute over three-quarters of the population. Joking depends on what the audience knows and feels. Israeli humor perforce plays on what Jews undergo. Some of the sharpest Jewish humor will keep bubbling up from below, letting the professionals know when a target is ripe for lampooning and when a boil has to be lanced. At least as long as Israel is the main target of Israel’s enemies, it will remain an incubator of Jewish humor.

  During the Second Intifada—the orchestrated suicide bombings of the 1990s that were Israel’s reward for the Oslo Peace Accords—a Jerusalem relative told me a joke she had heard that had “everyone rolling on the floor”:

  Sara in Jerusalem hears on the news about a bombing at a popular café near the home of relatives in Tel Aviv. She calls in a panic and reaches her cousin, who assures her that thankfully, the family is all safe.

  “And Anat?” Sara asks after the teenager whose hangout it had been.

  “Oh, Anat,” says her mother, reassuringly, “Anat’s fine. She’s at Auschwitz!”

  As against those who would object to the joke’s insensitivity or fail to understand it, the Israelis who laughed share a certain knowledge and sensibility. They know that as part of their education, Israeli teenagers are routinely taken on trips to Poland that include visits to the death camps where some of their ancestors perished. They may have felt a little queasy joking about the Holocaust, and such residual qualms would account for the explosive hilarity that comes with breaking taboos. The joke crosses the wires of anxiety over Jew-killing past and present, and revels in the forced recognition—surprise of surprises—that today’s danger may be greater than yesterday’s. It reassures us that the sense of “horror” spoken of by Reik persists in the recovered homeland. By acknowledging the infamous Nazi death camp as a refuge from what was intended to be the Jewish place of refuge, the joke offends both sides of the political spectrum—liberals who deny the ferocity of Arab aggression, and patriots who cannot acknowledge that Zionism does not fully safeguard the Jews.

  The joke’s reputation as a sidesplitter prompted me to tell it one evening to a pair of Israeli friends, Michael and Ruth Rabin, who spend part of every year in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michael is a pioneer theorist of computer science, and Ruth a former judge; both are connoisseurs and superb practitioners of the art of joke telling. But neither laughed—a response so unusual in our habitual repartee that it seemed to call for an explanation. Michael broke the awkward silence that follows an unappreciated joke with this counteroffering: “We used to say that there were two kinds of German Jews: the pessimists who went to Palestine, and the optimists who went to Auschwitz.” A child of the pessimists, he drew for his punch line on the unwelcome, long-resisted, politically improbable, yet ultimately comforting realization that security in Zion was more plausible than the once-assured comforts of Europe.

  Both jokes end on the same word, but the mature Israelis’ failure to laugh at its later version (unless I told the joke badly, or it lacked the punch in Cambridge that it would have had in Jerusalem) suggests that it may take longer than a lifetime for Jews to appreciate wit at the expense of their own formative assumptions of what Jewish humor is all about. Do you know the joke about the Polish comedian who boasts that the key to his talent is “t … t … t … timing”? The same principle holds true for humor at large. At a generation’s remove, Syrkin and Scholem could not appreciate Roth. Humor is delimited by chronology as much as by culture and language.

  Conclusion

  When Can I Stop Laughing?

  This is not the place to examine why I, a Jew, feel more threatened by those who would wipe out ethnic jokes than by those who unthinkingly make them. But it may be the place simply to record that I do.

  —Howard Jacobson, Seriously Funny

  History itself seems to be making fun of the Jewish tourist in Europe who now pays good money for an excursion to the Auschwitz death camp or for a ticket to see Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, whose walls are inscribed with the names of 77,297 murdered Czech Jews. Nothing in the works of Kafka is quite as weird as the presence of two competing Kafka museums in the city where he once imagined the hero of his novel The Trial being slaughtered “like a dog,” with only his shame to outlive him.

  Nor is history’s mockery confined to Jews. On a recent trip to Prague with a Catholic friend who was born in the city, she and I stayed at a cozy hotel that, as it turned out, had been converted from a police station—the very place where her mother had been interrogated when her father, a Czech patriot, fled the Communists in 1948. Yesterday’s tortures had become today’s conveniences, inviting us both to enjoy the ironies of our respective good fortunes. Of course, because Jewish suffering has lately trumped its Christian counterparts in Europe, Jewish kitsch wins out over its competitors; in Prague, many more images of Kafka than of the Czech religious martyr Jan Hus grace tourist posters and matchboxes.

  In one of the obligatory gift shops of Prague’s six refurbished synagogues, from among the tchatchkes and postcards I picked up a glossy paperback titled Jewish Anecdotes from Prague that I anticipated would contain legends of the golem—the figure fashioned from clay and allegedly brought to life by the sixteenth-century rabbi Judah Loew to protect the city’s Jews from impending attack. The legend is there, to be sure, but the Czech author of the book, Vladimir Karbusicky, a distinguished musicologist in his professional life, is more interested in the stories of his own time than in those of the distant past. A native of the city, he has collected the jokes of the Jews who formed about 20 percent of its population before the Second World War because he associates the city’s magic with their form of humor. The legend of the golem reminds him of the following anecdote that circulated before the Second World War:

  Leopold Munk has died. Always cheerful, healthy, ruddy, and suddenly … he has simply died. The family gathers around him, weeping and wailing. Into the room comes a certain Krauskopf [Curlyhead] who wants to know what is going on.

  “Don’t ask! Leopold Munk has died.”

  “Died? How?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Nonsense,” says Krauskopf, “I’ll resurrect him. Bring me a glass of wine.”

  Given the wine, Krauskopf raises the glass and calls, “Leopold, to your health!” He downs the wine, but there is no response from the deceased.

  Krauskopf shakes his head and says, “Bring me stronger wine. This was too weak.” They bring it and he calls in a louder voice: “Leopold, to your health. Arise!”
But the dead man lies still.

  The request for stronger wine is repeated once or twice more, until they bring Krauskopf the strongest wine. He drinks it and roars: “Leopold, I say: To your health! You are supposed to get up!”

  Leopold Munk doesn’t rise.

  Krauskopf looks thoughtfully at the deceased and then says in admiration: “Now that’s what I call dead!”1

  Death is a common subject of jokes, thereby feeding on our common anxieties, and humor normally sides with mortals who enjoy the advantages of life at the expense of the deceased. Serving up these old jokes, the author seems painfully aware that he may resemble the freeloader by benefiting from his own doomed attempts to resurrect the dead who told these jokes and savored this brand of humor. Indeed, the book itself, like the nostalgia on which the city’s tourism relies, suggests that all of Prague nowadays profits from a version of Krauskopf’s necromancy.

  The Talmud’s most popular tractate, Pirkei Avot (The wisdom of the fathers), teaches that “whoever cites his source by name brings deliverance to the world.” The rabbis honored not only the teaching that was passed down through generations but also the integrity of the process of transmission. In a similar act of homage, Karbusicky recounts this anecdote in the name of its teller, the popular Jewish humorist and cabaret entertainer Karel Polacek (1892–1945), who had performed it as part of his repertoire.

  Polacek the Jew was taken to the Terezin concentration camp in 1943, and from there to his death in Auschwitz; at about the same time, Karbusicky the Christian was sent as a slave laborer to Hamburg. When Karbusicky returned to Prague, by then under Soviet rule, he found employment in the Ethnographic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He collected Jewish anecdotes as part of his work, though their “antiauthoritarian” disposition made it prudent to keep them under lock and key. Forced to emigrate in 1969 (he found refuge in West Germany), he had to leave the humor collection behind, and was never thereafter able to retrieve it. He thus reconstructed this collection from memory and other anthologies, publishing it as homage to former Jewish classmates who went missing in Auschwitz. Macabre motifs, he points out, characterized Jewish joking long before the Holocaust.