Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  In 1888—effectively overnight—this contemptuous view of Yiddish was overturned, and by a single powerful pen writing in Yiddish. The pen had a pen name: Sholem Aleichem, a Hebrew salutation that literally means “peace to you” (the familiar Arabic cognate is salaam aleykum), and conveys a vigorously affectionate delight in encountering a friend, or someone who can immediately become a friend, if not an instant confidant. Almost no phrase is more common in Yiddish—as common as a handshake. The pseudonym itself declared a revolutionary intention: Yiddish as a literary vehicle was at last to be welcomed, respected, celebrated. The name, like the writer, looked to a program, and Sholem Aleichem was already a prolific author of short stories and feuilletons when, at the age of twenty-nine, he founded a seminal Yiddish literary annual, Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek (“The Popular Jewish Library”). The money ran out in a couple of years, and the new periodical vanished. But the revisionist ardor of its first issue alone— an electrifying burst of promulgation and demonstration—permanently changed the fortunes of Yiddish. The despised zbargon was all at once removed from scorn and placed in a pantheon of high literary art, complete with a tradition, precursors, genres, a sense of historical development, and uncompromising critical goals—a conscious patrimony that, only the day before, no one had dreamed was there.

  It had not been there. The aesthetics of literary self-awareness, a preoccupation with generational classifications, issues of precedent and continuity—all these were fictions, the deliberate invention of Sholem Aleichem himself. It was Sholem Aleichem who, invoking Gogol and Turgenev as models, established the genres and identified a radical precursor: the novelist and critic Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, who wrote under the nom de plume of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler). In the very hour Sholem Aleichem was naming him the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Mendele was no more than fifty-two years old, in mid-career. According to Professor Dan Miron, a leading scholar of Yiddish letters (who reveals all these marvels in his enchanting study, A Traveler Disguised), “What was unimaginable in 1885 was taken for granted in 1895. In 1880 Yiddish writers did not suspect that they had a history; by the early 1890s they had already produced one ‘classic’ writer; before the century ended The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century was written in English for American readers by a Harvard instructor.” It was, in short, a process of historical mythmaking so rapid and extreme, and so bewitching, that the historians themselves swallowed it whole in no time at all. And Sholem Aleichem was the premier mythmaker and founder of that process.

  But why was Yiddish so disreputable that it needed a Sholem Aleichem to fabricate a grand intellectual pedigree for it? Like any other language, it did have a genuine history, after all: a living civilization had eaten, slept, wept, laughed, borne babies, earned its bread or failed to, and had, in fact, read and written stories in Yiddish for nearly five centuries. Contempt for Yiddish, moreover, was simultaneously internal and external—Jewish intellectuals as well as Gentiles of every class habitually derided it. The Gentile world despised Yiddish as a marginal tongue because it was spoken by a people deemed marginal by Christendom; that was simple enough. And while it is true that the prejudices of the majority can sometimes manage to leave an unsavory mark on a minority’s view of itself, Gentile scorn for Yiddish had almost nothing to do with the contumely Jewish social and intellectual standards reserved for Yiddish. The trouble with Yiddish, from the Jewish standpoint, was that it wasn’t Hebrew. Yiddish was the language of exile— temporary, make-do; it belonged to an unfortunate phase of history: an ephemeral if oppressive nightmare only lightened by the unquenchable hope of national restoration. Yiddish was an empty vessel, uncultivated, useless for significant expression and high experience. It was the instrument of women and the ignorant—categories that frequently overlapped.

  Hebrew, by contrast, was regarded as synonymous with Jewish reality. Besides being the language of Scripture, of the liturgy, of daily prayer, it was the sole medium of serious life, which could mean one thing only: serious learning. In a society where fundamental literacy was expected of everyone without exception, including women, and where the scholar was situated at the apex of communal distinction, “ignorant” signified insufficient mastery of Hebrew. Everyone, including women—who could recite from the Hebrew prayer book—had some degree of access to Hebrew. A young boy’s basic education began with the Pentateuch; if he never acquired much of anything else, he still had that, along with the daily prayer book, the Passover Haggadah, and a smattering of commentary. And of course Yiddish itself, written in the Hebrew alphabet, is peppered with liturgical and biblical allusions, as well as homelier matter in Hebrew— which is why, while a knowledge of Yiddish may assure an understanding of a sentence in German, the reverse is not so likely. From the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Hebrew remained a living language in everyday reading and writing use. It may have suffered severe popular contraction—practically no one spoke it—but it never became moribund. My own father, who wrote a rather formal Victorian-style English, would never consider writing in English or Yiddish when he wanted to address a letter to a person of learning—a rabbi he respected, or perhaps the headmaster of a yeshiva: in the world he was reared in (he was born in White Russia in 1892), Hebrew was the only appropriate vehicle for a civilized pen. It took—and gave—the measure of a mind. You might tie your shoelaces in Yiddish, but Hebrew was the avenue of thought and certainly of civility.

  When Enlightenment ideas finally spread to the isolated Yiddish-speaking communities of Eastern Europe, they arrived a century late and turned out to have a somewhat different character. Like the Gentile Enlightenment, Haskalah—the name for the Enlightenment movement among Jews— fostered the advancement of secularization and an optimistic program for the improvement of the common people. On the face of it, it might seem that Hebrew would have been left behind in the turmoil of the new liberalization, and that the language of the Bible would at least attenuate in an atmosphere where the claims of piety were thinning out—just as Latin, after the decline of the authority of Christian scholasticism, was gradually compelled to give way to a diversity of vernaculars. In Jewish society exactly the opposite happened: the progress of Haskalah only intensified the superior status of Hebrew and accelerated its secular use. As the temporal more and more replaced the theological (though these phrases don’t quite fit the Jewish sense of how spiritual traditions and this-worldliness are intertwined), Hebrew pressed more urgently than ever toward the forefront of intellectual life. Hebrew belles-lettres began to be taken seriously by temperaments that had formerly regarded stories and novels as a species of levity fit only for women and the ignorant—and therefore written exclusively in Yiddish. The first Hebrew novel—The Love of Zion, by Abraham Mapu—didn’t appear until 1853, but it was very quickly followed by wave after wave of explosively burgeoning literary forms—fiction, essays, poetry. Hebrew composition, which over the last millennium or so had been chiefly employed in scholarly responsa on ethical and juridical issues, was suddenly converted to high imaginative art. Not that original Hebrew literature had never before burst out in European Jewish experience: the majestic poets of medieval Spain had astounded their little historical span with lyrical masterpieces to vie with the Song of Songs; and the experimental poets of Renaissance Italy echoed Petrarch and Dante in Hebrew stanzas.

  But the influence—and domination—of Hebrew among nineteenth-century Eastern European Jews was so pronounced that it was presumed the literary stigma attached to Yiddish would never be overcome. And at the same time, a noisy rush of activism expressed in competing currents of idealism, cultural or political, was beginning to awaken a harassed community to the potential of change and renewal. The most ancient of these currents, faithfully reiterated three times a day in the prayer book, refreshed in every season by religious festivals geared to biblical agricultural cycles, seemingly the least political of all in its psychological immanence, was the sp
irit of national return to Jerusalem. Under the influence of Haskalah, the renascence of literary Hebrew nourished, and was nourished by, this irreducible grain of religio-national aspiration immemorially incorporated in traditional Jewish sensibility. The more secularized Hebrew became, and the more dedicated to belles-lettres, the more it found itself, by virtue of its being Hebrew, harking back to the old emotional sources—sometimes even while manifestly repudiating them. The Hebrew belles-lettrists might appear to be focusing on modernist issues of craft and style—particularly at the expense of Yiddish, which the Hebraists declared lacked all possibility of style—but the prestige of Hebrew was also the prestige of national consciousness.

  This was the cultural situation into which Sholem Aleichem thrust his manifesto for the equal status of Yiddish.

  He was born Sholem Rabinovitsh in a town in the Ukraine in 1859, only three years after the abolition of a Czarist conscription scheme for the assimilation of Jewish children, whereby boys were seized at age twelve and subjected to thirty-one years of military confinement. He died in New York in 1916 (three months after the death of Henry James), having been driven there two years before by the upheavals of war and revolution; but he had already fled Russia a decade before that, after living through the ferocious government-sponsored pogroms of 1905. No version or variety of political or social malevolence failed to touch the Jews of Russia, and Sholem Aleichem—whose fame, after all, was that of sprightly comic artist—omitted few of these brutalities from his tales. The comparison with Mark Twain that emerged in Sholem Aleichem’s own lifetime was apt: both men kept people laughing even as they probed the darkness—though Sholem Aleichem, for whom cruelty had an explicit habitation and name, never fell prey to a generalized misanthropy of the Pudd’nhead Wilson sort.

  As a boy, Sholem Aleichem had Pickwickian propensities, and entertained his family with mimicry and comic skits. His writer’s gift—reflecting the normal bilingualism of Jewish life—rapidly turned up in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Not long afterward, though, he acquired a third literary language. After a conventional cheder training (Bible and Talmud in a one-room school), he managed to gain admission to a Russian secondary school; the university education that would ordinarily follow was mainly closed to Jews. But his exposure to Russian studies enabled him to get a job as a Russian tutor in a Russified Jewish family of means—he eventually married his young pupil, Olga Loyev—and emphatically opened Russian to him as a literary instrument. Though his earliest serious literary venture of any kind was a novel in imitation of Mapu, called The Daughter of Zion and written in Hebrew, his first published articles appeared in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish.

  When he ultimately settled on Yiddish, he disappointed no one more than his father, a struggling innkeeper who was an enthusiastic disciple of Haskalah, and who had hoped his son would develop into an exclusively Hebrew writer. And much later, after Sholem Aleichem had become virtually an institution, and was celebrated as the soul of Jewish self-understanding wherever Yiddish was spoken, the language that nevertheless prevailed as the mother tongue of his household was not Yiddish but Russian; he raised his children in it. If this suggests itself as a paradox, it also reminds us of Isaac Babel, born thirty-five years after Sholem Aleichem, arrested and silenced by the Soviets in 1939.* Babel too wrote a handful of stories that might be described as revealing the soul of Jewish self-understanding. (One of these, “Shabos Nahamu,” with its Hebrew-Yiddish title, could readily pass for a romping fable of Sholem Aleichem’s, except for the Chekhovian cadence of its last syllables.) Whether because he chose to write in Russian, or for some other reason, Babel is not usually counted as a Jewish writer. This leads one to imagine what the consequences might have been had Sholem Aleichem, like Babel, committed himself wholly to Russian: it is highly probable that Russian literature might have been augmented by still another dazzling writer. What is certain is that there would have been no Sholem Aleichem. To produce a Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish is a sine qua non.

  That may appear to be an unremarkable statement. One might just as well say that to produce a Guy de Maupassant, French is a sine qua non; or that to produce a Selma Lagerlof, Swedish is indispensable. For these writers, though, there was no difference between the legacy of the literary mainstream and the daily language that seemed no more a matter of choice than breathing; for them literature was conducted in the vernacular. But Sholem Aleichem was faced with a cultural redundancy—internal bilingualism—known almost nowhere else in Europe (Ireland, with important differences, comes to mind). Yiddish was the common language of breathing—the people’s language—and Hebrew was the language of the elitist literary center. In these circumstances, to choose Yiddish, and to insist that it be taken seriously—that it become, if not the literary center, then one at least equally respectable—was a mettlesome and revolutionary act.

  In a way, a version of this revolution—a revolution in favor of Yiddish— had already occurred a century before, with the advent of the Hasidic movement: romantic, populist, anti-establishment, increasingly cultlike in its attachment to charismatic teachers. The Hasidic leaders, resenting the dominance of the stringently rationalist intellectualism that held pride of place in Jewish communal life, enlisted the Yiddish-speaking masses against the authority of the learned (where learned always meant learned in Hebrew), and offered instead the lively consolations of an emotional pietism. The movement caught on despite—or maybe because of—the fact that scholarliness was unstintingly prized, far above earning power: a scholar-husband was a great catch, and the bride’s father would gladly support him if he could; so, often enough, would the bride. (My Russian grandmother, for instance, the mother of eight, ran a dry goods shop while my grandfather typically spent all his waking hours in the study-house.) The corollary of this, not unexpectedly, was that simple people deficient in learning were looked down on. At its inception, Hasidism was a popular rebellion against this sort of intellectual elitism; it threw off rigor and lavished dance, song, legend, story, merriment, and mysticism (the last too frequently fading into superstitious practice) on ordinary mortals whose psalms and prayers were in Hebrew but whose grammar was at best lame.

  While there lurked in Hasidism a kind of precedent for an unashamed turn to the Yiddish tale—including at least one fabulist of Kafka-like artistry—Sholem Aleichem’s revolution had another source. Like the belletristic passions of the Hebraists, it belonged to the Enlightenment. For the Hasidim, stories told in Yiddish were the appurtenances of a fervent piety; for Sholem Aleichem, they were vessels of a conscious literary art. Hasidism concentrated on devoutness and turned its back on modernism. Haskalah, with its hugely sophisticated modernist aesthetics, had little tolerance for Hasidic revivalism (though it later made literary capital of it). And yet the objectives of the two movements, the popular and the elevated, met in Sholem Aleichem. He had in common with the Hasidic impulse a tenderness toward plain folk and the ambition to address the human heart unassumingly and directly, in its everyday tongue. And he had, through the refinements of Haskalah, all the complexities of high literary seriousness and what we nowadays call the strategies of the text. This combination of irreconcilables—a broad leniency and a channeled pointedness—may be what fashioned him into the master of irony we know as Sholem Aleichem.

  Of course we do not really know him—not in English anyhow, and with the passing of the decades since the Nazi extirpation of Yiddish-speaking European civilization, fewer and fewer native readers of literary Yiddish are left. For Americans, Sholem Aleichem has always been no more than a rumor, or two or three rumors, all of them misleading. First there is the rumor of permanent inaccessibility because of the “special flavor” of Yiddish itself—its unfamiliar cultural premises and idiomatic uniqueness. But every language is untranslatable in precisely that sense; Robert Frost’s mot—poetry is what gets lost in translation—is famous enough, and the Hebrew poet Bialik compared translation to kissing through a handkerchief. Yiddish is as amenable to translation
as any other language—which may mean, despite certain glorious exceptions, not very. As for the historical and cultural idiosyncrasies inherent in Yiddish, they are not especially difficult or esoteric, and for the most part require about as much background as, say, managing to figure out what a name day is in Chekhov. If there should be any more trouble than that, the impairment will be in the unaccoutered contemporary reader, not in the passage: Sholem Aleichem is no more disadvantaging than Milton might be to anyone who comes to him innocent of biblical referents. Even so, saturated in allusiveness, Sholem Aleichem is a thousand times closer to Dickens and Mark Twain and Will Rogers than he can possibly be to more encumbered figures; he was a popular presence, and stupendously so. His lectures and readings were mobbed; he was a household friend; he was cherished as a family valuable. His fiftieth birthday was a public event, and at his death hundreds of thousands filled the streets as his cortege wound through the Bronx and Harlem, down to the Lower East Side and into Brooklyn for the burial.

  And still he was not what another rumor makes him out to be: simpleminded, sentimental, peasantlike, old-countryish, naive, pre-modern—the occasion of a nostalgia for a sweeter time, pogroms notwithstanding. It would be easy to blame Fiddler on the Roof for these distortions, but the Broadway musical—to which all those adjectives do apply, plus slickness—didn’t arrive until 1964, and Sholem Aleichem had been misrepresented in this way long, long before. In fact, these well-established misconceptions may have been the inspiration for the emptied-out prettified romantic vulgarization (the Yiddish word for it is shund ) typified by the musical’s book and lyrics: exactly the sort of shund Sholem Aleichem, in seeking new literary standards for Yiddish, had battled against from the start. Whatever its success as a celebrated musical, the chief non-theatrical accomplishment of Fiddler on the Roof has been to reduce the reputation of a literary master to the very thing he repudiated.