Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  That the sophisticated chronicler of a society in transition should be misconstrued as a genial rustic is something worse than a literary embarrassment. Dickens is not interchangeable with Sam Weller, or Mark Twain with Aunt Polly, or Sholem Aleichem with Tevye. (And even the Tevye we think we know isn’t the Tevye on the page.) This quandary of misperceived reputation may possibly stem from the garbled attitudes of some of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants’ descendants, who inherited a culture—failed to inherit it, rather—only in its most debilitated hour, when it was nearly over and about to give up the ghost. The process of attenuation through competing influences had already commenced in the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe (and was to become Sholem Aleichem’s great subject). In the rush to Americanization, the immigrants, zealously setting out to shake off the village ways they had brought with them, ended by encouraging amnesia of the central motifs and texts of their civilization. A certain text orientation remained, to be sure, which their American-born successors would learn to bring to bear on Whitman and James and Emerson and Faulkner, not to mention Bloomsbury; but the more intrinsic themes of Jewish conceptual life came to be understood only feebly, vestigially, when, substantially diluted by the new culture, they were almost beyond recognition, or were disappearing altogether. Among the immigrants’ children and grandchildren, the misshapen shard was mainly taken for the original cup. And generations that in the old country had been vividly and characteristically distinct from the surrounding peasant society were themselves dismissed as peasants by their “modern” offspring—university-educated, perhaps, but tone-deaf to history.

  Now, toward the end of the twentieth century—with a startling abundance that seems close to mysterious—we are witnessing a conscientious push toward a kind of restitution. Something there is that wants us finally to see—to see fairly, accurately, richly—into the substance of Yiddish prose and poetry, even if necessarily through the seven veils of translation. The buzz of anthologists hopeful of gaining attention for Yiddish has always been with us, but a worshipful air of do-goodism, whether hearty or wistful or polemical, frequently trails these votary efforts. A serious critical focus was inaugurated more than thirty years ago by Irving Howe and his then-collaborator, the late Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg, with their thick pair of “Treasuries”—collections of Yiddish stories and poems enhanced by first-rate introductions. These were succeeded in 1972 by the Howe-Greenberg Voices from the Yiddish, a compilation of literary and historical essays, memoirs, and diaries, and again in 1974 by selections from the tales of I. L. Peretz, one of the three classic writers of the Yiddish narrative. (Mendele and Sholem Aleichem are the others.) The last two or three years, however, have brought about an eruption—if this word is too strong, “efflorescence” is not nearly strong enough—of dedicated translation: My Mother’s Sabbath Days, a memoir by Chaim Grade, translated by Chana Kleinerman Goldstein and Inna Hecht Grade; the extant parts of The Family Mashber, an extraordinary work long quiescent in the Soviet Union, by Der Nister (“The Hidden One,” the pen name of Pinkhas Kahanovitsh, who died in a Soviet prison in 1950), translated by Leonard Wolf; American Yiddish Poetry, the first of a series of scholarly anthologies projected by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav and designed to support the thesis that poetry written in Yiddish, composed on American soil and expressive of American experience, counts significantly as American poetry; the splendid new Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, a landmark volume brilliantly edited and introduced by Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk; In the Storm and The Nightingale, novels by Sholem Aleichem, lucidly translated by Aliza Shevrin; Richard J. Fein’s devoted rendering of the poetry of Jacob Glat-stein, and Ruth Whitman’s of Abraham Sutzkever; and doubtless others that have escaped me. One result of all this publishing activity is that Isaac Bashevis Singer, the sole Yiddish-language Nobel winner and the only Yiddish writer familiar in any substantial degree to American readers, can finally be seen as one figure among a multitude of others in a diverse, complex, and turbulent community of letters. Too often—lacking an appropriate cultural horizon and seemingly without an ancestry—Singer has had the look in English of an isolated hermit of language fallen out of a silent congregation and standing strangely apart. The current stir of industry among translators begins at last to hint at the range and amplitude of modern Yiddish literature.

  All these freshly revealed novelists and poets are, in one respect or another, the heirs of Sholem Aleichem, and if there is a single work among those now emerging in English that is the herald and signature of the rest, it is, unsurprisingly, Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, issued under the auspices of the newly organized Library of Yiddish Classics, of which Professor Ruth R. Wisse is the series editor. The translator, Hillel Halkin, an Israeli born and reared in the United States, an accomplished translator from Hebrew here tackling Yiddish for the first time, has supplied a superb historical introduction and a clarifying biblical glossary. If it is true that one need not be familiar with Wordsworth, say, before starting on Marianne Moore or the nature prose of Edward Hoagland, then it is just as true that one need not have assimilated Sholem Aleichem before entering the fiction of Chaim Grade or the poetry of Jacob Glatstein; but in both cases it’s not a bad idea. Sholem Aleichem provides, in ways weblike and plain, the exegetical groundwork for his literary successors: to race along behind his footsteps brings one quickly and intensely into a society, an atmosphere, a predicament, and, more than anything else, a voice. The voice is monologic, partly out of deepest intimacy, a sense of tete-a-tete (with God or the reader), and partly out of verbal ingenuity, comedy, theatricality—even the sweep of aria. “While the crowd laughed, clapped, and frolicked, he wept unseen” is a line from an early version of an epitaph Sholem Aleichem wrote for himself; Pagliacci was brand-new in 1892, and its imagery of the clown in pain, trite for us, struck hard at the inventor of Tevye. (An oddity of resemblance: the late Gershom Scholem, the monumental scholar of Jewish mysticism, also identified himself with the idea of a clown.)

  The eight Tevye stories are without doubt the nucleus of any understanding of how Yiddish leaped into world literature a hundred years ago (even though world literature may not have taken note of it, then or since). Professor Miron speaks of “the homiletic-sentimental streak” in Yiddish fiction before Mendele and Sholem Aleichem: “definitely antiartistic, inimical to irony, to conscious structural artistry, to the idea of literary technique, to stylistic perfection, and favorable to moralistic sermonizing, to unbridled emotionalism, and to stylistic sloppiness.” Tevye stands for everything antithetical to such a catalogue. What one notices first is not the comedy—because the comedy is what Sholem Aleichem is famous for, the comedy is what is expected—but the shock of darkness. Poverty and persecution: while not even Sholem Aleichem can make these funny, he can satirize their reasons for being, or else he can set against them the standard and example of Tevye (as Mark Twain does with Huck Finn). Tevye is not any sort of scholar, this goes without saying: he is a milkhiger, meaning that he owns a cow; “dairyman” is too exalted a word for the owner of a cow, a horse, and a wagon. But he is not a fool, he is certainly not a peasant, and he is by no means the malaprop he is reputed to be. Tevye is intelligent; more, he is loving, witty, virtuous, generous, open, unwilling to sacrifice human feeling to grandiose aims—and all without a grain of heroism or sentimentality. He is never optimistic—he is too much at home with the worst that can happen. And he is never wiped out by despair—he is too much at home with Scripture and with the knowledge of frailty, mutability, mortality. When his wife, Golde, dies, he quotes from the morning prayer—“What are we and what is our life?”; and also from Ecclesiastes—“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for that is the whole of man.”

  Tevye’s play with sources, biblical and liturgical, is the enchantment— and brevity—of his wit. (Halkin’s glossary insures that nearly all of it is gratifyingly at our fingertips
.) Though his citations are mostly designed for comical juxtaposition—“And it came to pass,” he will chant, with biblical sonorousness, about an ordinary wagon ride from Yehupetz to Boiberik—now and then a passage is straightforwardly plumbed, and then the glancingness of Tevye’s brush stroke only abets the resonance of the verse. That sentence from Ecclesiastes, for instance: Tevye doesn’t recite it in its entirety. What he actually says is “ki zeh koyl ha’odom” “for that is the whole of man”—and the six scant Hebrew syllables instantly call up, for Tevye and his readers, the full quotation, the tremor of memory aroused by its ancestral uses, the tone and heft of the surrounding passages. Again it is worth keeping in mind that Tevye is not to be regarded as an educated man: he is a peddler of milk and cheese. And still he has a mastery of a plenitude of texts that enables him to send them aloft like experimental kites, twisting their lines as they sail. By contrast, it would be unimaginable for a rustic in a novel by Thomas Hardy (Sholem Aleichem’s contemporary, who outlived him by more than a decade) to have memorized a representative handful of Shakespeare’s plays from earliest childhood, and to have the habit of liberally quoting from one or the other of these dozens and dozens of times, not only accurately and aptly but stingingly, pointedly, absurdly, and always to an immediate purpose; we would reject such a character as madly idiosyncratic if not wholly implausible. Country people don’t get Macbeth or Timon of Athens by heart, if they are literate at all. And yet Tevye is a vivacious, persuasive creature, warm with the blood of reality. In his world it is not only plausible, it is not unusual, for a milkman or a carpenter to know the Pentateuch and the Psalms inside out, as well as considerable other scriptural and rabbinic territory, and to have the daily and holiday prayer books—no slender volumes, these—backwards and forwards. Tevye’s cosmos is verbal. Biblical phrases are as palpable to him as his old horse. When he wants to remark that he has no secrets, he tosses in a fragment from Genesis: “And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?” When his only cow dies on him, he invokes a Psalm: “The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell got hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.” When his daughter Shprintze is being courted by an unsuitable young man, he draws from the Song of Songs: “a lily among thorns.” Chaffing a Utopian socialist, he turns to a rabbinic tractate, the Ethics of the Fathers, for its illumination of a type of artlessness: “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” It is all done with feather-light economy; he drops in only two or three words of the verse in question—an elegant minimalism—confident that his audience will recognize the source and fill in the rest. Or perhaps sometimes not so confident. Tevye’s quotations, Halkin comments, “depending on the situation and the person he is talking to, can serve any conceivable purpose: to impress, to inform, to amuse, to intimidate, to comfort, to scold, to ridicule, to show off, to avoid, to put down, to stake a claim of equality or create a mood of intimacy.” And he is not above “deliberately inventing, confusing, or misattributing a quote,” Halkin continues, “in order to mock an ignoramus who will never know the difference, thus scoring a little private triumph of which he himself is the sole witness.”

  These virtuoso dartings of language—the prestidigitator’s flash from biblical eloquence to its mundane applicability—have a cavorting brilliance reminiscent of the tricks and coruscations of Finnegans Wake, where sentences are also put under the pressure of multiple reverberations. Or think of Harold Bloom’s thesis of “misprision,” whereby an influential resource is usurped for purposeful “misinterpretation,” engendering new life in a new text. While these macaronic comparisons—Tevye in the company of James Joyce and Harold Bloom!—may have the selfsame farcical impact as Tevye’s own juxtapositions, they serve the point: which is that Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is about as far from the mind, tone, temperament, and language of either folk art or Fiddler-type show biz as Boiberik is from Patagonia. Tevye is the stylistic invention of a self-conscious verbal artist, and if he stands for, and speaks for, the folk, that is the consequence of the artist’s power. Tevye’s manner emerges from the wit and genius of Sholem Aleichem.

  Tevye’s matter, however—his good and bad luck, his daily travail and occasional victory, the events in his family and in his village and in the next village—belongs unalloyedly to the folk. What happens to Tevye is what is happening to all Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement; his tales are as political as they are individual, and it is entirely pertinent that Halkin provides a list of government-instigated depredations against Russian Jews from 1881 to 1904, including numbers of pogroms, blood libel charges, restrictions, expulsions, closed towns and cities, special taxes, identity passes, quotas, and other oppressive and humiliating measures. Tevye’s life (and the lives of the characters in “The Railroad Stories”) is assaulted by them all.

  Tevye starts off, in the first of the eight tales, gently enough, with a generous ladling of burlesque. Ten years ago, he recounts in “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” “I was such a miserable beggar that rags were too good for me.” Unexpectedly he and his nag stumble into an act of slapstick kindness, he is rewarded with a cow, and his career as a milkhiger is launched. In the second story, “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune,” he is taken in by a con man, a Jew even poorer than himself; when he catches up with the swindler, who by then has lost everything and looks it, Tevye ends by forgiving him and blaming himself. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” he quotes from Job. But with the third story, “Today’s Children,” and the remaining five, social and cultural disintegrations begin to rule the narrative. Against the stiff precedents of arranged marriage, Tevye’s daughter Tsaytl and a poor young tailor decide to marry for love. Tevye accedes, but he is discontent on three strong counts: custom has been violated and the world turned upside down; Tsaytl has rejected an older widower of some means, a butcher in whose household there will always be enough to eat; and, foremost, Tevye himself is a textual snob with aristocratic aspirations who would like to claim a learned son-in-law. Neither the butcher nor the tailor is capable of the nuanced study of di kleyne pintelakh, “the fine points.” Still, Tevye defends his daughter’s autonomy for the sake of her happiness, despite his certainty that she will go hungry. “What do you have against her that you want to marry her?” he teases the young tailor. In “Hodl,” a story that extends the theme of social decomposition, Tevye’s daughter by that name also makes her own marital choice—a student revolutionary, a socialist intellectual who is arrested and sent to Siberia. Hodl insists on following him into exile, and when Tevye has driven her in his wagon to the railroad station, he closes the tale in sardonic melancholy: “Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?”

  But the truly unthinkable is yet to come: in “Chava,” Tevye’s most rebellious daughter elopes with Chvedka, an educated Gentile village boy (a social rarity in himself), and Tevye is torn by anguish and terror. Chava has not only cut the thread of religious and historic continuity, she has joined up with the persecutors. The village priest takes charge of her because, he says, “we Christians have your good in mind,” and Tevye cries: “. . . it would have been kinder to poison me or put a bullet in my head. If you’re really such a good friend of mine, do me a favor: leave my daughter alone!” In Tevye’s universe the loss of a daughter to Christianity—which for him has never shown anything but a murderous face—is the nadir of tragedy, he sobs for her as for a kidnapped child. (Fiddler on the Roof conspicuously Americanizes these perceptions. When a pogrom is threatened, Chava reappears with her suitably liberal and pluralist-minded husband, who announces in solidarity, “We cannot stay among people who can do such things to others,” and even throws in a post-Holocaust declaration against Gentile “silence.” But Sholem Aleichem’s Chava returns “to her father and her God,” chastened, remorseful, and without Chvedka.) In “Shprintze,” the daughter of the sixth tale—her name, by the way, is more decorous than it sounds, deriving from the Italian speranza—i
s jilted by a well-off young rattlebrain who is fond of horses, and drowns herself. Beilke, the daughter of “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel,” marries a coarse parvenu who, ashamed of a “cheesemonger” father-inlaw, wants to pay Tevye off to get him out of the way, even offering him the fulfillment of a dream—a ticket to Palestine. Shprintze and Beilke are the center of “class” stories: as traditional influences lose hold, position based on material possessions begins to count over the authority of intellectual accomplishment, marking a growing leniency toward Gentile ways (typified by Shprintze’s feckless suitor’s preoccupation with “horses, fishing, and bicycles”). The aristocracy of learning—the essential principle and pillar of shtetl life—is breaking down; the mores of the outer society are creeping, even streaming, in.

  In the final narrative, “Lekh-Lekho” (the opening words of God’s command to Abraham: “Get thee out of thy country”), everything has come apart. Golde, Tevye’s wife, the pragmatic foil for his idealism, is dead. Beilke and her husband have lost their money and are now laboring in the sweatshops of America. Tsaytl’s husband, the young tailor, is struck down by consumption; and the hope of Palestine vanishes for Tevye as he takes in his impoverished daughter and her orphans. On top of all this, it is the time of the Beilis blood libel trial—a Jew accused, as late as 1911, of killing a Christian child for its blood. (This grisly anti-Semitic fantasy turns up as far back as Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.”) Tevye’s neighbors, after a meeting of the village council, are preparing for a pogrom. “Since you Jews have been beaten up everywhere, why let you get away with it here?” argues Ivan Paparilo, the village elder. “We just aren’t certain what kind of pogrom to have. Should we just smash your windows, should we tear up your pillows and blankets and scatter all the feathers, or should we also burn down your house and barn with everything in them?” To which Tevye replies: “If that’s what you’ve decided, who am I to object? You must have good reasons for thinking that Tevye deserves to see his life go up in smoke. . . . You do know that there’s a God above, don’t you? Mind you, I’m not talking about my God or your God—I’m talking about the God of us all. . . . It may very well be that He wants you to punish me for nothing at all. But the opposite may also be true. . . .” Ultimately the villagers are talked out of the pogrom—they want it, they explain, only to save face with the towns that have already had one. Instead, all the Jews in the village—among them Tevye’s family, including the returned Chava—are expelled by order of the provincial governor; and there the Tevye tales end. “Anyone can be a goy,” Tevye concludes, “but a Jew must be born one. . . it’s a lucky thing I was, then, because otherwise how would I ever know what it’s like to be homeless and wander all over the world without resting my head on the same pillow two nights running?”