Heveinu Sholom Aleichem

...As if that matters in the light of the greater scandal of the chicken bones, wildly funny as it struck many of the congregants...

...and, of course, an ironic self-referential study of literary sleight of hand...

...Sholom Aleichem is different...

...The dominant quality of Sholom Aleichem's work, then, seems to me not his wit, or verbal brilliance, or playfulness, remarkable as all these are...

...At some point we would also have to admit that Sholom Aleichem's success as a stylist has frustrated our editorial choices, at least in part...

...In his ambiguous person he seems to straddle old world and new...

...Petersburg society...

...The strain of this divided existence, and the resentment too, shows in their work...

...The Mottel stories can be casual, offhand, charming, even mischievous, but then suddenly Sholom Aleichem will drop to a fierce irony, a harrowing sadness...

...In some ways it's the very typical Jewish story...

...The hijinks of an adventurous boy, so favored in American and English writing, is something (I would guess) that Sholom Aleichem must have chosen to write about only after conscious deliberation, as if to show his fellow Jews in Eastern Europe and in the American slums what life might be, or in their long-lost youth might once have been...

...Mottel shows us what has been lost...

...There are times, reading Sholom Aleichem in the pulsating original, when I think we ought to have put out a Yiddish reader for the fortunate few who can use it, leaving translation to the gods...

...Ruth Wisse is Chairman of the Jewish Studies Program at McGill University, Montreal...

...Still, even in the saddest and most burdened Yiddish writing, there is something else shown about the life of Jewish children, and now, in retrospect, this seems to form an overwhelming positive contrast to the literatures of our century...

...She is the author of'The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, The Shtetl and Other Modern Yiddish Novellas, WThe Well...

...Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose anecdotal style owes much to Sholom Aleichem, occasionally forces the serious mien of his stories with ser-monettes on good, evil, and the meaning of existence...

...A good many of Sholom Aleichem's stories are drawn from familiar or once-familiar folk tales and anecdotes...

...Remember I told you how startled I was to find that all the correspondence between the author and his family, his wife and children, was in Russian, obviously the language of the home...

...It's as you say: he actively challenges our notion of the denouement or solution, avoiding the verdict, the finality, of what would usually be an unhappy fate...

...For the author of these works is a sophisticated literary man, living at some remove from the insular and cohesive society he delights in depicting...

...God's mighty prophecy to Abraham of a promised land is applied by Tevye to himself with ihe caustic inversion of all the terms...

...he is a self-conscious artist, canny in his use of literary techniques, especially so in his use of the monologue, which in his stories may seem to be meandering as point-lessly as an unemployed Jew on market day in the shtetl but which keeps moving toward a stringent and disciplined conclusion...

...Take as an example the brilliant little story, "A Yom Kippur Scandal...

...between this narrator and the readers of the story, who are in effect challenged to figure out what to make of him...

...Pretty bitter stuff...

...While many of his contemporaries and even some of his successors were hampered by the novelty of Yiddish as a modern literary language, Sholom Aleichem turned the fluidity and newness of Yiddish prose style to penetrating advantage...

...The normal novel lays human destiny out as a one way trip, with important encounters, intersections, and moments of decision that determine one's rise or fall, success or failure, happiness or misery...

...In "Dreyfus in Kasrilevke" the narrator is placed within the action, he tells his "stories" (the reports he reads in the paper about the Dreyfus case) to other Jews in the little shtetl of Kasrilevke...

...But he has an eye for the life about him...

...Both scandals are serious, but in the eyes of the rabbi, one of Sholom Aleichem's innocents, the first seems a sin against man, the second a sin against God, and thereby the second is the greater...

...She labors within the same rounds of work and obligation set out for her by her mother...

...He is full of that spontaneous nature which Jewish upbringing has not yet suppressed ("Upon one leg I hop outside and—naturally straight to our neighbor's calf...

...The stature and personalities of Tevye...

...And now, in reading Sholom Aleichem, I find myself growing nervous, anxious even as I keep laughing...

...Thus, in "A Yom Kippur Scandal," the question of the visitor's money—was it ever really there...

...He embodies the essential values of Eastern European Jewish culture in the very accents and rhythms of his language, in the pauses and suggestions, the inside jokes and sly references...

...Some of the children's stories, like "Robbers" and "The Guest," are not at all carefree...

...3. Sholom Aleichem often uses in these stories a narrating figure that might be called "the clever Jew," one who is rather worldly though still tied to some of the old ways of piety...

...Irving Howe to Ruth Wisse We've been stressing, so far...

...And would you like to hear the rest of the story...

...Before him stories could be brought to an end...

...I wonder whether he could have kept the "comedy" going much longer...

...Raised in a Ukrainian shtetl...

...But Mottel does not yet know this, or Mottel pretends not to know it— who can be sure which...

...Almost all of his best comic stories hover on the edge of disaster...

...2. Sholom Aleichem is suggesting rather slyly that, really, there are far more important things in the world than the resolution of an external action, suspenseful and exciting though it may be...

...Yellow sunflowers, sweet-smelling grass, fresh air, fragrant earth, the clear sun—forgive me, these are not meant for you...

...Unlike Tevye, Sholom Aleichem encouraged his children's Russification, realizing that the centrifugal force of change would leave little of the old way of life intact...

...a mockery of tyranny...

...Perhaps all that I'm saying is that in the world of Sholom Aleichem there are still some remnants of community...

...If you follow the line of the plot, it traces nothing less than the breakup of an entire civilization...

...Like a true musician, he enjoys showing the speed and grace with which he can skip from one note or one tone to another...

...a Marxist critique of capitalism...

...Lecture on any other Yiddish writer—Mendele, Peretz, Asch, Grade, the brothers Singer—and your words will illumine, clarify, edify...

...HEVEINU SHOLOM ALEICHEM NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF SHOLOM ALEICHEM Irving Howe to Ruth Wisse * We bring you . Reading through the Sholom Aleichem stories we have brought together, I have an uneasy feeling that this is a Sholom Aleichem seldom before encountered...

...Sholom Aleichem, then, seems to me a great writer who, like all the Yiddish writers of his moment, was close to folk sources yet employed them for a complicated and individual vision of human existence...

...the bare anecdote on which the story is based becomes an occasion for revealing the deepest feelings of a culture, yet Sholom Aleichem's own quizzical voice is also heard at the end...

...I doubt that any translation can get this across...

...Characters who affect too traditional a language are either sanctimonious hypocrites, like the members of the Burial Society in the story, "Eternal Life," or con-men of whom Sholom Aleichem provides a peerless variety...

...He confronts all the things that happen to him, or forces himself upon life again and again, and the sum of these trials shapes the rhythm, constitutes the meaning, of his existence...

...Reading Sholom Aleichem is like wandering through a lovely meadow of laughter and suddenly coming to a precipice of doom...

...What we have is an author who works best by indirection, in the smaller modes of fiction, from the worm's angle of vision, and with apparently flimsy materials...

...Nowadays his name has become such a byword for folksy good humor, innocent "laughter through tears," that we're surprised to rediscover the undertone of threat in his work...

...did someone steal it...

...Sholom Aleichem uses the nuances of Yiddish to communicate the degree of a speaker's integration into the traditional culture, or of his deviation in any direction—towards the "German" enlightenment, the Slavic identification with the folk, the higher pretensions of St...

...In Sholom Aleichem, then, the balance between collectivity and individual, between Jewish tradition and personal sensibility, is very fine...

...he would invent a speaker, give him a story to tell, and the merest pretext for a tale—the amusement of a fellow passenger, the enlightenment of a stranger to town, etc...

...That means terror and joy, dark and bright, fear and play...

...5. Sholom Aleichem knew intuitively that the boundary line between comedy and tragedy is always a thin and wavering one— and for Jews, often nonexistent...

...The positive characters are those who tend neither inward nor outward but speak a perfectly balanced tongue...

...I have a few speculations: 1. Sholom Aleichem is persisting in the old tradition of oral storytelling (though, in fact, he is a literary artist and not an oral storyteller) which yields pleasure through leading the listener on, teasing him further and further...

...Let no innocent reader be alarmed: the stories are just as funny as everyone has said...

...The end of the nineteenth century, that very critical period for East European Jews, when they were still thickly rooted in their traditions but freshly vulnerable to social and political changes, provided great artists with a unique literary opportunity...

...By the end he is a widower, supporting a destitute widowed daughter...

...The exchange of letters is abridged from the introduction to that book, which will be published this spring...

...It's also difficult to distinguish in translation, as Sholom Aleichem does in the original, the many degrees of social climbers who oil their Yiddish with Russian phrases to ease the way up, and then slip comically on their malapropisms and mistakes...

...Yiddish, the common language, was ripe for the kind of harvest yielded during the Renaissance, when Western European writers in an analogous period of secularization and rising national awareness, plowed their vernaculars with heady expectations of gain...

...of reality to art...

...A man is what he is to begin with, even Mottel, the child...

...The Mottel stories are notable because the note they strike is not a frequent one in Yiddish literature...

...This is Lear on the heath, but as his own jester, Tevye, who is actually defenseless against the barrage of challenges and attacks that lay him low, should have been a tragic victim...

...And this gives him strength and security as a writer...

...fathers may be strict, mothers tearful, brothers annoying, but love breaks through and under the barriers of ritual...

...At the beginning Tevye "makes a fortune," becomes a dairyman, and begins to provide for his large family...

...the comic quest for identity...

...In Yiddish literature the family is still a cohesive unit...

...At the end they refuse to believe him...

...asks one of his narrators...

...Sholom Aleichem does not hesitate to register the psychic costs of traditional Jewish life, costs in denial, repression, narrowness...

...Tevye is attacked (albeit mildly) by his peasant neighbors and forced to flee from the land to which he feels he has as good a claim as anyone...

...after him they could hardly be begun...

...To see Sholom Aleichem in this way seems a necessary corrective to the view, now prevalent in Jewish life, that softens him into a toothless entertainer, a jolly gleeman of the shtetl, a fiddler cozy on his roof...

...The dangers of sentimentalizing on the one hand or falling into cynicism on the other become all too threatening when attempting a balanced humanism in the face of this kind of barbarity...

...Sholom Aleichem doesn't stop there, for at the end he leaves the story up in the air—it is a characteristic narrative strategy of his—so that we don't know whether the stranger really was robbed, or who did it, or how the problem was solved...

...the other that a youth should be discovered at the service with chicken bones hidden away, a violator of the fast...

...You see the point...

...Perhaps in a kind of tacit rebellion against the heaviness, the weighted ethicism, of Jewish life, Sholom Aleichem makes Mottel into something of a scamp, after the death of his father the cantor, becomes a little businessman, selling the cider and ink that his over-imaginative brother manufactures ("Jews, here's a drink: /Cider from heaven/If you order just one/You'll ask for eleven...

...So I'd like to keep in balance the two Sholom Aleichems, the traditional and the modern, who as we read him, are of course really one...

...As distinct from the normal novel, which develops a single architectonic structure, growing from introduction to a central point of resolution, Sholom Aleichem's major works beat like waves against a shore, one chapter resembling and reinforcing the last in variations of a theme...

...And so on...

...Reading the last chapters of Tevye...

...You have only to look at one of his earliest efforts, the thinly disguised autobiographical novella where the wealthy young heroine, who has been playing Chopin by moonlight, rushes through the garden into the arms of her indigent tutor to the following momentous dialogue: He: Polinka...

...Am I wrong...

...I thought it was very fine when the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof placed Tevye, in the finale, on a revolving stage, as though he were simply taking his world along with him wherever he went...

...It's the old literary knot of form and content...

...But doesn't it also comment bitingly on the relation of the artist to his audience and his material...

...It is narrated by a travelling salesman...

...Or should we stick to the compulsively naive and cheerful...

...whatever that might mean...

...It's easy to mock the high falutin' readings this story has received, but those who catch its serious import are not wrong either...

...to demonstrate the demoralizing effects of persecution...

...The story follows the Jewish habit of answering a question with another question: all life is a question, and if you ask me why, I can only answer, how should I know...

...of the audience to its artists and environment...

...the shrewd journalist, attuned to every nuance of socialist, Zionist, or assimilationist politics and polemics...

...Sholom Aleichem lives at a time when stories could be begun but not always brought to an end...

...Tevye is a particularized Jew with his own nuances and idiosyncracies, even as we also tec-ognize in him a shtetl Everyman...

...He can use these combinations to achieve both comic and sentimental effects...

...but as long as we can hear that voice, we know the world is not yet entirely mad...

...The deepest assumptions of a people, those tacit gestures of bias, which undercut opinion and rest on such intangibles as the inflection of a phrase, the movement of shoulders, the keening of despair, the melody of a laugh—all these form the inner substance of Sholom Aleichem's work...

...It must be some fifty years since Van Wyck Brooks drew attention to Samuel Clemens lurking behind the sprightlier Mark Twain...

...The artist can transform reality at will—a potent charm in desperate times—but his magic is subject to temporal claims...

...For Sholom Aleichem embodies the culture of the Eastern European Jews at a high point of consciousness, the tremor of awareness that comes a minute before dissolution starts...

...At the end of "The Enchanted Tailor" we have a vista of madness, at the end of "A Yom Kippur Expropriation" a prospect of social violence, at the end of "A Yom Kippur Scandal" the shame of Jewish disintegration...

...4. Sholom Aleichem uses, as I've said, traditional devices of oral storytelling, but he is also a sophisticated writer very much aware of his departures from the tradition...

...What better medium for conveying the critical changes of East European Jewish life than a "language of fusion"—to use Max Weinreich's term—in which the sources of fusion are still identifiable and still in active flux...

...it is his sense of moral poise, his assurance as both Jew and human being, his ease in a world of excess...

...This may be a compliment in its way, but in fact, the "artless garru-lousness" of the characters is under surprisingly tight control, and in ways that translation may sometimes have to sacrifice...

...But of the three, Sholom Aleichem alone really struck the note of balance...

...Still, aren't there some strands of connecting sensibility...

...In general, Sholom Aleichem did not do very well with a direct approach to the great, climactic, and decisive moments of plot...

...And the reasoning is obvious when once you come to think of it: the money is a mere worldly matter, while the behavior of the youth raises a moral issue...

...As if Sholom Aleichem had anticipated the tape recorder...

...But you're right...

...Sholom Aleichem's admiration for the stubborn rug-gedness of Jewish faith, and the surprising vitality of the people, comes to expression not just the-matically, in story after story, but in the resilient, recuperative shape of all his major work...

...But there are other stories, happier in voice, where the life-force, the sheer pleasure of a child in breathing and running, breaks through...

...simply because he is so much at home with his materials, he can move from one tone to another...

...Life may have been with people, but the people often lived in fright...

...At the moment of intended climax, when the Zionist hero is to win over the uncommitted heroine to both his politics and himself, he can do no better than to stop in the middle of the street, whip from his pocket a famous poem by Chaim Nahman Bialik, and read her its text for the better part of the chapter...

...He gives proof of his creative survival even as he describes the destruction of its source...

...The "clever Jew" is thus shown in many aspects— complicated, quizzical, problematic...

...But the rest: a clock strikes thirteen, a hapless young man drags a corpse from place to place, a tailor is driven mad by the treachery of his perceptions, the order of shtetl life is undone even on Yom Kip-pur, Jewish children torment their teacher unto sickness...

...When he did attempt a big love scene, or a tough social confrontation, he could be surprisingly inept...

...Beginning with no more than an anecdote, sometimes an item that his adoring readers sent him, sometimes a joke that already had whiskers on it...

...If Tom Sawyer could speak Yiddish, he'd be at home here...

...the "modern" Sholom Aleichem, a comic writer whose view of Jewish, and perhaps any other, life tends to be problematic, rather nervous, and streaked with those elements of guilt and anxiety that we usually associate with writers of the twentieth century...

...But set out to discuss the "narrative structure" or "comic techniques" of Sholom Aleichem, and he undercuts your very best attempt...

...True, there are moments of playfulness, innocent humor, as in the adventures of Mottel the orphan, he, so to say, is Sholom Aleichem's Tom Sawyer...

...Nervousness and fright become their dominant tone...

...is he a confidence man?—counts for very little by comparison with the scandal, the shocked laughter, in the shtetl when it discovers that one of its pious young favorites has been secretly nibbling on chicken bones during the fast day of Yom Kippur...

...the enforced discovery at too early an age of the bitterness of the world, their dominant theme...

...It does seem that in its literary imitations of the voices and mannerisms of ordinary Jews Sholom Aleichem's oral styles were almost too effective...

...he is beginning to seep up that quiet Jewish sorrow which is part of his life's heritage ("That's an old story: a mother's got to cry...

...Ruth Wisse to Irving Howe Ive been thinking about your emphasis on the cultural balance and "moral poise" of Sholom Aleichem, wondering how much of what you describe derives from the historical moment, and just what is specific to him...

...Far from distorting, your comments begin to set the record straight...

...There are at least two scandals: one that a stranger, a guest of the synagogue on the holiest of days, Yom Kippur, should be robbed of a substantial sum of money (or pretend that he has been robbed...

...an exposure of rootlessness...

...A second daughter is in Siberia, a third is a convert, a fourth has committed suicide, the fifth—who married for money— has fled with her bankrupt husband to America...

...Weinreich argues that the compulsive association of Yiddish with joking—an unfortunate tendency among modern Jews—has prevented a deeper appreciation of the master's verbal craftsmanship and artistic range...

...We set out—I think justifiably— to take a serious new look at a well-known but not well-appreciated author...

...So much for fact...

...Especially those told by an internal narrator, a character who is seen and heard telling a story either to other characters or to "Mr...

...By the end of the 19th century, I. L. Peretz, who was quickly becoming the dominant influence in Yiddish literature, tried to stabilize a literary language for the purposes of normal narration...

...Yet too extreme an emphasis on the Hebraic element, the most indigenous component of Yiddish, is not a good sign either...

...They stop rather than end...

...In addition to being a marvelous tool, Yiddish is also Sholom Aleichem's metaphor for the culture...

...The woman's circular style is the most accurate literary expression of the closed circle of her thoughts and her life...

...And this may be one reason that I think of him as a "culture-hero," in the sense that Dickens and Mark Twain were "culture-heroes" in their time and place...

...Then, as if to demonstrate the emotional power of the narrator or the moral perplexities of existence, there is a sudden abrupt blockage: figure out the rest for yourself, make up whatever denouement you can, it's all puzzling...

...What I'd like to know is whether all mothers cry all the time, like mine...

...Station Baranovich," which follows, is from The Best of Sholom Aleichem, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse...

...It even manages a stroke of revenge in its parting shot: "Damn that Station Baranovich...

...Sholom Aleichem is a self-conscious artist and he must have something in mind...

...And if that were not layered and indirect enough, the speaker would tell the story not to the readers, but to an intermediary, who was often the author's invented self, this all-embracing soul called "Sholom Aleichem...

...There almost always follows a duel: between this narrator and his audience of gullible and/or skeptical listeners within the story...

...Small wonder that there is so much masking and unmasking in his stories, so many instances of dislocation and social ambiguity...

...this is not meant for you, Jewish children...

...Maybe this, in part, is what the Yiddish critic, Borukh Rivkin, had in mind when he wrote that Sholom Aleichem provided the East European Jews with a fictional territory to compensate for their lack of a national soil...

...This relationship between the writer as "culture-hero" and the culture itself is something so intimate and elusive we hardly have a way to describe it— except to say that every Jew who could read Yiddish, whether he was orthodox or secular, conservative or radical, loved Sholom Aleichem, for he heard in his stories the charm and melody of a common shprakh, the language that bound all together...

...From the speaker's tendency to certain aspects of the German or the Slavic components of the language, one can determine his origins and aspirations, his relation to the values of his home and to the lure of the environment...

...Or at least, seldom before recognized...

...Irving Howe to Ruth Wisse Iknow we have to be moving along to the literary aspects of Sholom Aleichem's work: his inventiveness with language, his fondness for the monologue as a narrative form, his curious habit of seeming to end a story before it comes to climax...

...After a while I must admit I found myself adding quotations and dramatizing more stories to elicit that laughter, and when the lecture was over, people came over to tell me what a good storyteller I was...

...Before ending, I should tell you that this serious correspondence of ours about Sholom Aleichem appeared to me the other day in a comical light...

...Just four "anecdotes" on the subject of forgetting, in which three of the greatest Jewish writers of the age, and one choleric literary companion, are revealed as ordinary, anxious Jews, faltering and trembling in ordinary, if not humiliating circumstances...

...But he was also the consummate artist, working the full range of modern literary genres...

...Like all great humorists, he attaches himself to the disorder which lies beneath the apparent order of the universe, to the madness beneath the apparent sanity...

...sometimes, one ventures to say, between this narrator and Sholom Aleichem himself, a little bemused by his own creation...

...the exacting editor, forging a new cultural idiom and enjoying a cosmopolitan milieu...

...Ruth Wisse to Irving Howe The other day I came across an essay of 1941 by Max Weinreich that runs oddly parallel to some of our main concerns...

...In fact, wherever the danger of dissolution is greatest, the stories work their magic in simulating or creating a terra firma...

...Still, we should not go too far in trying to revise the common view of Sholom Aleichem...

...Ikh vil aykh fregn a shayle vil ikh aykhl" Natural English can't attempt much more than "Rabbi, I've come to ask you a question...

...Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the Family of Sholom Aleichem...

...He has written widely on politics and literature and is editor of several anthologies of Yiddish literature...

...indeed, that what one learns along a journey of narrative matters more than the destination where it comes to rest...

...As in his, "what's new with the cholera epidemic in Odessa...

...His controlling voice tells us of madness, often enough...

...Early Yiddish readers were likely to know that their author, the man you once called, "the only modern writer who may truly be said to be a culture-hero," had suffered a complete collapse at that fateful stop during a grueling speaking tour, an attack of "acute pulmonary tuberculosis" that was followed by years of convalescence...

...I guess Sholom Aleichem's contemporaries took the nightmarish uncertainties for granted and enjoyed the relief he alone provided...

...Sholom Aleichem," there is roughly the following sequence: the stories move toward climax, they arouse suspense, they bring together the elements of conflict and then, just at the point where you would expect a writer to drive toward resolution, they seem deliberately to remain hanging in the air...

...He takes us by the hand, we are both shaking with laughter, and he leads us...

...I. L. Peretz, and Sholom Aleichem (Rabinowitz)—flourished almost together...

...What, for example, can we do with the opening sentence of "Dos Tepl"—"The Pot"—that famous Sholom Aleichem monologue: "Rebbe...

...Yet the stories, apart from the few translated here for the first time, are familiar enough, part of the standard Sholom Aleichem canon...

...Tevye the dairyman, probably Sholom Aleichem's greatest character, stems from the depths of Jewish folk experience in Eastern Europe, yet he is far more than a representative type...

...Out of this insubstantial matter, Sholom Aleichem has woven a masterpiece with a dozen interpretations: it is the plight of the diaspora Jew...

...It's as if Sholom Aleichem were intent upon reminding his Jewish readers that we too deserve a little of the world's innocence...

...her son is dying of the very illness that claimed her husband...

...He is a wonderful little boy, celebrating his friendship with a neighbor's calf and stealing apples from the gardens of the rich...

...who at Baranovich was warned of his own mortality, makes this a writer's story: the fate of Kivke and of the Jewish community are ultimately in the hands of the gifted storyteller whose untimely departure at Baranovich constitutes the story's only really fatal event...

...he had later to suffer the indignities of living in Kiev without a residence permit, scrambling like a thousand other Menachem-Mendels to provide for his family, fleeing the pogroms, joining the great migration to America...

...Instead, balancing his losses on the sharp edge of his tongue, he maintains the precarious posture of a comic hero...

...Sholom Aleichem's speakers are characterized as much by the quality of their language as by its apprehended meaning...

...He gives us no disquisitions on literature, no pen portraits of his contemporaries, no contemplative philosophy from the heights...

...He came out of a culture in which the ferment of folk creation was still very lively, and in which the relationship between writer and audience was bracingly intimate, certainly different from what we have come to accept in Western cultures...

...all is fun, pranks, jokes, and then comes a brief lyrical description of a Yom Kippur service in the hold of the ship, "a Yom Kippur," says this Jewish little boy, "that neither God nor man would ever forget...

...All those misquotations, puns, and freewheeling interpretations of Tevye's that cause such hardship to even our best translators have been offered as proof of Tevye's simplicity and ignorance...

...And among them was Sholom Rabinowitz, experiencing all the personal and social upheavals that as "Sholom Aleichem" he would reorder with amusing grace...

...It's when you come to Sholom Aleichem's stories about children that you see how balanced, at once stringent and tender, severe and loving, is his sense of life...

...In the group translated as "Mottel the Cantor's Son," the tone of things is lighthearted and playful...

...I say, "oddly," because as a linguist Weinreich was dealing strictly with Sholom Alei-chem's language and linguistic influence: yet he too concludes that the folksiness of Sholom Aleichem received undue attention and had a deleterious effect on its imitators, while the hard precision and richness of his language have gone almost unnoticed...

...At Baranovich the great entertainer, the spellbinding storyteller, had almost left the train for good...

...Perhaps the ferocious undercurrent in Sholom Aleichem's humor has never been fully seen, or perhaps Jewish readers have been intent on domesticating him in order to distract attention from the fact that, like all great writers, he can be very disturbing...

...Mendele and Peretz were both embattled writers, fiercely critical of their society, and only gradually softened by pity, doubt, and age...

...His most recent books include World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews and the Life They Found and Made and Leon Trotsky...

...The passengers' conversation runs appropriately grimly, to pogroms, murders, anti-Jewish decrees...

...Though he too felt the impending break in the "golden chain" of Jewish tradition, and the cracks in his own life, he makes it his artistic business to close the gap...

...Lest this seem just the failure of a novice, one could turn to a ripe novel, like The Storm, 1905, where Sholom Aleichem depicts the ideological clashes among the Jews in pre-revolutionary Russia...

...The Tevye stories provide the most striking instance of stability where one would least expect it...

...And if you're particularly struck by the generally overlooked "ferocity" of the work, I'm amazed by the ingenious and self-conscious artist behind the widely accepted notion of the folk-voice...

...I was lecturing about Sholom Aleichem to a nice synagogue audience, and every time I illustrated a point with a quotation or the plot of a story, the audience broke into happy, appreciative laughter...

...they cannot credit so gross an injustice...

...Coming at the point in the history of the Eastern European Jews where the coherence of traditional life has been shattered but where an enormous, fresh cultural energy has been let loose precisely by this process of breakup, Sholom Aleichem stands as both firm guardian of the Jewish past and a quizzical, skeptical Jew prepared (as the unfolding of the Tevye stories makes clear) to encounter, maybe accept, the novelty and surprise of modern Jewish life...

...She: Rubalsky...

...The major works of Sholom Aleichem have no such suspenseful vision...

...Even sophisticated readers were so amused and dazzled by the natural flow of the language that they considered the writer to be a ventriloquist, and his art a superior form of realism...

...As underpaid employees of the Jewish community—Mendele was a school principal and Peretz a bureaucratic official—they spent most of their adult years torn between the daily routine of duty and the personal drive for literary self-expression...

...her poverty traps her in such narrow constraints of time and space that she cannot grasp those very possibilities that might mitigate her poverty...

...All exemplify the truth of Saul Bellow's remark that in Jewish writing "laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two...

...in Sholom Aleichem, you get no such prompting...

...He has "been around," as merchant or traveler...

...Even the main, archetypal, figures of Sholom Aleichem are not fullblown heroes of novels, but characters or speakers in short story sequences, written over a period of years, and later assembled in book form...

...And it is a token of Sholom Aleichem's genius, his "moral poise," that we are entirely prepared to accept the claim that these words come from the same boy who sells cider and ink and hops toward the neighbor's calf, on one leg...

...But I can't resist a few more words on the matter of "moral poise"—by which, of course, we mean not some abstract doctrine but a vibrant quality of the stories themselves, communicated through details of language...

...Ridiculous...

...Tevye may not be the Vilna Gaon, but he is the original stand-up comic, playing to an appreciative audience of one: his impresario, Sholom Aleichem, who then passes on this discovered talent to us readers...

...I'm aware of that danger and try to check myself, but still____As I read story after story, I find that as the Yiddish proverb has it, "a Jew's joy is not without fright," even that great Jew who has in his stories brought us more joy than anyone else...

...Everyone was remaking himself, with varying degrees of success...

...The kernel "story" of "On Account of a Hat," one of your favorites, I know, was once told to me as a regional Jewish joke, in about 10 seconds...

...What confronts us, finally, is the quizzical smile of the author with his compulsive skepticism about everything but the story...

...When Kafka read his stories aloud, he roared with laughter...

...Though her speech may be generally "true to life," it is actually used to give truth to her particular embattled consciousness, self-protecting and self-defeating in equal measure, and preoccupied with impending death...

...I have the uncomfortable feeling that readers may look through these letters not for any insights, but for their illustrative examples...

...It's just this balance, so delicate and precarious, that I find enchanting in his work...

...What about the fiction...

...If anything, we're a little late in exposing the negative, the harsher "World of Sholom Aleichem" and the canny Mr...

...But Sholom Aleichem...

...Veiled, then, like Salome, the anecdote begins its tantalizing, captivating play, a dance of words that is meant to leave you, as the author boasts, laughing your head off...

...Consider the deliberate irreverence of his literary memoir, The Four Who Sat, and contrast this mountaineering saga of Jewish writers with all the high serious climbs of other European literati...

...He says, "What portion of the Bible are they reading this week...

...But for Sholom Aleichem the unfixed nature of Yiddish was its greatest attraction, and its infinite range of dialects and oral styles the best literary means of capturing the dynamic changes—or the resistance to change—in the culture...

...But the original circles back on itself, rather like this: "Rabbi, I want to ask you a question is what I want to do...

...Irving Howe to Ruth Wisse In talking about Sholom Aleichem's stories, we both remarked on the seeming oddity that many of them do not really end...

...Wit and cleverness turn upon one another...

...Impossible to read the scene without laughing—at the author's expense...

...No, his mastery is of quite the opposite order...

...Irving Howe is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York...

...For Tevye, the most trustworthy of Sholom Aleichem's speakers, the fused elements of Yiddish are an eternal delight...

...Get going, Tevye, they said to me, get out of thy country and from thy father's house, leave the village where you were born and spent all the years of your life and go—unto the land that I will show thee—wherever your two eyes lead you...

...Or: terror in joy, dark in bright, fear in play...

...But they now seem to me funny in a way that almost no one has said...

...Tevye has been endowed with such substantiality, so much adaptive vigor of speech and vision, that the dire events he recounts almost cease to matter...

...Mottel represents the sadly abbreviated childhood of the traditional shtetl, where life does not flow evenly from one phase of experience to another, but all of them, childhood, adolescence and manhood, are compressed into one...

...In their "rejection" of this narrator-figure, Sholom Aleichem has created an overpowering moment...

...He deflates intellectual and artistic pretentiousness, and even undercuts the grandeur of the Alps...

...There are periods when the culture and its language seem to be at just the right point of tension between maturity and untried possibilities...

...Ruth Wisse to Irving Howe Your concluding words remind me of the description by Ba'al Makhshoves, the Yiddish critic and one of Sholom Aleichem's earliest admirers, of the feeling we have when we think we've committed a terrible sin, or experienced catastrophe, and wish it were all just a dream...

...If there are few carefree children in Yiddish literature, there are few unloved or brutalized children...

...Ruth Wisse to Irving Howe 48, Moment Iappreciated your speculations on Sholom Aleichem's endings and narrative art...

...Assuredly not...

...Sholom Rabinowitz behind the man with the avuncular smile...

...Menachem-Mendel, Mottel the Cantor's son, as well as the town of Kasrilevke, Sholom Aleichem's fourth, collective "hero," emerge from a run of episodes, each only slightly different from the one before it, that cumulatively establish their dimensions...

...The image of the human, drawing upon traditional Jewish past and touching upon the problematic Jewish future, has seldom received so profound a realization as in these stories...

...It is a deeply poignant image of the Jewish refusal to believe in the full evil of the world...

...There is fear, not just confusion, and guilt, a nastier emotion than sorrow...

...And actually, how could it be otherwise...

...The sly mockery of American Jewish assimilation, rendered through the crude, over-eager borrowings of Yiddish immigrants fresh off the boat, falls flat in English, the host language...

...Take "Station Baranovich," one of the train stories we decided to include...

...Magically witty and unpretentious as it is, the story leaves you with an eerie, troubling sense of reality that begs attention...

...Hilarious the story is...

...In his autobiography Sholom Aleichem writes about childhood pleasures...

...That recurring image of the sick father, once powerful but now coughing fitfully between sentences, or the humiliated teacher, never able to recover his authority, suggests the fatal weakness in the culture and—more to the point— the narrator's sense of his own shared culpability in having brought it low...

...In many of the stories one hears the timbre of the problematic...

...This, according to him, is Sholom Aleichem's incomparable achievement: he conjures up the collective anxiety and then dispels it magically, laughing the danger away...

...The Chelm stories, the Hershel Ostropolier stories, the Hasidic tales, even sometimes the folk songs: all have their undercurrents of darkness...

...And this happens often enough to make us suspect that it cannot be a mere accident or idiosyncracy...

...And Sholom Aleichem would be right behind them, egging them on...

...Is my view a distortion, the kind induced by modernist bias and training...

...The story would be either about himself, or more often, about a third party, someone from his shtetl, perhaps, more of a character type than a differentiated personality...

...And insofar as we reject or at least complicate this prevailing view, it's especially important to remark that Sholom Aleichem is not a "folk writer...

...No, he isn't Kafka, and I don't at all want him to be...

...Expostulate on Kafka, or Dostoevsky and people are fairly begging for your explanations and interpretations...

...Vayikrol The first portion of Leviticus...

...Above all, her mind is imprisoned in its own obsessive circularity, unable to come to the point even long enough to pose her question...

...Well, I'm on quite another chapter...

...The writer universally adored as a humorist, the writer who could make both Jews and Gentiles laugh, and most remarkable of all, the writer who could please every kind of Jew, something probably never done before or since—this writer turns out to be imagining, beneath the scrim of his playfulness and at the center of his humor, a world of uncertainty, shifting perception, anxiety, even terror...

...Given the nature of Jewish life in Europe these past several centuries, how could the folk tradition have been as comforting or soft as it has come down to us through both the popularizers and the sentimentality of people who have broken from even as they feel drawn to the Jewish tradition...

...It is not that Sholom Aleichem avoided the romantic subject, the heroic possibility, the grand style of the novel: he was simply unconvincing and demonstrably uncomfortable in this mode, especially at the high points of resolution, and of course, conclusion...

...His best jokes and quotations are polyglot, drawing attention to the mixture of high and low, old and new, indigenous and imported...

...The rest isn't so nice...

...He can no longer regard a story as something that is always fixed, secure, knowable (e.g., the rebellious clock in "The Clock That Struck Thirteen," an appropriate and homely image for the sense of collapsing order...

...At the end Mottel and his family are aboard ship for America...

...Copyright © 1979 New Republic Books...

...Oh, to be sure, he was still the product of "tradition," and confined to a Jewish fate...

...No accident that all three of the Yiddish classical masters—Men-dele Mocher Sforim (Abramo-vitch...

...The interior story of a certain Kivke, alternately a victim of the Tsarist regime and a blackmailer of his own community, might have been used by many another Jewish writer (God bless us...

...Leykh lekho: get thee out...