The last three letters exchanged between Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse over Sholem Aleichem’s fiction and its meaning show us the subtle differences between these two important thinkers and literary critics. As I pointed out in my last blog entry about this dialogue, Ruth Wisse suggested that Aleichem was, in contrast to the Yiddish writers […]
Irving Howe initiated his letters to Ruth Wisse about Sholem Aleichem by staking his main claim that, based on his own experience of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, he must go against the grain and state that they, like all stories of the Schlemiel (from Chelm to Hershel Ostropolier), have “their undercurrents of darkness.” Throughout Howe’s letter, […]
In their epistolary introduction on Sholem Aleichem, Irving Howe sets the tone for his declaration of Jewishness by noting that he has an “uneasy feeling” that he has discovered a Sholem Aleichem that has “seldom been encountered.” Howe says what no-one wants to hear; namely, that Sholem Aleichem “turns out to be imagining, beneath the […]
Do we laugh through tears or do we cry through laughter? The answer to this question or perhaps the question itself are, for Irving Howe, the crux of Jewish identity. For Howe, the few Jews who really “scrutinize” themselves, the Jews who “dare to know” (so to speak), will come to this very question. Howe […]
After explaining how the Yiddish writers (“the writers of sweetness”) came out of a world that made “impossible the power hunger, the pretensions to aristocracy, the whole mirage of false values that have blighted Western intellectual life,” Howe and Greenberg define the themes of Yiddish literature which correlated with this Eastern European world: “the virtue […]
Dan Miron is one of the greatest living critics of Yiddish and Jewish-American literature today. His books on these bodies of literature have won him critical claim. What interests me most is how Miron would approach a schlemiel like Motl (the main character of Sholem Aleichem’s Motl the Cantor’s Son: Writings of an Orphan Boy. […]
Citing the traditional joke about the schlemiel who spills the soup on the schlimazel, Ruth Wisse, in The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, argues that the schlimazel “happens upon mischance” and “has a penchant for lucklessness”(14). But “the unhappy circumstances remain outside him”(14). In other words, the schlimazel’s comedy is situational. The schlemiel, however, is different […]
On Erev Yom Kippur (the Eve of Yom Kippur), it makes sense – at least for me – to ask how Sholem Aleichem, perhaps the most well-known and celebrated of all writers on the schlemiel – approaches Yom Kippur by way of fiction. With this in mind, I thought of one piece that has Yom […]
In Isidore Goldstick’s 1948 translation of Sholem Aleichem’s Inside Kasrilevke there is a lot of American slang. Instead of being resentful, I found it to be rather fun imagining the driver of a tram in Kasrilevke speaking to his conductor Yossel in the following manner about tobacco or rather “tabacky”: ‘Let’s have some tabacky, Yossel,’ […]
In a “Five Books” interview, the Jewish-American writer Allegra Goodman was asked what five books in Jewish fiction she would suggest people read. Each book, for Goodman, would provide readers with one sense of the Jewish experience. One of the books she chose was Sholem Aleichem’s Inside Kasrilevke (the contents of which are the stories […]
Schlemiel Theory 