Tag Archives: Envy; Or Yiddish in America

Swimming in a Sea of Invisible Ink: A Note on Ozick’s “Envy; Or, Yiddish in America.”

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One of the more interesting characteristics of the schlemiel relates to his/her timing.  The comic character is belated: s/he comes too late to the party or is out of sync with what is going on.  But what is most interesting about this belatedness is how the schlemiel relates to it: the schlemiel can either be oblivious to being belated or painfully aware of it.   However, even in the latter case, which often leads to bitterness, there is still a blindness that prevails.  And the schlemiel, it seems, is swimming in, as it were, invisible ink.  Sometimes, however, that ink can be a bitter sea.

Edelshtein, the main character of Cynthia Ozick’s, “Envy; Or, Yiddish in America,” is a case in point.  He is caught up in a dying dream of being recognized in America as a Yiddish writer.  Yiddish, as he notes, died in Europe.  But this doesn’t keep him from being enthusiastic about it.  Besides writing in Yiddish and maintaining a journal entitled A Bitterer Yam (the “Bitter Sea”) he goes from synagogue to synagogue and Jewish community center to Jewish community center to talk about Yiddish.  The narrator likens him to a “television stand-up comic” whose humor is bitter, sardonic, and falls dead (like the language he dreams in).  Nonetheless, he continues to talk about Yiddish and write in Yiddish although he knows it is dying and will not live on.  And, regardless of his humor, he lives a belated existence and continues to swim in bitterness.

However, there is hope; but, for him, it is not hope.  It comes in the form of a man named Yankel Ostrover.  He and Baumzweig, the editor of A Bitterer Yam (which Baumzweig’s wife jokingly calls Invisible Ink), can’t stand him:

Edelshtein’s friendship with Baumzweig had a ferocious secret: it was moored entitled to their agreed hatred for the man they called der chazer.  He was named Pig because of his extraordinarily white skin, like a tissue of a pale ham, and also because in the last decade he had become unbelievably famous. When they did not call him Pig they called him shed – Devil.  (133, Jewish American Stories ed. Irving Howe)

Ostrover, they complain, is not a real Yiddish writer.  Like a pig, he appears to be Kosher (pigs have split hooves on the “outside,” but they do not “chew their cud” and are not kosher in the “inside”) but is not.   His writing in the Yiddish lacks the greatness of all the famous Yiddish writers.  And his topics are, in his view, vulgar.  And, as Edelshtein learns, his popularity is largely based on his translator and is, in many ways, the function of good luck.  And that’s the point.  Edelshtein has bad luck and this kills him.  He feels he is more deserving and is pained by the fact that the youth – the next generation of Jews – love Ostrover while he can only speak to older Jews who give no hope of carrying the tradition on.  In other words, the tradition of Yiddish isn’t really be carried on, in his view, by Ostrover.  Something else is.

Edelshtein is a schlemiel of a rare type because his hope is impossible.  He cannot admit to himself that he has failed or that Yiddish in America is closer to what Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi – in Booking Passage – would call a “virtual shtetl.”  To be sure, the person, she argues, who was translated into Yiddish and became a central figure in this virtual shtetl was I.B. Singer.  His “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow and published in the Partisan Review, marked the beginning of the new wave.

However, Edelshtein’s resentment is based on the fact that he didn’t make it and not just Yiddish.  He is the schlemiel because he believed he, himself, could actually preserve the core of Yiddish when America wanted something else, something in English that may have some link to Yiddish – one it will never know.   He comes to late, it seems; but Ostrover seems to come in on time.  The difference between the two is, as a I mentioned above, a matter of luck; but it also has to do with the fact that America wants to have a “virtual shtetl,” one, so to speak, in its own image.

And in this virtual shtetl there seems to be no room for the bitter failure and his journal A Bitterer Yam; or is it, rather, Invisible Ink?  After all, who will read him and carry on his legacy?   He comes too late and the tradition that goes on, it seems, isn’t Yiddish, it’s virtual.   Edelshtein – because he is belated and afflicted by bad luck – seems to be swimming in a bitter sea of invisible ink because no one will read him like they read Ostrover and his virtual Yiddish novels.

A Kvetching Schlemiel: On Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” – Take One

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You don’t see many schlemiels in Yiddish Literature or Jewish-American literature that spend most of their time kvetching or complaining.   Schlemiels are better known for being dreamers, not complainers.   They live on air (luftmensches); not hot air so much as the air of dreams.  However, it does happen from time to time that one occasions a kvetching schlemiel.   Saul Bellow’s Herzog (from the novel of the same name) kvetches from time to time and so does Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern (from the novel of the same name).   We also see a few kvetching schlemiels in contemporary literature.  Kugel, the main character of Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy lets out an occasional kvetch about his horrible situation.

And Larry David, in Curb Your Enthusiasm or in his lead role for Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, turns kvetching into an art form that, for all its repetition, has crafted a popular kind of modern-American schlemiel type.

But all of this kvetching, as is the kvetching of the other schlemiels mentioned above, is lightened by way of comedy.  And if we look deeper into the source of this kvetching we find a trail of bad luck.  But, as Ruth Wisse points out the schlemiel usually creates bad luck but is unaffected by it.  These schlemiels, however, are.  They are, as it were, schlemiels and shlimazels at the same time.

One kvetch that has recently caught my eye is the kvetching of the narrator and main character of Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.”  Edelshtein, the main character, has the kvetch of an immigrant.  He has left Europe and Yiddish behind for America.  And he can’t stop thinking about what has been lost.  His being caught up in what was and how it fails to relate to what is creates a comic rift which also has, for all its kvetching, a sad note.

Ozick’s descriptions of Edelshtein reflect a kind of comic kvetching that hits on many different levels.  Edelshtein’s anger is really “envy.” It is comical, yet painful because he feels that he knows history and that American Jews do not.  He doesn’t think, for this reason, that they should be considered Jews.

Spawned in America, pogroms a rumor, mamalashon a stranger, history a vacuum.  Also many of them were still young, and had black eyes, black hair, and red beards…He was certain he did not envy them, but he read them like a sickness.  They were reviewed, praised, and meanwhile they were considered Jews, and knew nothing.  (129, Jewish American Stories ed. Irving Howe)

Edelshtein looks around New York City and sees a childhood acquaintance from Kiev named Alexei Kirilov.  He wonders what ever happened to him.   How had history swallowed him up?  Did he die in the massacre of Babi Yar or did he flee to Russia?

This memory and question plies him, but what is he left with from the past?  Edelshtein, like many Yiddishists, turns to language.  But he realizes that the language he so loved is dead.  And he is a schlemiel by virtue of being stuck with a language that no one speaks anymore:

And the language was lost, murdered.  The language – a museum.  Of what other language can it be said that it died in a sudden definite death, in a given decade, on a given piece of soil…Yiddish, a littleness, a tiny light – oh little holy light! – dead, vanished. Perished. Sent into darkness.  (130)

The murder or “sudden death” of this language was, the narrator tells us, Edelshtein’s “subject” – the one “he lectured on for a living”(130).  He constantly recalls it to people in Jewish community centers, synagogues, etc. But while he tells Yiddish jokes to make people laugh he knows – and they know – that the language is dead and that his humor is really meaningless:

But both Edelshtein and his audiences found the jokes worthless.  Old jokes.  They were not the right kind. They wanted jokes about weddings – spiral staircases, doves flying out of cages, bashful medical students – and he gave them funerals.  To speak Yiddish was to preside over a funeral….Those for whom his tongue was no riddle were specters. (131)

He lives in memory of a dead past; he draws life from it.  But his memory is not caught up in Europe alone; he remembers, most clearly, his experiences at the American home of Baumzweig.  Unlike Baumzweig, who was also a Yiddish writer, he had no children.  He had no one to pass on his past too; however, he does watch how Baumzweig’s children speak to him – using English to respond to their Yiddish.  The parents couldn’t adequately pass the tradition on. And this has an effect on him and gives him a sense of the “new generation.”  There was a generation gap.

But then it became plain that they could not imagine the lives of their children.  Nor could the children imagine their lives.  The parents were too helpless to explain, the sons were too impatient to explain.  So they had given each other up to a common muteness.  In that apartment Josh and Mickey had grown up answering in English the Yiddish of their parents.  Mutes.  Mutations.  What right had these boys to spit out the Yiddish that had bred them? (132)

In the midst of all this kvetching, Baumzweig reminds him of the schlemiel and that, though he never had children, Edelshtein has a son, himself

She told Edelshtein he too had a child, also a son.  “Yourself, yourself,” she said.  “You remember yourself when you were a little boy, and that little boy is the one you love, him you trust, him you bless, him you bring up in hope to a good manhood.” (133)

This memory is a kind of counter-memory to his present resentments.  It also prompts the question as to whether he actually did bring his “son” up to a “good manhood.”  Does his son remain a child, and he, a schlemiel?  Or was his “little light” a language that is dead?  Is his son dead if the language is dead?

We also can see his mind wander back to the child in Kiev who, regardless of his kvetching about the end of Yiddish, remains close to his heart.  The question of his “son” and its “maturity” as well as this memory of a child whose fate his unknown  – juxtaposed to the present memory of the death of Yiddish – makes him into a kvetching schlemiel of sorts.

…to be continued….