Tag Archives: Sholem Aleichem

Lost in Translation: On the Americanization of Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke

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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,’ the conductor was addressed by the driver, the fellow with the whip and tattered coat.

‘It won’t kill you to smoke some tumblings, Reb Kasriel,’ the conductor cut him short. ‘Good tobacco is liable to give you a headache.’

‘Never mind your wisecracks; better hand over that tabacky,’ Kasriel the driver insisted.

This dialogue over the “tabacky” is something of a caricature and, to be sure, it Americanizes the schlemiel.   And this raises a lot of interesting questions about how the schlemiel translates, in text and on stage, into an American idiom.

But while I find this question intriguing, a critic like Cynthia Ozick finds the translation from one language to another to be devastating.  In a review essay on the Hillel Halkin translation of Tevye The Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, Cynthia Ozick, while praising Halkin’s feat, notes that Halkin’s translation sounds to American and not Yiddish.  Ozick points out that Halkin has a “facile and supple ear” which can “transmute Sholem Aleichem’s easy idiomatic language into familiar slang.”

But, for Ozick, that’s the problem. Its too familiar. What “Halkin lacks, I am afraid is for what is apropos. American street talk is preposterous in the mouths of people in a forest outside Yehupetz on the way to Boiberik – and the more skillfully and lavishly these relaxed Americanisms are deployed, the more preposterous they seem.”

To illustrate, Ozick cites several examples.  I’ll take note of a few:

‘He looks at me like the dumb bunny that he is,” ‘I blew in this morning,’ ‘It drives me up the wall, ‘holy suffering catfish!’

To show the abyss between one translation and the other and to point out what has been lost from one culture to another, Ozick cites a line of Aleichem and Halkin’s translation.

The line in Yiddish is:  “Vu zitst er, der tane dayner, vos iz zayn gesheft un vos far a droshe hot er dedarshnt?”

She translates it literally as, “Where does he sit, that tane of yours, how does he get his living, and what kind of droshe has he preached.”  Ozick leaves the words “tane” and “droshe” in explain what has been lost.  The word “tane” refers to the “tannaim” “classical scholastics…whose hermeneutics appear in the Mishna, a collection of sixty-three tractates of the law and ethics that constitute the foundation of the Talmud.” And the word “droshe” refers to a “commentary, often formidably allusive, prepared by a serious student of homiletics.”

Compare this to Halkin’s translation:  “And just where does he live, this Mr. Important of yours?  What’s his act and what makes him such a big deal?”

Between the two translations, we can clearly see that what has been lost are the main idioms of a culture that was familiar with the Talmud and with rabbinic commentary.  While Ozick is right to point this loss out, she offers no solution.  She simply diagnoses the problem.

To be sure, the fact of the matter is that the majority of American Jews don’t know what a “tane” or a “droshe” are.  These words and the culture that knew what they meant have been destroyed by the Holocaust.  What remains, it seems, is the gesture.  And, I might add, this gesture is often comical.

If the schlemiel comes through these kinds of translation, what we have, it seems, is a Mark Twain-kind-of-Jew who has a name like Yossel but speaks like he’s from Appalachia.

Growing up in upstate New York, I am familiar with euphemisms like “tabacky.”  And reading this expression in a Sholem Aleichem collection did bring a smile to my face.  It is familiar.  On the other hand, Ozick’s reading of such kinds of translations, however, are more like an act of mourning and a wake-up call to what has been lost in translation.

Taken together, I found that I had a new understanding of why the order of laughter and tears is so important for Irving Howe.  But, and here’s the rub, he was closer to that loss than I am.  Where do I figure in this literary reflection if I am much farther from the loss than they were?

How do I, a lover of the Yiddish and the American schlemiel, relate to what was lost in translation?

“Let’s Have the Music” – Reflections on Sholem Aleichem’s Inside Kasrilevke – Take 1

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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 of this fictional town (Kasrilevke) which is, arguably, Sholem Aleichem’s version of Chelm).  Like Irving Howe, she notes that the Broadway version of Fiddler on the Roof is a “cartoon version of his work.”  What she finds so important about Inside Kasrilevke is that it is “very funny, laugh out loud funny.”  Goodman likens the stories to “comedy routines” and notes that this book is her “comic ideal.”

Taking Allegra Goodman’s suggestion to heart, I think it makes a lot of sense to focus on these comic routines. But in doing so, I’m interested not so much in a comic ideal as in how the narrator of this collection of stories relates to schlemiels and other stock comic characters in the stories.   In this and in other blog entries on Inside Kasrilevke, I will be making a series of different readings which look into comic relationships and comic rhythms so as to understand how Aleichem, in this collection of stories, presents the schlemiel.

Right off the bat, Aleichem, the “author,” explains why he is writing this book in the “Author’s Foreword.” The picture he presents gives us a sense of someone is an insider and an outsider of the town.  For this reason he, like Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, can report on what happens in the town.

Like a writer of his times (and not, as Howe would say, a folkish “oral story teller”), he notes that “of recent years” many people have been writing books “about cities and lands.”  Playing on a Jewish stereotype (and echoing something we see years late played on in Woody Allen’s film Zelig) he “says to himself”: “We imitate other peoples in everything: they print newspapers – so do we; they have Christmas trees – so do we; they celebrate New Year’s – so do we.” So, just like they publish “guides” to big cities, he asks (with a shrug of sorts): “why shouldn’t we get out “A Guide to Kasrilevke?”

After pointing out how he has much in common writers in pursuing such a project, Aleichem notes how much he owes to this town of fools.  He tells us that he is a native who has left and has recently returned to honor the dead; namely, to visit his parents grave.  While he was visiting their graves, it occurred to him how much he wants to show his “gratitude” for the “hospitality” of his “friends” in Kasrilevke By writing this book, he felt he would be doing this.  I want to underscore this element, here, because Aleichem is noting, in the very beginning, that his book is a response to hospitality.  This implies that his representations, no matter how comic or even negative, are kind-hearted and articulate a way of returning kindness for kindness.

What is so fascinating about the final paragraph of the “Author’s Foreword,” is that it works by way of what Ruth Wisse would call “indirection.”  After stating his personal gratitude and the personal cause of this book, the narrator states that he, “of course” doesn’t have “personal motives” for the book. Rather, he writes it in response to “considerations of public service” meaning that he wrote the book in order to “guide strangers visiting Kasrilekve.”  This, he tells us, will help them to know where to get a train, where to go, eat, and have fun.  But at the end of the paragraph he states something that would contradict his present project, what Irving Howe would see as “troubling.”  He notes that “Kasrilevke is no longer the town it used to be.  The great progress of the world has made inroads into Kasrilevke and turned it topsy-turvy.  It has become a different-place.”

This final, sour note gives us a sense of how, in Aleichem, the comic is as Irving Howe would say, citing Saul Bellow: “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” But, in relation to Howe’s claim, I would also like to emphasize, as does Howe and Sidrah Dekoven Ezrahi, how important place is for Aleichem and how place relates to comedy. After all, the book is all about this place, perhaps the changing place of Jews in Eastern Europe.  Through fiction, Aleichem gives honor to the place and the people.  This, he claims, is not simply personal; it is a “public service.”

Even though Aleichem ends on this somber note of how “it has become a different place,” he changes rhythm and words by “indirection.”  And I want to underscore rhythm because there is a comical music going on at the outset and how this comic music is connected to place.  It addresses what the place has become (which is sad) by way of comedy.  (Laughter and tears, in other words, are intimately related to and emerge out of a place, a world.)

As a comic rejoinder to this sad meditation on place in the “Author’s Foreword,” the narrator points out how, immediately on arrival, he is accosted by a bunch of hotel porters and a sea of yellow: “At the station I was set upon by a horde of yellow porters with yellow whiskers, yellow coats, and bits of yellow tin stuck on their yellow, threadbare caps.”

The cacophony of yellow, so to speak, is coupled by a cacophony of voices calling on the narrator to come to his hotel/place: “Mister! Grand Hotel!” “Hotel Francia, mister!” “Hey, mister, Portugalia” “Mister! Turkalia!”  He tries to avoid this cacophony by moving to another place, but there too he is once again occasioned by a mob.

They are not “civil” and take his bag away from him just to get him to their hotel.  He fights with one to get back what is most important to him: his manuscripts.  Right after he seizes his back, he rushes for the “tramway.”  But when he gets there, he occasions more cacophony this time between passengers, the rider, and the manager.  All of the “noise” is comic and sheer slapstick.  And once it does move, it gets in an accident.

The movements in this text teach us that, for Aleichem, the schlemiel is not simply in the character as in a comic exchange and rhythm: that occur in terms of an erratic movement from place to place, stopping and starting, while comically gesticulating. All the while, there is a blindness and a timing in each movement.  Each thing collides, changes direction, moves no, stops, and repeats this process.  Each event prompts one to move, so to speak, from one vehicle or hotel to another.

But each of these movements, while erratic, is endearing.  In the midst of all this, the narrator is scrambling.  In fact, by the time he gets to the hotel, he has a hard time retaining his cool.  When the hotel manager tells him that he can either be in a room that is infested by bed bugs or a room penetrated by the music of a cantor practicing for the Sabbath or a bunch of Yiddish actors, the narrator is startled.

And for good reason… Given what we have learned from the “author’s forward” we don’t see evidence of hospitality so much as rudeness, he don’t see civility so much as chaos.  More importantly, since we know that he was a native of the town and is now on a visit, we see that he may be lying or have forgotten what really goes on in this town.  Its as if he led us on.

Its confusing for the reader and its confusing for the author, it seems, to know how to relate what is happening to him on the tram and the hotel to what he has said before.

He is startled (and we are startled) by a city that is full of many erratic rhythms.  And, it seems, the narrator is the shlimazel while the town, and all its rhythms, is the schlemiel.  This comes out when, after being told about choosing between music and bedbugs in another room (without music) the narrator chooses the music:

“If that’s the case,” I said, “let’s have the music.”

Indeed, in Karilevke, in a town full of schlemiels and permeated by schlemiel rhythms, that seems to be the only option.   And perhaps Aleichem is telling us that to understand the schlemiel, we must first relate to its comic musicality.

Perhaps we hear a similar in Woody Allen’s Zelig but in Allen’s film there isn’t an ambivalent sense of place; there is constant movement and change which echoes what we said in the beginning of this entry; namely, that Jews do what others do and become what they become.  For Allen, as opposed to Aleichem, this music of change, which happens in America, is purely comic. While there are tears, laughter, and music for Aleichem over Kasrilevke, there are no tears for Allen; in relation to America, there is only laughter and music.  Here you can dance the Zelig-dance (“The Chameleon”) without any remorse:

The Final Notes of Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse’s Epistolary Exchange over Sholem Aleichem

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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 Mendel Mocher Sforim and I.L. Peretz, more “balanced.”  This was a part of Wisse’s epistolary strategy since she was countering Howe’s harsher view of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction.  Wisse’s response to Howe shows us that while she agrees that there are “dark undercurrents” in Aleichem’s work, these words do not subsume Aleichem’s approach to Jewishness, Jewish history, and Yiddish literature.

For Wisse, as I’d like to show in this entry, Howe’s view should be balanced out with a more positive view of the Jewish writer.  Like her brother, David Roskies, she sees Aleichem as an artist who acknowledges fragmentation but who, in response to it, takes on the tradition of the Magid (story-teller).   She sees Aleichem as a “stand-up” comic of sorts who is looking to create bridges and create balance; unlike Howe, who sees him primarily as a modernist writer who focuses on fragmentation and ruin.  The last letters between Howe and Wisse work to bring out this differing take on Aleichem and his work.

At the end of his third letter to Ruth Wisse, Howe notes that although Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Stories are “casual offhand, charming, even mischievous,” Aleichem will “suddenly…drop to a fierce irony, a harrowing sadness.”  And this, for Howe, is the keynote of Aleichem as a modernist writer.  He ends on the sad note: for Howe, Aleichem goes from laughter to tears.

In response, Wisse turns to Aleichem’s Yiddish so as to show that he was a Yiddish artist.  In other words, she agrees with Howe that Aleichem is an artist, but she takes a different strategy with respect to explain why this is the case. She turns to his language and shows that Aleichem used Yiddish to show how repetition is used to create a closed circle of thoughts – what she calls a “circular style.”   Noting this style in relation to one of Aleichem’s characters, Wisse points out that “her mind is imprisoned in its own obsessive circularity.”  But the point of Aleichem’s using circular style in relation to this character is to “give truth to her particular embattled consciousness, self-protecting and self-defeating.”  This speaks to the negative note that Howe is addressing.

But from here, Wisse turns to the linguistic strategies of Tevye (one of Aleichem’s most celebrated characters).  Wisse sees this character as evidence of Aleichem-the-artist and not simply Aleichem the-folk-storyteller:

Like a true musician, he enjoys showing the speed and grace with which he can skip from one note or one tone to another.  His best jokes and quotations are polyglot, drawing attention to their mixture of high and low.

But Aleichem differs from a writer like I.L. Peretz who “drew attention away from the specificities of Yiddish, away from its folk expressions, the interplay of its source languages, the different dialects of its various speakers.”  Contrary to Peretz, “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.”  By pointing this out, Wisse is shifting the emphasis of this epistolary exchnage.  For Wisse, the emphasis should be on the way Aleichem bridges high and low culture by way of his use of Yiddish.  This makes him a modern artist.

Howe catches wind of this shift of emphasis and, so to speak, sticks to his guns.  In his final letter to Wisse, he reiterates his points.  His first words seek for the agreement between he and Wisse about the “oddity” of his stories.  In other words, he acts his if they agree fundamentally but, ultimately, he is changing emphasis.  Howe ends with five points which convey this “oddity” and how it relates to Aleichem being a quintessential modern writer.  For the purpose of understanding his tactic, I’ll summarize each.

1)    Aleichem is a literary artist and not an “oral story teller” and the evidence for this can be found in the “sudden, abrupt blockage” of closure in Aleichem’s stories.

2)    His work demonstrates that he is not interested in “resolution of an external action” so much as evoking “shocked laughter.”

3)    His work is more interested in the “clever Jew” (who is “complicated, quizzical, problematic”) than in the naïve simpleton who is concerned with the “old ways of piety.”  The relation of the “clever Jew” to the past is secondary to his being…a “complicated, quizzical, problematic” Jew.

4)    He is a sophisticated writer who is “very much aware” of his full departure from the tradition of oral storytelling.

5)    Shalom Aleichem, like Saul Bellow who followed in his footsteps, “knew intuitively that the boundary between comedy and tragedy is always a thin and wavering line.”

Howe’s last point is something I have been discussing from the very beginning of my blog series on Howe.  It taps into his approach to Jewishness.  To be sure, he sees the fluid movement between comedy and tragedy as a defining characteristic of modern Jewishness and modern Jewish-American literature.  And this reiterates what he was saying in his introduction to Jewish American Stories.

Wisse final letter to Howe – literally, her last word –  provides us with a key to understanding how she differs with Howe over how we should understand Sholem Aleichem and his project.

First of all, she notes that he avoided “the romantic subject, the heroic possibility, the grand style of the novel” because he was “simply unconvincing and demonstrably uncomfortable in this mode.”  More importantly, he was a modern writer because he is able to work on many levels simultaneously.  She notes “On Account of a Hat,” a story Howe loved, and points out that it has a “dozen interpretations: it is the plight of the Diaspora Jew, an exposure of rootlessness, a mockery of tyranny, the comic quest for identity, a Marxist critique of capitalism, and, of course, an ironic self-referential study of literary slight of hand.”

In other words, Wisse wants to “balance” out the “oddity” – that Howe finds so fascinating – with other elements of the text that Howe’s reading overshadows.  To be sure, she points out that Aleichem works by way of “indirection” with “the worm’s angle of vision, and with apparently flimsy materials.” But he uses them to present something tenacious about Jewishness, something Howe may miss.

As we saw above, Howe sees Aleichem’s Motl in terms of the final, negative note.  Wisse, reading the same character, points out his tenacity: “He confronts all the things that happened to him and forces himself upon life again and again, and the sum of these trials shape the rhythm, constitute the meaning, of his existence.”

Commenting on this, Wisse notes that:

Sholem Aleichem’s admiration for the stubborn ruggedness of Jewish faith and the surprising vitality of the people comes to expression not just thematically, in story after story, but in the resilient, recuperative shape of all his major work.

Knowing full well that her reading may not be deemed “academic” enough, she notes that Aleichem had no obsessive interest in an academic, modernist reading. She asks us to contrast Aleichem’s memoir to the “mountaineering saga of Jewish writers with all the high, serious climbs of other European literati.”  And what we will find from his simple memoir (consisting of only four anecdotes about the ordinary nature of other Yiddish writers and forgetting) is that he “he deflates intellectual and artistic pretentiousness, and even undercuts the grandeur of the Alps!”

In other words, Wisse, like Aleichem, thinks that Howe’s obsession with the “quizzical” and “troubling laughter” of Aleichem is something Aleichem would laugh at.  Playing on the word “quizzical” (which Howe uses several times in his letters to Wisse), Wisse gives her final words on Aleichem which show us a correlation of simple faith (hope) in the story (and storytelling) and not with the world:

What confronts us, finally, is the quizzical smile of the author, compulsively skeptical about everything but the story.

This tension between hope and skepticism, for Wisse, not only informs her reading of Aleichem as an artist; it also informs her reading of the schlemiel.   Howe’s reading of the schlemiel would differ significantly because, in reading Aleichem, he puts the emphasis on the quizzical-as-such and not the relation of the quizzical with the tension between fiction and reality or hope and skepticism.

 

 

 

 

Laughter through Tears or Tears through Laughter: Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse’s Dialogue over Sholem Aleichem – Take 3

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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, we find a repeated emphasis on how odd he now feels when he reads Aleichem: “And now, in reading Sholem Aleichem, I find myself growing nervous, anxious, even as I keep on laughing.”   This troubled laughter reverberates throughout the letter.

Although she agrees in many ways, Ruth Wisse is suspicious of Howe’s way of speaking.  And despite the fact that she can understand its source and agrees with it – to some extent – she puts forth a different tone and a different emphasis.  As the epistolary correspondence moves on, this becomes more and more apparent.

Wisse initiates her epistolary response to Howe by noting that what he is saying was also said by the Yiddish critic and early admirer or Sholem Aleichem, Ba’al Makshoves.  According to him, Wisse tells us, Aleichem “conjures up the collective anxiety and then dispels it magically, laughing the danger away.”   Reflecting on this, Wisse argues that Aleichem’s contemporaries may have “taken the uncertainties for granted” and “enjoyed the relief he alone provided.” But she agrees with Howe and reflects that “nowadays his name has become such a byword for folksy good humor, innocent ‘laughter through tears,’ that we are surprised to rediscover the undertone of threat in his work.”

She concedes that it might be their shared “modernist bias” that makes them frown upon contemporary kitsch representations of Aleichem’s work; nonetheless, she does note that Aleichem was aware of the “fatal weakness of the culture.”  It comes through in the “narrator’s sense of his own shared culpability in having brought it (the culture) low.”

In other words, he is a “self-conscious” modern artist and, like Howe and Wisse, he has a modernist bias.  And unlike “Tevye, Sholem Aleichem encouraged his children’s Russification.”  But, and here is the difference, Aleichem knew he was “confined to a Jewish fate” and was the “product of ‘tradition.’”  He also left for American and made and remade himself like many other Jews fleeing a slowly dying Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

Although she acknowledges the modernist bias and the “ferocity” we see in Aleichem, Wisse wants to take some of the sting out of Howe’s reading. And she does this by  lending more emphasis on Aleichem as the artist who, she believes, can do the Jewish people some good.  Making reference to an Aleichem story entitled “Station Baranovitch,” Wisse notes how the narrator and the author share a similar task; the task of the story teller:

The fate of Kivke (the place in the story) and the Jewish community are ultimately in the hands of the gifted story teller whose untimely departure at Baranovitch constitutes the story’s only fatal event.  The artist can transform reality at will – a potent charm in desperate times – but his magic is subject to temporal claims.

Like her brother, David Roskies (who in his book A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling, looks into the power of the Magid, “storyteller,” to bridge the past and the present), Wisse wants us to pay closer attention to the storyteller.  Nonetheless history does matter for Wisse as much as it does for Howe.  But history is balanced against the powers of the story teller: as we see in Wisse’s words above, the storyteller’s “magic is subject to temporal claims.”

In response to Wisse’s counter-balancing of the story-teller and his magic to the horrors of history, which he addresses, Howe takes note once again of the kitschy view he is trying to think through with his emphasis on the undercurrent of horror in Aleichem.  He justifies his challenge in view of this:

To see Sholem 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 words “toothless entertainer,” “jolly gleeman of the shtetl,” etc are meant to cajole and insult those who fall for kitsch and masscult.  He goes on to say that Aleichem is a “self-conscious” artist and not a “folk writer.”  The problem with this claim, however, is that Wisse (like her brother Roskies) believes that Aleichem, although a self-conscious writer, was still drawing deeply on the folk tradition of the Magid (story-teller).  In response, Howe notes that he came out of this culture -where the storyteller and the audience were intimate – but that he was not bound by it.  Nonetheless, Howe himself is perplexed as his thesis – influenced by Saul Bellow – about comedy and horror being interchangeable is being challenged by Wisse who is looking for more balance between the powers of the story teller and the challenge of history.

The word Howe uses to distinguish his reading of Aleichem from the older type of Magid – and to “balance” the Jewish tradition with the modern artist – is “quizzical” (a word which, as we shall see, Wisse plays on):

Sholem Aleichem stands as both firm guardian of the Jewish past and a quizzical skeptical Jew prepared (as the story of the Tevye stories makes clear) to encounter and maybe accept the novelty and surprise of modern Jewish life.  It’s just this balance, so delicate and precarious, that I find so enchanting in his work.

In “the end,” says Howe, what we also hear in Aleichem’s folkloristic tales is a “quizzical voice.”  Howe goes on to say of this voice that it “tells of madness…but so long as we can hear that voice, we know the world is not yet entirely mad.”  Indeed, Howe sees quizzical voice as offering a kind of salvation for modern readers such as himself who see the world as mad.

But this mad, quizzical voice is not funny.  And its salvational aspect is, because it is mad, still troubling.  Nonetheless, Howe agrees that the traditional and the modern should be balanced by way of balancing the folk voice (the voice of the Jewish tradition) with the “quizzical” voice.

In response, Wisse next letter pushes Howe to think more about the meaning of balance so as to take the edge off of his modernist obsession with the “quizzical” and the uncanny.   She notes that of the three greatest Yiddish writers – Mendele, I.L. Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem – all tried to find a “balance” between tradition and modernist writing but each of them tilted too much in the direction of towards the skeptical: “The strain of this divided existence, and the resentment, shows in their work.”  However, Aleichem is “different”; he achieves balance:

Sholem Aleichem is different.  Though he too felt the impending break in the ‘golden chain’ of Jewish tradition, and felt the cracks within his own life, he makes it his artistic business to close the gap.

Wisse goes so far as to say that “wherever there is a danger of dissolution,” the stories “work their magic in simulating or creating a terra firma.”   In other words, we need to pay attention to the crisis but, more importantly, we need to see how Aleichem addresses it and “balances” out tradition.  As Roskies, Wisse’s brother might say, Aleichem provides a “bridge” and that, for Wisse, is more important that the “quizzical” voice that Howe hears in Aleichem’s work.

To be sure, by Terra Firma Wisse even goes so far as to agree with the Yiddish critic Borukh Rivkin that Aleichem gave the Jews of Eastern Europe a “fictional territory to compensate for their lack of a national soil.” Wisse’s reading, here, is echoed by Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi in Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination.  In her book Ezrahi sees this move, for her embodied in the post-Holocaust American translation project of Howe, Bellow, and Feidler, as the creation of a “virtual shtetl” – and, after the founding of Israel, this substitute land (think of George Steiner’s “text as homeland”) comes into question.

In addition to finding the necessary “balance” in terms of rescuing tradition from dissolution, Wisse claims, in response to Howe, that even though Tevye is not the Vilna Gaon, he is “the original stand-up comic, playing to an appreciative audience of one: his impresario, Sholem Aleichem, who then passes on this discovered talent to his readers.”

In other words, Wisse looks to underscore the ameliorative aspects of Jewish humor which are a response to history.  She does this by pointing out that Aleichem not only balances out tradition but he does so in the spirit of the “original stand up comic,” which he created.

And this speaks to Wisse’s recent book No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, since Wisse looks for a humor that balances tradition instead of destroying it by way of extreme/excessive sarcasm.

As I have tried to show in this blog entry, Wisse also thinks that extreme skepticism (the “quizzical” tone that Howe speaks of with Aleichem) can also pose a threat.  That’s why she introduces the notion of “balance” into the epistolary exchange with Howe.

(In the next blog entries that address this epistolary exchange, I’d like to bring out this subtle contrast between Howe and Wisse so as to show how the schlemiel can be read in terms of the tension between tradition and modernity.  If an author looks at the schlemiel in too skeptical or quizzical a light, the Jewish tradition may be compromised. Nonetheless, Wisse does agree that skepticism must be there.  As I noted above, for Wisse it seems to be a matter of emphasis.  She would agree that there is a strange, dark “undercurrent” with the schlemiel, but how much of an undercurrent?  How does it relate to – or balance out with – the comic element?  Is that what makes for Jewishness?  Or does radical skepticism and irrevernace, as we see in writers like Sholom Auslander or even Phillip Roth, mark Jewishness as “quizzical?”)

Laughter Through Tears or Tears Through Laughter? Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse’s Dialogue over Sholem Aleichem’s Humor – Take 1

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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 has taken this risk and his experience of this question concerning Jewish humor serves as an example of his Jewishness.  This performance of Jewish identity – which comes out through his question concerning Jewish humor – is what Howe is showing us.   Howe is demonstrating a Jewishness that is based on pondering the question of what Jewish humor and with it Jewish identity is.

Either one laughs in order to dispel one’s sadness or one laughs and inevitably runs into sadness.   For Howe, laughter cannot dispel tears.  This declaration is, to be sure, Howe’s conversion experience. And he didn’t learn it from Saul Bellow, as he stated in his introduction to Jewish American Stories; rather, he learned it from an artist who is Saul Bellow’s Moses: Sholem Aleichem.

The relation of Bellow to Sholem Aleichem is a missing link for understanding not just Howe’s approach to Judaism, which ponders the question as to whether one laughs through tears or cries through laughter, but Howe’s Judaism, which he inherits.

Howe takes part in the legacy of a schlemiel tradition.  He is, in a way, educating the next generation of (troubled) schlemiels.

As I pointed out in the last blog-entry, Irving Howe, in his introduction to Jewish American Stories, and in this epistolary exchange, identifies with Saul Bellow’s reading of Jewishness.  And, as I pointed out, Bellow’s reading of Jewish identity is made in terms of Jewish humor.

Let us recall that Bellow finds that the uniqueness of Jewish humor is found in the fact that “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not so easy to determine the relation between the two.”  Howe so deeply identifies with Bellow’s claim about the intermingling of laughter and trembling in the Jewish humor that he repeats it in his shared introduction to another book published.  This new book, a collection of  Sholem Aleichem’s stories, was published three years after Jewish American Stories.  The 1979 collection of Shalom Aleichem stories is entitled The Best of Sholem Aleichem Stories.

In that introduction, Howe once again nods to Bellow and notes that Jewish humor “laughter and trembling are so curiously intermingled that it is not easy to determine the relation between the two.” The fact that Howe repeats this definition – not simply of Jewish humor, but, for Howe, Jewishness- is significant: he shares this “declaration” of his Jewishness with Ruth Wisse, a scholar of the schlemiel.

Given that he is testing his view of the schlemiel against hers, what Wisse says in response to Howe is even more telling.  Her similarities with Howe are important, but her differences are more interesting.  Her schlemiel and his differ.

The difference between their views of Jewish humor is instructive for those of us, today, who are concerned with the meaning of Jewish identity.  Their shared introduction to The Best Stories of Sholem Aleichem teaches us – by way of prompting us in a Talmudic manner – to interpret their relationship.  To prompt their readers to make a more literary reading of their introduction to Aleichem, they structured it as an epistolary exchange.

Let’s take note of this and read their dialogue closely.

I’d like to carefully go through this exchange of letters so as to show where Wisse agrees with Howe. After doing this, we can she where and how she tactfully disagrees.  The subtle differences between them are important and foreshadow Wisse’s recent book and much talked about book on Jewish Humor: No Joke.  ( I will address this book in a separate blog entry, but for now I’d like to draw out the precursor to that work which, I think, can be found in her dialogue with Howe.)

Ruth Wisse’s 1979 reading of Aleichem is of especial interest to a “schlemiel theorist” like me since Wisse is one of the foremost authorities on the schlemiel.  Her reading of Aleichem and Howe’s reading are not simply founded on their similar yet different readings of Jewish humor but also their readings of Jeiwshness.    For both, the famed Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem is an important starting point.  As a historian of Jewish literature, Howe believes that without Sholem Aleichem their could be no be Saul Bellow.  Bellow inherits crying through laughter not laughter through tears from Sholoem Aleichem.

First of all, although the introduction begins with (and is initiated by) Howe’s reflections on Aleichem’s perplexing humor, it ends with Wisse’s resolution.  Her resoluation balances between Howe’s “quizzical” view of Aleichem’s humor and Wisse’s own “quizzical” yet joyful view of his humor.   In the end, it is not just a matter of emphasis; in fact, their views of humor also articulate two kinds of Jewishness.  And the differences between these articulations are instructive and far reaching.

What concerns Howe most about Aleichem is the darker side of his work.  To be sure, one of the reasons he put Sholem Aleichem’s Best Stories together with Ruth Wisse was to show this neglected aspect of Aleichem’s humor.   Until then, many Americans who romanticized Aleichem (and, for Howe, Fiddler on the Roof didn’t help) associated Jewishness with joy and “laughter through tears.”

For Howe, this view, which I will call the “kitschy” view, is wrong.

The view of Aleichem (and the schlemiel) as simply a popular fun loving artist is, for Howe, too kitschy; and, as a result, it forgets history and rupture.  To be sure, Howe doesn’t desire a kitschy kind of laughter through tears.  He’s not interested in a Broadway or a Hollywood Production of Fiddler on the Roof (1964).

He seeks to be true to who he, by virtue of history, is: a Jew.  And his commitment to this kind of troubled laughter demonstrates his commitment to Judaism.  This commitment puts his kitschy identification with Jewishness into question. But the kitschy view of humor is not annihilated.  Alechem’s humorous world is, so to speak, “nihilated.”

Howe wants to show us (demonstrate for us) that his commitment to troubled laughter, in the face of such nihilation, is based on the approach to Judaism of his progenitor, Sholem Aleichem.  In other words, Howe’s Jewishness can be found in the troubled laughter we hear in Aleichem’s books.  He wants to share this insight and demonstrate how a commitment to Jewishness must challenge the popular, kischy view, that laughs through tears.

Howe seeks to set the record straight.  In the introduction he shares with Ruth Wisse, Howe tells us that Aleichem, like Bellow after him insist that to be Jewish we must admit that we cry through laughter.   This is tantamount to, as Howe says, “declaring” one’s Jewishness.

Wisse responds to Howe’s declaration with her own.