Through this personal memoir with its unpublished letters from the pen of Sholom Aleichem, Israel Cohen here offers a glimpse of Yiddish literature’s great figure in his last years.
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Rummaging recently among an accumulation of old letters and papers, I came across some letters in Yiddish, written in a small, neat hand, and signed with an elaborate and indecipherable flourish, which immediately evoked a train of pleasant memories. They were letters received over forty years ago from Sholom Aleichem, and vividly recalled the friendship that I enjoyed with that prince of Jewish humorists at the pinnacle of his fame and the nadir of his fortune: when he and his family were compelled by the pogroms in Russia to abandon their home in Kiev and seek peace and shelter in the Western world.
In April 1906, when I was on the literary staff of the Tribune, a great London Liberal daily which was too good to live more than two years, I received a letter with an Austrian postmark sent from Lemberg (or Lvov), which then belonged to the Austrian Empire. It was the first of a series of letters that formed the prelude to my friendship with Sholom Aleichem. It was in his characteristic Yiddish style, which I have translated (as in the case of the rest) as faithfully as possible:
Lemberg, Kotlarska I
April 7, 1906
Highly honored Colleague, Mr. Israel Cohen!
You have certainly heard that there is a country called Russia, in which there are some six million Jews, who have a language, a “jargon,” which has a literature that boasts of a good many authors, the least of whom am I, Sholom Aleichem. And because the whole of Jewry there has been battered to pieces, its authors also have not been spared, and they have spread over the wide world . . . . And I am on the way to America, but they have kept me here in Austria—Galicia, Bukovina—and they are dragging me from one city to another and make merry with me. I give readings and the people laugh, say that I am an artist in this matter and usually exaggerate, as is the habit among Jews—and now they are writing to me that I should also travel to England. Should I or not?
From the enclosure you will see wherein my art really consists. Could you not tell me what sort of a public I could have in East and West London? And whether one could reckon upon a public at all? It would naturally be more in accordance with my wishes if I were invited by some club or society. That is how the custom was among us there, that is in Russia, and it is like that also here among the Polish Germans. I shall be very grateful to you if I receive your friendly reply very soon. I have heard that you are a writer on an English paper, and yet I am writing to you in the holy language of the Taitsch-Chumesh, because I am a common individual and a simple—
Sholom Aleichem.
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It was necessary to make some inquiries as to what arrangements could be made to fit in with Sholom Aleichem’s expectations, and there was, therefore, an inevitable delay in replying to him. Consequently I received a second letter, as follows:
Galatz, Rumania
April 27, 1906
Dear Sir:
I am very much surprised that I have not received any reply to my first letter, in which I took the liberty to inform you that I am coming to London. I thought of coming soon after Passover, but the Galician and the Rumanian Jews have given me such a friendly welcome that I shall be able to come only at the end of May, as they are also inviting me (for the second time) to Vienna and also to Switzerland, and one cannot refuse. I am now wandering about and experiencing all the miseries of the great Golus, learning about all sorts of things and getting to know people by meeting them. I should like to become acquainted with the East End as well as with the West End of London before I set out on my journey to far-off, fortunate America . . . .
What is your opinion about my plan in England? I am no lecturer, but I read my short sketches before a large audience, it seems with great success, because the people clap and shout “Bravo!” and “Bis!” In London I suppose it’s usual to arrange the thing on a bigger scale. The question is: who are to be the arrangers?
I am writing also to my great colleague Zangwill, but I’m afraid that he doesn’t understand Yiddish, not even a lick!
My address to the end of May is Lemberg, Kotlarska I.
Yours sincerely,
Sholom Aleichem
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My reply to this letter resulted in Sholom Aleichem’s arrival in London in the latter part of May, 1906. A reception comittee had been formed, with the late Joseph Cowen (well known at the time as one of the Zionist leaders in England) as chairman, and Israel Zangwill had promised his support. Our first step was to give a dinner in honor of our distinguished guest at a Jewish restaurant in the East End of London. It was my privilege to propose the toast to his health, and he responded in a speech full of humor and pathos. He was then forty-seven, a man of medium height, with a shock of dark-brown hair brushed back from his forehead, a thick mustache, and a slight tuft on his chin, and he always wore spectacles. He had a refined, intellectual face rather deeply lined, and seldom spoke without a faint smile.
Sholom Aleichem remained in England during this first visit for more than two months, and I was in constant touch with him throughout that time. I was therefore able to learn something about the vicissitudes that had befallen him before he left Russia, of the misfortune that had converted him from a businessman into a novelist, of his friendship with the great Russian writers of the day, of the tragedy of the pogroms, and of his enforced wanderings from land to land. He had been a rabbi for three years before he became a novelist, and he had written in Hebrew before he gave way to the popular demand for Yiddish. At first he had been indifferent to the monetary possibilities of authorship, but in 1891 he lost all his money by speculations on the stock exchange, and was compelled to fall back upon his pen for a living. (He drew upon his unlucky experiences as a speculator for the writing of one of his best books, Menachem Mendel.)
He spoke a good deal about the leading Russian authors of the day, most of whom he knew. Gorki had proposed to him in 1902 that the best popular Yiddish writings should be translated into Russian so as to acquaint the Russian people with the true character of the Jews. This suggestion was carried out: many translations were made from the works of Sholom Aleichem, Mendele, and Peretz. In 1903 Sholom Aleichem asked Tolstoy, Gorki, Chekhov, Korolenko, and other Russian writers for contributions to a volume in aid of the victims of the pogroms. Tolstoy wrote three essays, which Sholom Aleichem translated into Yiddish.
From 1903 to 1905 he went on a reading tour throughout the Pale of Settlement. He was an excellent reader, clear and expressive, and he told me that he had acquired his elocutionary gifts from the old rabbi who had been his teacher in the humble cheder of the Jewish townlet he immortalized as “Kasrilevke.” He was severely affected by the pogroms that took place in 1905, when he was living in Kiev. He lost his home and publishing business, and found himself obliged to abandon his work and his hopes for the Yiddish theater, for which he had written some plays. He thereupon undertook a tour of the principal Jewish communities in Galicia, Bukovina, Rumania, Austria, and Switzerland, giving readings from his works, and everywhere met with a friendly and popular welcome and material success. He left his wife and six children in Switzerland before coming to England.
When I asked him which he considered his best works, he said that although Stempenyu and Yossele Solovey were most in public favor, he was too much of a realistic humorist to be enamored of the romantic style used in them: his preference was for Menachem Mendel, Tevye der Mïlchiger, and Kleine Menshelach, portraying the very humblest of the denizens of the Pale.
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Sholom Aleichem gave his first public reading in London on June i, 1906, at the South Place Institute, a building of rather medium capacity which was usually the rendezvous of Ethical Church preachers. Israel Zangwill, who presided, said that the Yiddish author’s visit was the only good thing that had come out of the Russian pogroms, and stigmatized as snobs those English Jews who despised Yiddish. He compared the language to the Provencal dialect, whose poets were lauded, and also to the Tuscan dialect of Dante, which had also at first been disparaged. Sholom Aleichem then read a number of sketches that kept his audience in continual laughter.
As I recall, the sketches included descriptions of “Kasrilevke,” an ironical account of the blessings of a large family called “Nachas fun Kinder,” and “Milchiges,” a monologue by a hungry gourmand. A few weeks later he gave two public readings in Manchester. Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was at that time a lecturer on biochemistry at the Manchester University, was present on both occasions: he proposed the vote of thanks to the distinguished visitor at the first, and presided at the second. Sholom Aleichem repeated his reading in Leeds, which then contained a predominantly Yiddish-speaking Jewish community, and then returned to London, where he took part in a public celebration of the tenth anniversary of Theodor Herzl’s first visit to London. As it proved impracticable to make any further arrangements for readings, he then returned to Switzerland to rejoin his family.
A few weeks later I received the following letter from him:
Geneva, Switzerland
August 12, 1906.
Highly honored Colleague:
I have spent three weeks in Switzerland. I have written a drama for the famous Jewish actor, Jacob P. Adler, of New York, Grand Theater. Adler is now performing in London in the Pavilion Theater. I shall read the play to him on Tuesday, the 14th of August, in Three Nuns Hotel in Aldgate Street. It is in my interest that the reading of the play for Adler should take place in the presence of those who understand me best, and unfortunately I have very few in London for this purpose. I have invited besides yourself Mr. Finkenstein and one of my friends, If it were possible for you to sacrifice two or three hours for me, I would beg you to be at the Three Nuns Hotel, Aldgate Street, on Tuesday, the 14th of August, between 12 and 2. It would be good if you would send me a postcard there to let me know that you are coming and at what time. I shall await you.
Your colleague and admirer,
Sholom Aleichem.
I at once replied to this letter, and on the appointed day I called at the hotel in White-chapel, where I found Sholom Aleichem awaiting me. With him were Jacob P. Adler and Mrs. Adler, and Mr. Finkenstein, who was the Secretary of Zangwill’s Jewish Territorial Organization. Unless my memory deceives me, Sholem Asch, then a young man of twenty-five, who had just arrived in England, was staying at the same hotel at that time, and was also with us. We all went up to Sholom Aleichem’s bedroom, a simply furnished chamber into which a few extra chairs were brought, and he then began to read his new play, which was called David ben David. It was a drama that mirrored all the main currents of thought and conflicting views in Jewish life during the preceding ten years. The central figure was a young Jewish millionaire who was fired by the ambition to establish a Jewish state, but after he had aroused feverish enthusiasm and high expectations his mind became unhinged, and the play had a tragic end. We followed the dramatic developments, which were liberally relieved with touches of humor, in silent and tense expectancy, as the author read his manuscript with varying inflection and suitable gestures. Adler fidgeted and nodded his head occasionally, and when the reading was over he made some criticisms, which the author readily agreed to consider.
Shortly afterwards Sholom Aleichem went to the United States, and I next met him at the Zionist Congress of August 1907, at the Hague. He was a very popular figure among the delegates, gave his autograph very generously, and was photographed together with the poet Bialik. I still have a copy of that photograph hanging up in my study: both authors, in cutaways, are seated, facing one another in animated conversation, the humorist holding a cigar in his gloved hand and the poet (already bald, but with a mustache) fingering a cigarette. That was the last time I saw Sholom Aleichem, although I continued to keep in touch with him by correspondence.
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Somewhat disillusioned by Western Jewry he returned to Russia, where he again traveled about from town to town in the Pale, like a medieval troubadour, giving readings instead of singing songs, and depending upon this mode of activity to eke out the rather modest income derived from the sale of his books (which were unfortunately widely pirated). In 1908 he celebrated his Silver Jubilee as an author. Public meetings were held throughout the Pale, at which tributes were paid to his literary genius, and collections of money were also made for his benefit, because his health had begun to fail and his earning powers had declined. At one of these meetings, at which he was present himself, at Baronowicz, he was seized with a fit of coughing during a reading and began to spit blood. He had to be taken out, fell ill, and continued in a serious condition for some weeks; when he had recovered sufficiently he was ordered to the Italian Riviera to make a complete convalescence.
It was at this point that I entered into correspondence with him again (or he with me). Under the auspices of the Union of Jewish Literary Societies, of which I was an executive, I arranged a public meeting in his honor and for his benefit at the University College, London. Since we could not have the ailing author with us, I wrote to him for a special message and received a characteristic letter of eight pages, as follows:
Villa Briand
Nervi, Italy
November 12, 1908
My dear friend and honored colleague,
Israel Cohen:
In the first place allow me to make you a compliment: in your Yiddish writing in the past two years you have made great progress. Three years ago you wrote Yiddish like a real goy. Now you write Yiddish, one can say, like a born Englishman. There is a hope that in time you will write Yiddish like a proselyte or a meshumed. (But like a Jew, dear friend, you will never write Yiddish—and for that I envy you. I wish I could write Yiddish like you and write what I write in a goyish language!)
And secondly, dear friend and colleague, you must excuse me for writing this letter in pencil. I am not doing this out of perversity or mere fancy, but simply because I am writing on my back—lying in bed. And I am lying in bed also not because of wantonness or some fancy or other, but simply because the doctor orders me to do so. He says that a man who can permit himself to spit blood, to cough and have a high temperature, deserves to lie in bed like a monarch. So one can’t be a beast and one must obey. And so, my dear friend, I lie in bed near open windows which look out upon the Mediterranean. The silvery waves please me by their reflection of the golden beams of the fiery sun. The blue Italian heaven gives me a greeting from the Land of Israel: “There,” it says, “there is also such a heaven, with such a sun and such air.” And I swallow the pure light air of the Garden of Eden and feel that I am getting better from day to day, from hour to hour; but when I take a look at the calendar and see the date of the 15th of December when I shall have to pay for the villa, and my purse is dry as a desert, then it is bad, it is bad! Speaking of the desert I recall the great miracles which the Lord God performed for our great-great-grandfathers in the desert, and I say to myself: No, it isn’t so bad! And this is the proof.
Just now is my jubilee of twenty—five years. The Jewish people have remembered that there is somewhere in the world a Jewish author whose name is Sholom Aleichem, who is living a life of exile and misery, wandering from land to land—now is he in barbarous Russia, now in Western Europe, now curiously enough in free America, and now once more in barbarous Russia. Untiringly he gives readings almost one evening after the other, and at one of these readings he suddenly begins to cough and to bleed. He takes to bed and makes acquaintance with the Angel of Death . . . . But in a wonderful manner he wriggles out of the hands of the Angel of Death, and the doctors send him to Italy just at the very time of his literary festival!
Then there awakens among the Jewish people, merciful children of the merciful, a feeling of pity, and they say to themselves: “Let us show the whole world that Jews know how to esteem their authors and poets.” And they set about arranging this celebration in a way that should be beneficial to the subject of the jubilee, and beautiful for the world to see. And Jews can if they only want to. And they set about thinking, and they thought and thought and thought again—Jews can if they only want to—they thought of buying for the beloved hero an estate or a substantial house. Where? Naturally not in barbarous Russia. In Palestine. But why Palestine? Sholom Aleichem is beloved by Territorialists not less than by Zionists. Then in Italy? Why not in America? . . . And so Jews have racked their brains and scraped their pennies—Jews can if only they want to. The entire Yiddish and also Russian press have been seething. The community has been in a ferment. Surely this is no trifle, Sholom Aleichem, our Sholom Aleichem! There is no conceivable thing that is too dear for such a people’s favorite as Sholom Aleichem! The Jewish people . . . . Money? Ha, ha! Who speaks of money? There is already in deposit for this purpose a special fund of a hundred roubles or ten pounds sterling!!!
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I Am pleased, dear colleague, that you and your friends in London want to do me honor. You say it is quite possible that Zangwill will be present at my festival and deliver a speech. Permit me to doubt this. I am an apikoires. I hardly believe the great ghetto-portrayer of England will condescend to greet the “jargonist” of Kasrilevke with a Jewish “sholom aleichem.”
Nevertheless, I beg of you, good Israel Cohen, if you see Israel Zangwill—to give him a warm greeting from me and say that the success of his play The Melting Pot in Washington has afforded me much pleasure in my sick-bed. Every time a brother Jew of mine distinguishes himself in the literature of the world is a source of jubilation to me. I want the world to recognize what we say and think about ourselves . . . .
Have I now written to you about everything? With regard to my health, all the chances are on my side that in the course of six months I must get perfectly better here in Italy. It is only a question of means: shall I have the wherewithal to maintain myself? In answer to that there is a Jewish mode of argument, mimmo nafshech, which runs like this: “Mimmo nafshech—if there will be the means to keep yourself it will certainly be all right. But what then, supposing there should not be? Why should there not be? . . .” By this way of arguing, brother Cohen, all the Jews of Kasrilevke have been living for years, and this same way lives also their representative, Sholom Aleichem. There is not another optimist like him in the world. He dreams even now while lying in bed that there will be found somewhere in the world a Maecenas, a fool, who will come and say: “Sholom Aleichem, brother! Don’t worry. I undertake the responsibility of issuing all your works in twenty volumes, and now be quiet!”
It is a pity I have nobody to copy my newest sketch, which I wrote in bed on the day of my Jubilee, with the title “Shmuel Shmelkess un zein Jubileum.” I should like two things: that you should have something new to read on the evening of November 21, and that you should translate it and have it printed according to your liking. I have written to my children in Switzerland that they should send you the preface. Do with it what you like.
You will certainly not fail to send me a faithful account of the evening and also send me everything that is printed about me in the English Yiddish papers. I wish you a happy Yom-Tov!
Sholom Aleichem.
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Selections from Sholom Aleichem’s works were read by a well-known writer, Dr. Angelo S. Rappoport, and I gave an address on the novelist’s life and writings. Israel Zangwill, who had been invited to take part, was unable to get away from his home on the south coast, and sent a letter, in which he wrote: “A silver jubilee seems indeed an ironic expression for a man who has gathered scant silver by his work and whose health leaves him so little reason for jubilation. The touches of humor and pathos in our friend’s work are so masterly that if he had only had the good fortune to write in English he would have secured the income of an American humorist. His demand upon the Jewish public of today consists not in the fact that he writes in Yiddish, but that he is a man of letters who, after a long and honorable career, finds himself in broken-down health and therefore with diminished earning power for his old age. Let us try to make his silver jubilee golden.”
Unfortunately the meeting did not yield much gold. The attendance was affected by bad weather, and those who came were richer in sympathy than in money. I therefore supplemented the appeal by writing letters to the Jewish press. The final result was that I raised just a little over forty pounds—a trivial and miserable tribute to a great writer. I sent the sick man ten pounds each week until there was nothing more left, and each time I received a letter brimful of gratitude and good humor as though the remittance were ten times as large.
Sundry contributions from sympathizers continued to reach me at lengthening intervals, which I promptly forwarded. The last of which I have a record is a check that came to me in August 1909 from South Africa through the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, and the acknowledgment that I received from Sholom Aleichem was addressed from Sanatorium St. Blasien, in Germany—proof that his health still needed careful attention. He died seven years later, in 1916, in New York, at the age of fifty-seven.
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