Is this Jewish Humor?
A Treasury of Jewish Humor.
by Nathan Ausubel.
Doubleday. 735 pp. $5.00.
In compiling this massive anthology—and himself translating many of its items from the Yiddish—Mr. Ausubel has undertaken a heroic task, perhaps more heroic than he realized. A book as large as this, and bearing the title which this bears, ought to be a reasonably definitive collection of stories illustrative of characteristically Jewish humor. The most important preliminary task for an editor of this kind of work is surely to make up his mind about what Jewish humor is. That Jewish humor exists, is hardly to be questioned. Or rather, that Jewish humor existed. Many of the modern funny stories about Jews which Mr. Ausubel includes in his book are just funny stories that happen to be about Jews: they are not specially or essentially Jewish. Fewer and fewer of the new stories about Jews are essentially Jewish. For Jewish humor, so far as it can be clearly differentiated from other kinds of humor, is a product of the ghetto, and bears in its philosophy as well as in its idiom the marks of a “peculiar people” who are both proud and ironical about their peculiarity, who have developed a sad secular wisdom against a background of minute and daily religious observance, who always expect the worst while maintaining a teasing and quizzical familiarity with the Almighty. The great period of Jewish humor was the period between the Enlightenment and assimilation—the period, that is, when Jews were still Yiddish-speaking and ghetto-dwelling, but after the stern conviction of unquestioned faith had been modified in response to the infiltration of skepticism. Zangwill’s Melchitsedek Pinchas, one of the last comic characters in a Jewish literature now no longer written in Yiddish, could not have existed in the Middle Ages and could not exist today. Sholom Aleichem’s Menachem Mendel belongs even more completely to a lost world.
One looks in vain in Mr. Ausubel’s arrangement of his selections and in his often acute comments for any awareness of the state of unstable equilibrium which produced the most characteristically Jewish humor. For him, Jewish humor seems to be timeless and permanent (one wonders, then, why it is not to be found in the Hebrew Bible), to be classified thematically in terms of the different subjects with which it deals rather than chronologically in terms of the development, flourishing, and passing away of the special situation in which it flowered. Thus in the section entitled “A Dash of Vinegar” he includes Peretz’s story “The Little Hanukkah Lamp” and Alfred Adler’s remark (quoted as an item in itself) that “It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them” (Jewish humor??). He gives us both Aaron Ogus’s finely ironical little story “The Shofar Blower of Lapinshok” and Lion Feuchtwanger’s very differently ironical “Balance Sheet of My Life.” We get Bialik’s superb story “The Short Friday” (absolutely Yiddish in style and subject, and redolent of the ghetto, though written in Hebrew) and Louis Untermeyer’s “parody in the manner of Edw-n Markh-m” about Einstein:
We drew our circle that shut him out
This man of Science who dared our doubt.
But ah, with a fourth-dimensional grin
He squared a circle that took us in.
I know that both Untermeyer and Einstein are Jewish, but that doesn’t make a poem by Untermeyer about Einstein an example of Jewish humor. And I cannot for the life of me see why Dorothy Parker’s little poem “Résumé” is included in an anthology of Jewish humor, even if Dorothy Parker was born a Rothschild. Sometimes I think that Mr. Ausubel believes that irony in any form is a Jewish monopoly and any ironical remark must be an example of Jewish humor.
Most humorous Jewish short stories are naturally about Jews, but not all humorous short stories about Jews are necessarily humorous in an essentially Jewish way. Arthur Kober, for example, is humorous about Jews—humorous in a grim and critical way—but the humor of his stories is anything but Jewish. Bella Gross may embody with considerable brilliance the vulgarities and frustrations of lower-middle-class American Jewish life, but her saga is neither essentially Jewish nor essentially humorous. At least, if it is to be regarded as essentially Jewish the onus lies on the editor (who writes fairly long and chatty introductory comments to each section) to differentiate it from other kinds of Jewish humor and to point out its origin in a special phase of American Jewish life. But instead of that Mr. Ausubel puts “A Letter from the Bronx” in his section on “Love,” which is preceded by a discussion of the Jewish attitude to love and marriage that seems to assume that that attitude is constant and stable or at least that all the stories he includes in this section are equally illustrative of his generalizations. “Love is a fine thing, but love with noodles is even tastier.” This theme may indeed run through all Jewish stories about love, but the differences between Hatvany-Deutsch’s sophisticated central European irony, Z. Wendroff’s traditional fun at the expense of shadchans, and Leon Kobrin’s oddly convincing account of the elderly Reb Mottel’s falling in love with the pretty girl lodger—the differences are more striking and more significant than any resemblances. Only the second, I should say, is funny in an essentially Jewish way.
Jewish humor at its most authentic arose from the clash between a vocabulary geared to a life of religious observance and a deeply ironical practical skepticism: as the latter comes more and more to dominate the former, the humor becomes less and less specifically Jewish, and when finally we get the Western Jewish intellectual playing his part as an ironist in a sophisticated Western community, the Jewish ties are generally lost altogether. (Heine, it is true, managed to preserve those ties, but, in spite of everything, Heine was emotionally closer to the ghetto than most of his modern equivalents.) I do not want to chide Mr. Ausubel for not having produced the kind of book he clearly never set out to produce, but I do wish that in his comments and in the organization of his material he could have given the reader some sense of this movement. Surely we are confusing the issue if we put a love lyric by Judah Halevi next to a story about shadchans by a late 19thcentury Yiddish writer as examples of Jewish humor about love! And a mother-in-law joke does not become Jewish by being set in a rabbi’s study.
_____________
I am disturbed also by a tendency in the collection to degenerate into a mere jokebook. (Incidentally, this tendency was also noted by Isaac Rosenfeld in his review of Mr. Ausubel’s Treasury of Jewish Folklore in the November 1948 issue of COMMENTARY.) I suppose that an anthology of Jewish humor ought to include Jewish jokes, but surely the best example of each kind should be chosen. The jokes which fill up odd spaces on the page in this volume are for the most part pretty shabby, and in many cases I have heard better examples of their kind. In any case, there is hardly a Jewish joke whose point is not more effectively illustrated in more extended treatment in some Yiddish short story. Jewish humor is discursive and argumentative, and the snappy two-line version of an anecdote often squeezes out much of its essential flavor. Often the humor lies in the sheer discursiveness, reflecting the traditional Jewish awareness of the ironical contrast between the subtleties of discourse and the hard facts of life—a contrast of which the Talmud chochem of the ghetto must have been very much aware. The kal v’chomer joke, for example (using the Talmudic a fortiori argument from the less to the greater: if for one, then so much the more so for two), is dialectical and discursive in nature, and its point often lies in the awareness it displays of the difference between the flexibility and subtlety of argument on the one hand and the irresistible nature of facts on the other. A repressed minority bred on Talmud disputation would naturally cultivate this kind of humor: yet I do not remember a single example of it in Mr. Ausubel’s anthology.
In spite of these limitations, however, Mr. Ausubel has produced an impressive work, which includes many pieces translated from the Yiddish (as far as I know) for the first time. His own translations are fluent, though not always discriminating in the use of modern American slang to render a Yiddish term or expression, and must have involved a great deal of labor. The core of the book consists of the translations from late 19th- and early 20th-century Yiddish writers, but there are also translations from Hebrew, German, and other languages and a fair sprinkling of modern American Jewish writers. If from one point of view Mr. Ausubel’s range is so great as to obscure the differentiating qualities of Jewish humor, from another it must be conceded that it extends the scope of his volume and gives the reader the opportunity to read something of Heine and Hermann Hiejermans and César Tiempo as well as of Peretz and Sholom Aleichem. But the greatest of these is Sholom Aleichem.
_____________
