The publication of Wandering Star (Crown, 314 pp., $3.00), fourth volume of Sholom Aleichem’s works to appear in English translation, affords IRVING HOWE an opportunity to assess Sholom Aleichem’s extraordinary art, and to ask why he has not been accorded the place in world literature that many think he deserves. 

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We live in a time when the literature most valued by serious people is likely to be intense, recalcitrant, and extreme; when the novel is periodically combed for images of catastrophe; and the possibilities of life seem available only through ultimate, prophecies, and last judgments. Formally we accord Dostoevsky and Tolstoy equal honor, but in our hearts we feel closer to Dostoevsky; his seems the true voice of crisis, and we know ourselves to be creatures of crisis. I myself join in this response, and I believe it to be inevitable to our age.

Yet it would be good if we could also celebrate another kind of literature: the kind that does not confront the harsh finalities of experience, or strip each act to its bare motive, or flood us with anguish over the irrevocability of death. In such writers as Turgeniev, Chekhov, Silone, Sherwood Anderson at his rare best, and Sholom Aleichem at his frequent best, there is a mature restraint from the extremes of vision, a readiness to value those milder virtues which can only cause impatience in many modern minds. These writers—let me call them the writers of sweetness—do not assume evil to be the last word about man, and they seem to add: even if it is the last word there are others to be declared before we reach it They do not condescend before the ordinary, or scorn the domestic affections, or suppose friendliness to be mere bourgeois cant; and perhaps because of these very virtues, they seldom strike us among the greatest writers. But they are often among the most tolerable: one can live with Chekhov in a way that is difficult with Dostoevsky, and one can love Silone with a warmth impossible to feel for D. H. Lawrence.

Sweetness is a quality our age suspects; and “sweetness and light” now seems a phrase of faint ridicule, calling to mind a genteel academicism, a cultivated futility. But when Matthew Arnold used the phrase he was hardly seeking a warrant for complacence; he knew that the quality of sweetness need not preclude the most stringent moral and social realism.

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The little I know about Yiddish literature strengthens my confidence in these remarks. Here is a literature which explored poverty as few others have, which studied the misery of this life as intensely as the French have studied love—many a Yiddish writer could speak as an expert on the subject of hunger. But while I do not wish to suggest that Yiddish literature has been without its voices of desperation and violence, I find myself repeatedly moved by the tone of love—a tone that is the most certain register of moral poise—with which such masters as Peretz and Sholom Aleichem faced the grimmest facts about ghetto life. Blinking nothing, they could accept everything.

Why should this be so? Not, I think, because of any special virtues in Jewish life or character; nor even because of the distinctive religious cast of the ghetto. When Mendele wrote his tribute to the compressibility of the Jewish stomach, and Sholom Aleichem had his Tevye declare, “I was, with God’s help, a poor man,” and Peretz fused the harshest naturalism with the most exquisite lyricism in the story of poor young lovers called In Keler—these writers were expressing an ethos that reflects a unique historical condition. The ghetto Jews could be as greedy as any other human beings, and as unscrupulous in their pursuit of parnosseh (livelihood); but they were cut off from the world at an all too visible point, the limits of their social movement were pathetically clear. And here may be one cause for that fascination with the Rothschilds which runs through Yiddish writing and humor: the great family was not only Jewish, not only rich, not only close to the ears of kings, it had established itself halfway between two worlds, facing the brilliant and tempting West even as it cast an occasional, uneasy glance back at the Jews.

Who, in the ghetto world, was not finally a luftmensh, a Menachem Mendel trading nothing for nothing and living off the profits? This precarious position made history itself seem a little ridiculous—a response almost impossible to those who are in history; it made the ironic shrug a symbolic national gesture; and it made the feeling of fraternity with the poor a foundation for Peretz’s delicate studies in character and Sholom Aleichem’s marvelous flights into surrealism. This feeling had nothing in common with the populist sentimentality we have come to suspect in Saroyan and Steinbeck; no one could have been more caustic than Mendele or Sholom Aleichem in the criticism of Jewish life. What it signified was that, in the end, the best Jewish writers knew to whom their sympathies were pledged, and never doubted their ties even to the most miserable little shnorer. They wrote from a firm sense of identification, an identification that was simultaneously inheritance and choice; and this was the source of their moral security. (Consider what Sholom Aleichem would have made of Scott Fitzgerald’s lifelong struggle with the problem of money!)

None of this, to my mind, has anything to do with shtetl-nostalgia; nor is it uniquely Jewish; the sense of fraternity with the poor is as fine in Silone as in Sholom Aleichem. It was only that the Jews, with God’s help, had more occasion than most peoples to look into the matter.

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In the last six years we have had four translations of Sholom Aleichem, three collections of stories and now Wandering Star, a novel. Wandering Star (translated by Francis Butwin) is inferior to the others, but the inferior work of a master. For Sholom Aleichem is a master in quite the same sense, though not to the same degree, that George Eliot or Mark Twain or James Joyce is. To those who know their Yiddish literature, such a declaration will seem amusingly naive; but those who know the American literary scene will appreciate its necessity. Neither Sholom Aleichem nor any other Yiddish writer has really entered the consciousness of literary America: the quarterlies say nothing about them, the universities do not teach them, the serious graduate students have hardly heard of them. For this ignorance there are several reasons: the problem of translation, the depreciation that creeps into the occasional Jewish presentation of Sholom Aleichem as a kind of national minstrel, and the snobbish assumption by some literary people that no great literature is likely to have come from any place as out of the way or grubby as the ghetto.

In Wandering Star Sholom Aleichem is not consistently at his best. He lacked a firm grasp of the novel form (he never attended a Writers Conference). To watch him work up a complicated plot and then laboriously resolve it, is both amusing and touching; that such a genius should feel obliged to fool with such triviality! But the quality of genius comes through, gleaming in the interstices of the plot. And perhaps his particular kind of genius didn’t need to master the novel form. So closely was he attuned to his audience, he could afford to take more for granted than any other important modern writer; he did not feel a need to put everything into his work, as does the writer who no longer knows for whom, if anyone, he writes. Sholom Aleichem’s stories are therefore packed with clues, implications, and sly gestures which his readers could immediately grasp and enlarge.

Wandering Star is a picaresque novel describing the travels of some indigent Yiddish actors from a Bessarabian town through Bucharest, Vienna, London, and finally New York. Traditional picaresque often portrays the social ascent of an outsider who storms society by disregarding its formal morality. In Sholom Aleichem, picaresque is more restricted, being primarily a horizontal journey that seldom moves beyond Jewish limits; the outer precincts, with their threats and allurements, are superbly suggested but seldom presented—again because of the economy possible to a writer who works in a living tradition—except, I should add, for a riotous burlesque of a laconic Englishman who is being milked by Nissel Schwalb, one of many experts in combinatzies who wander through the novel.

Hero and heroine are romantic sticks, but every other character breathes; a few bleed. They are all marginal, shabby, rather mad, and sometimes a bit disreputable; these impresarios, actors, directors, hangers-on, and confidence men are not at the center of Jewish life and not nearly so close to Sholom Aleichem as are Tevye and Menachem Mendel. Sholom Aleichem is not taken in by these fellows, but he gives them their due and in the end loves them. They are his, these fakers and shnorers, these grabbers and dreamers; they belong to his world, bear his brand. One character seems to me a major creation and an example of that still, winding sadness which a careful reading will reveal in Sholom Aleichem. Rising from prop-boy to impresario, Holtsman coughs his way through the Yiddish theaters of Europe, a fabulous schemer and bluffer, yet dedicated to the theater as he sees it. His success lasts as long as the hero of the novel, a gifted young actor, stays with him; and when his protégé abandons him to go to America, Holtsman dies in Whitechapel, spitting up blood, cursing the present, hungering for the past. There are others, too, not so finely individualized but fascinating as types: Madame Cherniak, the character actress also known as Braindele Kosak, whose well-filled stocking tempts repeated advances and whose face leads to repeated jiltings; Nissel Schwalb, the master of moneyless finance; Shchupak, the director with three wives; Klammer, the restaurant owner who dreams of dramatic glory. Touched in lightly, often caricatured, all are authentic Jewish types.

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The word “tradition” has become an ikon of modern criticism, and “traditional,” though properly a neutral term, serves for implicit praise. Yet if by traditional we mean not merely a writer’s sense of continuity with the writers that have preceded him, but also his sense of being rooted in living culture and intimately related to an active audience, then it is above all in Yiddish literature, and certainly far more so than in modern English or American literature, that tradition is a sustaining force. Consider the immense advantages under which Sholom Aleichem worked: he could assume that his readers knew not only the world he described but every nuance of character he hinted at; he had no need for depth psychology or intensive analysis of character, for his readers lived next door, as it were, to Tevye and Menachem Mendel and Holtsman. He could, that is, count on one of the main resources of tradition: the powers of unconscious or implicit communication among members of a coherent group. In terms of language he could count, as well, on the tremendous possibilities for wit and ambiguity that followed from an interplay of Yiddish text and Hebrew quotation; on the possibilities from a salting of the text with the rich Yiddish proverbs and epigrams; and on the further dimension of meaning that could follow from a slight twisting of Biblical quotation or Yiddish proverb.¹

The Wasteland is a more recondite work than a group of Sholom Aleichem stories, but the footnotes Eliot felt obliged to append to it indicate that he was writing in a society where tradition had been disrupted, while the coherence and conciseness of Sholom Aleichem’s stories indicate how much he could still expect from his readers—and from his readers throughout the world. He had no need to foreshorten plots or seek fresh devices by which to avoid boring his audience; he was as sure of his readers as of his materials; and which Western writer since Tolstoy has been able to enjoy such advantages?

Perhaps the greatest advantage of all was that he wrote at a time when the Jewish tradition still pulsed vigorously, but Yiddish literature itself had not yet become excessively “literary.” Peretz is a literary man in a sense Sholom Aleichem, and Mendele before him, can hardly be said to be; which may account for the shade of preference one has for the latter two. In Sholom Aleichem the sense of the past is still strong, but the language comes far less from a literary stock than first-hand, from the yarid (fair), and the gass (street), still fresh, rich, frothing with idiom. The forces of dissolution have begun to appear, and they may account for the occasional note of doubt one hears in Sholom Aleichem. But he need not linger on this, he need only sketch it in: one of the finest moments in Wandering Star occurs when a group of young Hasidim visit the “modern” theater and are enchanted by what they see.

In translation, something of this tradition-rooted strength must be lost. I suppose, for example, that modern readers may be taken aback by the violence and coarseness of the cursing in which the actors of Wandering Star indulge. Jewish life certainly had its share of coarseness, but whoever is familiar with the role of invective and hyperbole in Yiddish speech will make the necessary ironic discounts. Actually coarseness is second only to cruelty among the traits Sholom Aleichem dislikes. Though he never romanticizes the poor, he does write with a certain harshness about the rich, at least with as much harshness as he can summon. The two least attractive characters in Wandering Star are a rich village Jew who visibly corrupts the language, and the “Maecenas of Lemberg,” an even richer Jew who pretends to a passion for art but closes his pocketbook to artists. Both of these men, the one openly and the other subtly, are grobe yungen—and it is the grober yung, the man lacking in delicate sensibilities, whom Sholom Aleichem can least abide. His heroes are, above all, edel: Tevye the dairyman is a man of exquisite refinement in all the things of life that really matter.

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If modern literary men cared about tradition as much as they claim, Sholom Aleichem would be avidly discussed in the literary journals and as many dissertations would be written about him as are about Faulkner. And if the chatter one hears about values were very much more than educated noises, Sholom Aleichem would be read with amazement and joy: for in how many other modern writers does one find so lovely a a quality of feeling, so warming and fraternal a vision, so active a sense of human goodness? Middleton Murry once said of Thomas Hardy that “the contagion of the world’s slow stain has not touched him.” This magnificent remark must have referred to something far more complex and valuable than innocence, for no one could take Hardy to be merely innocent; it must have referred to the power to see the world as it is, to love and yet not succumb to it; this is the power that I find, admire, in Sholom Aleichem.

But if we are to deplore the neglect of Yiddish literature in American literary circles, what are we to say about its neglect in the Jewish world? and particularly in those official segments of the Jewish world aggressively devoted to the slogan of “Jewish survival”?

There are now in print four volumes of translation of Sholom Aleichem, one of Mendele, perhaps two of Peretz. Surely, this is a wretchedly inadequate representation of the major Yiddish figures—not to mention the many other secondary writers who have not been translated at all. We have a Portable Irish Reader but no Yiddish Reader, a collection of German stories in the Modern Library but not one of Yiddish stories. The Jewish organizations are ready to devote their resources to a variety of ends, but which of them would consider, for example, subventing an edition of Mendele, a writer whom an authority in COMMENTARY declares to have painted the Jewish world with a Balzacian completeness. Nor is there much time left; either the Yiddish literary heritage will soon be made available in translation or it will not, in any significant sense, be available at all.

For there are values, shades of perception, turns of feeling, blends of humor that can be found in Yiddish literature and nowhere else. In Sholom Aleichem we hear a voice of purity and sweetness; but even more important, we see the tremendous resources that come to a writer when he can work with the knowledge that wherever his readers may be, there he is loved.

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