Don Quixote of Tunyadevka
The Travels of Benjamin The Third.
by Mendele Mocher Seforim.
Schocken. 124 pp. $1.50.
“Poverty and degradation and lack of employment and misery accustom men to pin their hopes on follies not in consonance with the ways of the world.” So wrote Mendele Mocher Seforim in one of his novels. As an enlightened 19th-century intellectual and educator of the benighted masses to their civic responsibilities, Mendele fervently believed in the influence of environment. Even the children, he bitterly commented in true Rousseauian fashion, were de-natured by the straitness of existence in the poor Jewish villages within the Pale of Settlement of Czarist Russia. He sharply noted the accusation leveled by ghetto adults at Jewish children when they got out of hand: they were being “childish”! The autodidactic country boy who wandered with a band of gypsy beggars before bowing under “the yoke of livelihood” to become the father of Yiddish literature almost automatically also became an enlightened rationalist who inveighed with his time against the limitations and irrationalities of civilized man. But Mendele was a satirical artist as well as a novelist of social morality, and it is a paradox only in the best artistic sense of the word that he should also have produced one ostensibly minor work totally at variance with the ideology of his day: one which directly attacked the doctrine of perfectibility.
The Travels of Benjamin the Third is that work, and the brevity which permits it to be printed as a 124-page Schocken Library Book is ascribable to this fundamental divergence from the general pattern of Mendele’s other works. Digging below the surface of his own assumptions, Mendele came to the hardbed of a psychological reality he could not continue to explore without undermining the purpose of his life. So The Travels ends inconclusively; the woebegone travelers are released from military service with a snicker, and continue blithely on their meandering course to the “land of the Red Jews.” Yet the book does not end too soon; for the taste of The Travels is almost intolerably acerb. One begins reading with a smile which gradually freezes into a grimace. The Travels is unrelievedly bitter; but it is a book that must be read, to shatter once and for all the romantic idylls now being built upon the ruins of the ghetto.
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The Travels has often and obviously been compared with Don Quixote: the chief characters and type of situation seen on the surface are similar. The hero Benjamin, himself, is the same unworldly shlemiel, misled by his readings to pursue an archaic ideal in the real world; and Senderel, Benjamin’s more practical companion, bears a superficial resemblance to Sancho Panza. Yet here, at the very base of the comparison, an important cleavage appears, and it grows wider the more closely one reads The Travels.
For the books which lead Benjamin away from the small town of Tunyadevka (“Droneville“) are not the popular romances which Cervantes’ contemporaries read and recognized as fictions. They are mythological reminiscences, in which fact and fantasy are inextricable, so that the valid accounts written by the first Benjamin (the actual Benjamin of Tudela) of his travels to the Near East in the 13th century stand side by side with the description of the fabulous River Sambatyon, which acknowledged the piety of the Red Jews by ceasing to hurl stones on the Sabbath. The Hebrew works that induced Benjamin the Third to desert Tunyadevka and set forth on his great travels in search of those mythological Red Jews received some credence in the eyes of the ghetto, to whom Biblical myth was a source of real history. Hence, Benjamin is not a real eccentric in the same sense as Don Quixote; he acts rationally in everyday life (begging, for example, to earn a living) because his dream is popular, and only his flight from home to achieve it is radical. Mendele underscores this point by identifying Benjamin’s aspiration with that of the Zionists of his period, whom Mendele viewed with, at best, mixed feelings of irony and sympathy. Benjamin and Senderel remember to take with them the indispensable paraphernalia of the Orthodox Jew, the prayer-bag containing prayer-shawl and phylacteries, as well as prayer books, because their search is, in a larger sense, not for their own, but national redemption.
The second conspicuous distinctiveness of The Travels consists in the relationship between Benjamin and Senderel the Housewife. From the very outset, when we are introduced to Senderel peeling potatoes and wearing an apron, it is an unmistakably homosexual relation.
There are frequent and clear references to Senderel’s femininity; he assumes the role played by Jewish women in the ghetto: Senderel is the “female” provider for the learned idealistic male, Benjamin. It is Senderel who is most successful at the ancient profession of begging, and, ironically, he who begins to adapt himself to the routine formality of military life which Benjamin disdains. Like Swift, Mendele’s attitude toward women in The Travels is sardonic; the only women in this book are ignorant, aggressive, spiteful, and masculine. There are none of the tractable, feminine women whose education to liberalism figures so largely in Mendele’s larger works. This absence of sympathetic woman figures and the emphasis on men who have deserted their masculine functions is an important element in the pessimism of this book. What can one expect of a world where sexuality itself has gone awry?
Nor does religion offer its famous consolations. The encounter of the fugitive husbands with the peace-making rabbi on the big-city bridge turns into a complete burlesque in which the rabbi proves his wordy inadequacy and is forced to retreat from the—perhaps symbolically—narrow one-way bridge. Significant, too, is Mendele’s employment of children and animals for crude effects—as the scene in which a peasant boy sics a dog on to the rabbi at the river and sends him flying, desperately holding on to his pants. Children and animals are no longer the exploited creatures of nature. They turn the tables on the adults by upsetting their loftiest pretenses; e.g., Benjamin embracing a cow in his sleep, which in return both butts the hero and upsets a bucket of water over him. Most devastating of all, in a passage of epical irony all of nature seems to mock Benjamin and his companion. Its beauties seem to turn inward, ignoring the day dreamer as they never ignored the earnest heroes of Mendele’s other works.
The Travels of Benjamin the Third is a bleak picture of a filthy landscape of unrelieved folly, hallucination, and avarice, peopled by visionary runaways, political claques behind the synagogue stove, and scoundrels who sell their fellows into military service. It is Mendele Mocher Seforim at his hardest, a tour de force of harsh laughter which will, I suspect, outlive the author’s more ambitious and conventional works.
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