Last month Norman Podhoretz discussed in our pages (“Literature and the ‘Spiritual Crisis’”) the current tendency to regard religion and literature as comrades-in-arms in a common struggle against that “loss of values” which seems to so many people to lie at the root of all our troubles. Here Mr. Podhoretz takes a look at the work of a writer who not only would have found such discussions entertaining—he found everything entertaining—but might have failed entirely to understand them: Sholom Aleichem wrote for an audience in the full tide of its “loss of values,” but so intimate was his relation to the audience that he succeeded in creating great literature out of just those elements which our present-day criers of literary doom have decided make literature impossible. Maybe, Mr. Podhoretz implies, the “lesson” of Sholom Aleichem is that Jewishness inheres simply in the Jews, and not in any ideology or doctrine that seeks to “explain” or “define” them. The Adventures of Mottel the Cantor’s Son, which Mr. Podhoretz discusses here, was published recently by Henry Schuman in a translation by Tamara Kahana (342 pp. $4.00).
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Sholom Aleichem’s The Adventures of Mattel the Cantor’s Son is the comic Odyssey of a Jewish family traveling from Kassrilovka to New York in the early years of the 20th century. It is not, I believe, considered one of Sholom Aleich-em’s major works; but if it doesn’t rank with the Tevyeh stories, Sholom Aleichem’s characteristic genius is still there. The book, made up of a series of humorous incidents all narrated by the youngest member of the family, the rascally child Mottel, is divided roughly into three parts: life in Kassrilovka; the adventures of the immigrants in various European cities; and, finally, an unfinished section describing their first months in New York.
The American sketches were written immediately before Sholom Aleichem’s death in New York in 1916, and they are certainly inferior to the marvellous chapters on Kassrilovka begun nine years earlier. The humor of the last section is a little too cosy; for once the exuberance seems a bit forced. Despite this, Mottel remains a great work of comic literature, and Mrs. Kahana’s fine translation ought to dispel any lingering doubts about whether Sholom Aleichem is “universal” enough to carry over into English. We can see now that there is nothing parochial about his humor, and his sense of life, though peculiarly Jewish in some respects, is not the less intelligible on that account.
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Sholom Aleichem lived through the breakup of the Yiddish-speaking world. As a result of persecution from without—especially the May Laws of 1881—as well as the pressure of criticism from within, the walls of the ghetto had begun to crack. There were mass emigrations to America, and amorphous Zionist sentiment was collecting into a powerful political movement. Life in the ghetto or the Pale of Settlement had been hard, but it was also secure, clannish, and changeless. If such a life has no other advantage, it at least permits its creatures a clear knowledge of who and what they are. But with the disintegration of this dirty though cosy world, doubts and confusions about their own identity spread among the Jews at large. And the fact that there had been dozens of attempts during the 19th century to re-define the content of Jewishness by Zionists, Hebraists, emancipationists, assimilationists, and a host of others, did not simplify matters for the shtetl innocents going abroad for the first time.
The various schools of thought on what constituted “Jewishness” disagreed in many details, but they were unanimous on one point—that a real Jewish identity could be maintained outside the ghetto, that, in fact, the Jewishness of the ghetto was not actually Jewishness at all, but a withered, stunted version of it. The ghetto had perverted the true spirit and character of Judaism, and thus had produced a degenerate breed of Jews with nothing of the dignity and bearing of men whose cultural heritage entitled them to walk upright among their fellows. Consequently, all the movements for their rehabilitation invariably began with attacks on the manners of the “ghetto Jew”: the clothes he wore, the beard he grew, the food he ate, even the language he spoke—all were stigmatized, sometimes naively, as the cause of anti-Semitic outbreaks, more often as barriers to the building of a new and better world. The bitterness and hatred of Mendele’s satire, for example—the only Yiddish fiction other than Sholom Aleichem’s with a claim to greatness—were provoked by a conviction that the manners of East European Jews rendered them incapable of pulling themselves out of the mire. Mendele saw them as degraded by centuries of misery and poverty, ignorant of everything but the “useless” scholasticism of Rabbinic studies, boorish, dirty, and vile, so complacent that they were unwilling even to dream of better worlds.
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But if Mendele was the prophet of wrath, coming, like the first Isaiah, before the destruction, Sholom Aleichem was chosen, like the second Isaiah, to bring consolation in the dark days and in the years of exile and doubt. What were the Jews—a civilization, a religion, a political entity? What was their proper language—Yiddish, Hebrew, English? How were they supposed to behave and dress? Sholom Aleichem answered these questions by refusing to believe in their validity; it is one aspect of his greatness. To him, Jewishness was not a matter of “values” or “essential characteristics” of race or nationality or both; it was nothing abstract, neither a civilization nor yet a peculiar kind of religion. Jewishness was simply the way Jews behaved; it was, in short, the very manners and habits despised by the avant-garde, and it was the rich diversity of attitudes implied by the things they did and the way they did them.
And what a marvellous conception of their own threatened identity he conveyed to a people deserted by external reality and harassed by the suspicion that perhaps they didn’t really exist at all. He portrayed them not as they were told they ought to be, or as they might turn out to be, but truly as they were. Jewishness was sister-in-law Brocha with the big feet, father-in-law Jonah the biscuit-man, Pinney with the nose, Eli with the temper, Fat Pessie the neighbor, and the eternally weeping Mama. They are types still to be met in any Jewish neighborhood in New York or London or Paris; so right was Sholom Aleichem about the weird persistence of manners. Money, status, possessions were all at the mercy of circumstance, but the people could be relied upon to maintain their identity, at least for a little while, in spite of circumstance: “If I didn’t know for sure that we were in America, I might have thought we were in Brod or in Lem-berg. The same Jews, the same women, the same noise, the same dirt.” But above all, Jevvishness was Mottel, the image of the adaptability, resilience, energy, resourcefulness, and—most important—the durability of the Jew.
The Jews of Eastern Europe considered childhood a phase to be got over as quickly as possible, a sort of malignant disease the curing of which justified the use of any means, no matter how drastic. Consequently, Mottel’s relation to the world—like that of the Jews to the peoples around them—is one of conflict, the battle between an irrepressible child and adults who can neither understand nor tolerate him, a world to which his very existence is an offense. “According to them, everything is mischief. To tie a piece of paper on a cat’s tail in order to make her spin is mischief. To bang a stick on a priest’s fence and make all the dogs run out is mischief.”
Indeed, mischief—that for which you get a beating—comes to mean by definition anything Mottel happens to do. He whistles and is trounced; he takes a ride on a goat’s back and is rewarded with a punch in the teeth; he goes fishing and almost has one of his ears torn off by an indignant elder brother trying to “make a man of him.” But making a man of Mottel seems to consist only in slapping him around and threatening to “finish him off” altogether in another moment. Miraculously, something always intervenes to save him: “I’ve rarely seen my brother in such a rage. He rushed at me ready to tear me apart with his bare hands. Luckily for me, he sneezed just in time, else I’d be a cripple for life.”
Only on two occasions does life become safe. The first is when his father dies: “ Your luck that you are an orphan!’ says Leibkeh to me, ‘else I’d break you, hand and foot. You may believe that I’m not lying!’ I believe him. I know that no one will touch me because I am an orphan. It’s grand to be an orphan!” The other crazy reversal of his fortunes is in America, the place where “everything is possible,” where “the small can become big, the lowly great, and the dead practically come to life,” and where— miracle of miracles—”parents get punished for their children’s mischief.” “Try not to love such a country,” says Mottel. The adults, of course, don’t appreciate it as he does. “America,” they say, “is a free country; everyone is making a living, and having a terrible time.”
The adult world, then, is a great tissue of absurdities to the child. The absurdity comes out in many ways. For example, in Mottel’s eyes the whole of reality is a Garden of Eden like Mrs. Doctor’s garden in Kassrilovka:
“What can’t you find in this garden! Apples and pears and cherries and plums and gooseberries and currants and peaches and morellos and raspberries and blackberries— what else do you want? . . . [But] Heaven preserve you from asking her [even] for a sunflower! . . . She finds it easier to pluck a tooth out of her mouth than a sunflower out of her garden.”
There it all is, offering itself to him, yet Mottel is kept out of the garden by a high fence with horrible spikes and a dog that must really, he thinks, be a wolf. Now why on earth shouldn’t he be allowed to pluck a fruit or two from the trees? Fruit was obviously made to be eaten before it gets too ripe, when it’s still sour enough to make your lips pucker. But this fruit will never be eaten, not by Mottel or anyone else; it winds up as mouldy jam in Mrs. Doctor’s cellar. Why should this be? There’s no reason, it makes no sense, no more, that is, than the cuffings he gets on every page:
“What does she need so much jam for, in heaven’s name? If you ask her, she doesn’t know herself. It’s simply her nature. It’s too late, you can’t change her. All she knows is that when summertime comes, she’s got to start cooking jam.”
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This conception of reality as insanely irrational is common to the comic literature of oppressed peoples. We have lately seen it in Ralph Ellison’s novel about the Negroes, but it has a long history behind it. With varying degrees of success, Defoe, Smollett, Disraeli, and Dickens all work from such a conception when they write the comedy of the poor. What is unusual about Sholom Aleichem is that he makes the absurd malevolence of the world all part of the fun and richness of living. This is a way of accepting life even when life is most niggardly in its gifts. And it is an attitude that strikes me as quintessentially Jewish, the perfect comic expression of a culture in which theology— i.e., the attempt to understand the problem of evil in rational terms—never flourished. Like Mottel’s—and like Job’s—the privations and sufferings of the Jews bore no relation whatever to anything they did; they suffered only because of what they were. And despite the attempts from time to time by pseudo-theologians to make sense of a classically senseless situation, the Jewish answer was still the answer of the Book of Job —that there is no answer. And if there is no answer, one can either rage like a Dostoevsky, or laugh. Sholom Aleichem laughed. His laughter has something to teach modern apologists for Original Sin who believe that optimism and a love of life must necessarily reflect superficiality of spirit.
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