No Joke (13 page)

Singer (who wrote under the name Yitzhok Bashevis) did not cast himself as a humorist except when playing to a U.S. public. Coming of age in Poland at the height of Yiddish literary experimentation during and following World War I, he declared himself a devotee of realism, and made his reputation with stories and novels in a serious vein. Like many a nineteenth-century writer and like his older brother the Yiddish writer I. J. Singer, he published most of his long fiction in serial form, in the daily press. Fortunate to immigrate to New York in 1936, he was greatly affected by the disparity between his U.S. prospects and the fate of those he had left behind; the United States had
freed him to the point of irrelevance while Europe was hunting down his fellow Jews in the cruelest search ever devised. To get across this scandalous contrast, he created images of imps who play around with human fate and the demonic writer who can do likewise with his characters.

The relatively innocent trickster of Yiddish joking becomes, in Singer's stories, the demon luring a bored young wife into one kind of sin and a coarsened butcher into another. Professional male and female liars are caught in their respective snares and destroy each other more completely than they could a naive victim of their trade. A final demon survives the destruction of the Jews, asking rhetorically, “Why demons, when man himself is a demon? Why persuade to evil someone who is already convinced?” Singer did not think that one could find a new kind of moral balance outside the code of Jewish law while doubting that modern man could “return” to the tradition's discipline.

The best known of Singer's stories, “Gimpel the Fool,” translated by Saul Bellow in 1953, serves up this dilemma as if in the familiar Jewish comic tradition. Gimpel is the name of a Yiddish cartoon character, while the Hebrew word
tam
, Singer's term for fool, designates the simpleton among the Passover Haggadah's four sons and the “simple man” of Nahman of Bratslav's iconic story. We might also imagine the simpleton as the straight man of a burlesque team. Although the cuckold is a universal butt of comedy, none before Gimpel ever allowed himself to be married off to the town prostitute, or was ever complicit in his wife's adultery to the point of “siring” and raising six children, none of who proves to be
his own. The laughingstock of the town, he remains trusting because he worries lest doubting his wife may lead to doubting God. The posture of faith is indistinguishable from gullibility.

Gimpel is not without his comic resources. When the Spirit of Evil comes to tempt him and asks, “Why do you sleep?” he replies, “What should I be doing? Eating
kreplach
?”
²⁹
But once the story has milked this comedy, something in it seems to snap, moving it from comedy to another plane of fiction. Gimpel's unwarranted trust in others is credited with keeping him purer and happier than he would have been otherwise, and worthy of God's grace, if such were to be had. The joke, in other words, becomes a fable. Singer first mines the humor of his protagonist's excessive credulity, then shows its implications for a Yiddish-speaking Jewry that had just been massacred in Europe. His final sentence consigns the innocent to a heaven “where even Gimpel could not be deceived”—
or
where he learns that he has been the ultimate dupe.

Yiddish was inherently contradictory: a mongrel language to preserve Jewish distinctiveness, “secondary” language that became mother tongue, and in the modern period, vernacular that generated a world-class literature. Jews were a people exiled from a promised land and the chosen people of an elusive God. They were untroubled by such contradictions. They
required
forms of speech that incorporated incongruity and sought out expressions that bordered on absurdity. They epitomized the betrayal of good in a world of evil—and for that reason, if no other, Yiddish humor knew that it dared not succumb to the weight of evidence militating against its very existence.

Ultimately, however, even Sholem Aleichem could not always bear that weight. He admits as much in “The Haunted Tailor,” which retells a familiar story about a hapless teacher of Chelm who is sent by his wife to a nearby town to purchase a goat so that their starving children may have some milk and returns instead with a billy goat—never having noticed the difference. (In alternate versions of the story, the goat's milk is required to heal the ailing rabbi.) The legendary Jewish fools' town of Chelm—on par with Britain's Gotham or Germany's Schilda—is noted for unworldly scholars and rabbis who habitually propose absurd solutions to straightforward problems as well as manifest hopeless innocence in the face of evil. In all these ways the story recorded as “The Chelm Goat Mystery” was typical of the genre.
³⁰

In Sholem Aleichem's version, the poor man is a patchwork tailor from the fictional town of Zolodievke, Shimen-Eli by name, an otherwise-ordinary soul with a slightly inflated sense of his own importance along with a liking for drink that prompts him to stop at a wayside tavern on both the outward and homeward legs of his journey. His mission accomplished, Shimen-Eli boasts of his purchase to the innkeeper, a rogue who surreptitiously substitutes a male goat for the milking animal. Naturally, the incensed wife berates her schlemiel husband and sends him back to correct his folly, but also naturally, he stops again at the inn, where the innkeeper once again exchanges the animals so that the original seller is able to milk the nanny goat and send Shimen-Eli back home with his original purchase. As in the Chelm folktale, the tailor walks through the same process a second time, and Maskilic criticism has no
better target than this Jew who repeats the patterns of his life without investigating their causality.

But a joke stops being funny at the point that its consequence becomes fatal. Whereas the folktale ends with the rabbi's pronouncement, “Such is the luck of Chelm that by the time a nanny goat finally reaches our town, it's sure to turn
into a billy!” Sholem Aleichem's version does not stop with this outcome. A local council of rabbis takes up the tailor's cause with its counterpart in the neighboring city; local crafts-people do the same and come to blows. But Shimen-Eli himself becomes convinced that the goat is a transmigrated soul of some dead antagonist, goes mad, and dies. The goat skips away scot-free. Sholem Aleichem concludes:

Russian Jewish artist Anatoli Kaplan (1902–80) created lithographic editions of a number of works by Sholem Aleichem, including “The Haunted Tailor.” In this image, the tailor's wife berates her husband for bringing home a goat of the wrong gender: “That is a nanny goat as I am a rabbi's wife!” The children join in the mockery. The neofolk style of illustration is characteristic of Kaplan's interpretation of Sholem Aleichem.

“What is the moral of this tale?” the reader will ask. Don't press me, friends. It was not a good ending. The tale began cheerfully enough, and it ended as most such happy stories do—badly. And since you know the author of the story—that he is not naturally a gloomy fellow and hates to complain … then let the maker of the tale take his leave of you smiling, and let him wish you, Jews—and all mankind—more laughter than tears. Laughter is good for you. Doctors prescribe laughter.
³¹

This tagline, on its own, would come to serve as a plug for the palliative benefits of Jewish humor. But as I observed in the introduction, prescribing doctors must constantly be mindful of the dangers of overdose. The careful reader of this tale cannot help noting that in it, Sholem Aleichem issues a powerful warning against just those dangers.

For their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Montreal friends of ours decided to entertain friends who knew Yiddish with readings from Sholem Aleichem by a local Yiddish actor. We gathered eagerly in the improvised comedy club. The actor had chosen a funny story and performed it well, but there was less
and less laughter with every sentence. The humor was simply too dense—too intimate, too
good
. Rather than continuing with the second Sholem Aleichem story, our entertainer switched to a sketch by the American Yiddish humorist Moishe (Mark) Nudelman (1905–67)—a tale that was thinner in substance and heavily doused with English. This went off much better, inadvertently showing us how much was gone from our culture as opposed to how much of its richness had been retained. As though he had foreseen this, Sholem Aleichem's last will and testament instructed his family to gather for the anniversary of his death, his
yortsayt
, and read from his work in whatever language they understood.

Sholem Aleichem's influence on Yiddish was so strong that his language was mistaken for humorous in its essence. But though New York Jews may have accorded him the city‘s largest-ever funeral when he died there on May 13, 1916, his Yiddish writings never did go over big in the United States. The advent of hybrid Yinglish, like Spanglish, made it harder to appreciate intricate humor. In order to win new laughs from new audiences, Sholem Aleichem adaptations like
Fiddler on the Roof
—the musical version of his stories of Tevye the Dairyman—are obliged to alter at least as much as they retain.

3

The Anglosphere

Let me entertain you
Let me make you smile

—From the musical
Gypsy
¹

When and under what circumstances did Jewish humor become a marketable commodity, leaving the synagogue and Jewish study-house to take the public stage?

With their entry into European society, Jews began making their mark in the arts; we have seen how writers like Heine and Kafka exploited the doubled perspective of outsider-insiders and insider-outsiders for comedy. This chapter charts a further step: namely, the penetration of non-Jewish society, first in England and then in the United States, by Jewish humor and Jewish humorists—to the point where, by 1975, an estimated three-quarters of U.S. comedy professionals, from Woody Allen to Henny Youngman, were Jewish. Moreover, much (though not all) of their comedy was itself perceptibly Jewish in its references and style.

Jews had traditionally earned their keep in host societies by supplying necessary services and goods. How did they create a demand for Jewish joking?

That they had often been the
targets
of humor is not surprising, given their long-standing political dependency and the delight taken by satirists in ridiculing alleged inferiors. The Roman writer Juvenal lampooned the Jews' squatting and sponging; his compatriots derided their religious credulity; even the generally sympathetic fourth-century emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus (Julian the Apostate) taunted their weakness:

But now answer me this: Is it better to be free continuously and during two-thousand whole years to rule over the greater part of the earth and the sea, or to be enslaved and to live in obedience to the will of others? No man is so lacking in self-respect as to choose the latter in preference. Again, will anyone think that victory in war is less desirable than defeat? Who is so stupid?
²

One can see Julian's point. Jews prided themselves on being the people chosen by God, “Lord of Hosts,” yet they boasted not a single general of the stature of Alexander or Caesar. The discrepancy between Jewish claims of election and their unhappy experience in other people's lands provoked many sallies of this kind at their expense, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and many in between. All too many Western writers enjoyed ridiculing the Jews.

Nor is it surprising that among themselves, Jews should have encouraged some merriment alongside their rituals of mourning. In the previous chapter I highlighted the ritualized cheer on the holiday of Purim, mandated by the Book of Esther with its portrait of a clumsy king and tale of triumphant
political reversal. Many Jewish communities traditionally celebrated Purim as a funfest of inversions; over time, they cultivated entertainers like the Purim rabbi, wedding joker, and other roguish wits. But all these were strictly for internal consumption. The question, again, is at what point Jews undertook to turn their own brands of humor to the task of amusing their fellow citizens.