No Joke (19 page)

Jolly Paupers
(
Freylekhe kabtsonim
) was shot in Warsaw in 1937, at the height of Yiddish film production in Poland, starring the comic team of Shimen Dzigan and Yisroel Schumacher as schlemiels who discover oil (where someone has accidentally spilled a can). The scene being shot features actor Menashe Oppenheim in the eponymous role of Bar Kokhba, leader of the 132 CE Jewish rebellion against Rome. Courtesy of YIVO Archives.

Reflecting on this high point in his life, Dzigan later asked himself, “How was it possible?”

Were we deaf, dumb, and blind to the threatening signs of the times? I have no answer. I can only say that perhaps because we subconsciously felt that our verdict was sealed and our fate unavoidable, we consciously wished to shout it down and drown it out. With effervescent joy we wanted to drive off the gnawing sadness, the dread and fear that nested deep inside us.
¹

To describe this attempt to drown out their woes, Dzigan employs the term
fartumlen
, just as Americans used tummler to describe their Borscht Belt shtick.

Dzigan's reflections on the uses of comedy in a time of acutest danger became even more pertinent once the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 brought on the German invasion from the west and the Soviet onslaught from the east. Uniting the staunchest of ideological antagonists, the pact was more preposterous than anything a comedian could have invented. Jews, whose modern culture had specialized in accommodation and self-mockery, were the least equipped to imagine the pathological criminality of the Final Solution, even after they were trapped in ghettos and forced to sew yellow stars on their clothing, even after a few stragglers escaped to tell the tale from the burial pits where they and thousands of their fellow Jews had been rounded up and shot. Nor could those who had looked to socialism as the perfection of humankind believe the accounts of tyranny and terror emanating from the Soviet Union. If cognitive dissonance is caused by a divergence between convictions and actuality, and if humor attempts to
exploit that discomfort, no one was ever so perfectly placed to joke as were Jews under Hitler and Stalin.

During the late 1930s and early years of the Second World War, the common repressive measures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia generated much interchangeable humor. In the German version a child is asked, “What would you like to be if Hitler were your father?” “An orphan!” comes the answer—and the answer is the same when the imagined parent is Stalin.

Two Jews, waiting before the firing squad, are informed that they are to be hanged instead. “You see,” says one, “they've run out of ammunition!”
²

Two acquaintances meet on the street. “It's good to see you back,” says the first.

“I hear that conditions in the concentration camp are horrible.” “Not at all,” replies the second. “They wake us at 7:30. Breakfast with choice of coffee or cocoa is followed by sports or free time for reading. Then a plentiful lunch, rest period, games, a stroll, and conversation until dinner, the main meal of the day. This is followed by entertainment, usually a movie …”

The first man is incredulous. “Really! The lies they spread about the place! I recently ran into Klein, who told me horror stories.”

“That's why he's back there,” nods the second.

We do not know whether such jokes moved from east to west or vice versa, but they are found in both languages. The play
between “getting” a joke and getting sent to a concentration camp for getting a joke dates from either the establishment of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in 1933 or the earlier Soviet labor camps that came to be known as the gulag. The joke, whose technique is dissimulation, exposes the need for dissimulation in order to stay alive. To the extent that humor reveals what must otherwise remain concealed, a repressive regime can be its natural incubator.

The German Sphere

Though Jewish humor in the late 1930s crossed otherwise-sealed frontiers, it responded differently to the two regimes. Nazism was unlike Soviet Communism in offering no enticements to Jews. Since it aimed at their elimination and held no promise of a better world for all, it attracted no Leon Trotskys to its cause. The increasing threat to Jews under German rule brought greater moral clarity. Jews were targeted as Jews, humiliated as Jews, denounced as Jews, and finally forced into Jewish ghettos and murdered as Jews. Under Nazism, therefore, Jewish humor went mainstream only among a small liberal constituency and only until the war. In the ghettos and concentration camps, under German rule, Jewish humor became more internal, hermetic, contorted, and intense than what had once circulated outside their walls.

In 1985 I joined a study trip through Poland with professors of the Hebrew University, several of whom had fled the country before the Second World War. One day, on a street
in the town of Kaziemerz, as they were talking in Hebrew among themselves, they overheard one Pole remark to another, “That's how they used to speak before the war.” One of the Israelis corrected him, “Not exactly. Before the war, ‘we' spoke Yiddish, and now we were speaking Hebrew.” The Pole replied, “But that's how you used to speak when you didn't want us to understand.” This perceptive witness was accurately describing what the linguist Max Weinreich calls the linguistic style of
yehudi beloy
(Jew, beware), a way of speaking Yiddish that incorporates as many Hebrew loanwords as possible so that Gentiles who understand some Yiddish or German will be left in the dark. As Weinreich puts it (with the Hebrew in italics), “
Zay
shomea
vos der
orl
iz
magid [listen to what the Gentile is saying]” had less of a chance of being understood than the synonymous “
her vos der
goy
zogt!
”
³

Germans and Jews both developed furtive languages—the same strategy of secretive speech being put to opposite uses by predators and intended victims, respectively. Whereas Nazism specialized in what George Orwell called doublespeak to conceal its murderous intentions, Jews under Nazi rule used
yehudi beloy
to clarify their situation. Jews developed code words to warn of approaching Germans or their henchmen, to express the horrors of death and dying, starvation and deportation. A signal that a moment of danger had passed was
nirtzeh
, the heading of that part of the Passover seder when the major part of it is over; the festive term served a practical and psychological conspiratorial function, uniting celebrants of Passover against a new pharaoh:

A bomb explodes at a meeting of Horowitz, Moyshele, and Shtolener.

Who survives?

Mankind.

It helps to know that Horowitz was a code name for Hitler, Moyshele for Benito Mussolini, and Shtolener for Stalin, the man of steel.

In common ghetto speech, Hitler was routinely referred to as Haman, villain of the biblical Book of Esther, and on the festival of Purim, when Jews eat hamantaschen to mark the evil schemer's inglorious end, ghetto Jews looked forward to devouring Hitlertaschen.

Jewish irony darkened with Jewish fate. Jews in hiding were called
lamed-vovniks
, an acronym for the legendary thirty-six (Hebrew:
lamed-vov
) saintly men for whose sake God keeps the world alive. In folktales, these anonymous just men escape notice as a feature of their humility; in ghetto irony, they escape notice in order to save their lives.

A reliance on Aryan papers (
arishe papirn
) was mocked by the addition of the consonant “n” (
narishe papirn
, meaning “foolish papers”), as though to suggest that the subterfuge was bound to be exposed.

Maxims were adapted to local conditions. To the motto inscribed over the gate at Auschwitz,
Arbeit macht frei
, Jews added
fun lebn
: “Work liberates you—from life.”
⁴

Wit became drier and more compressed. Ghetto Jews quipped that they had turned religious: they fast every day as on Yom Kippur, they sleep in makeshift quarters as on Sukkoth,
they are riddled like matzo on Passover, and so forth. Cleverness scored the victories that the victims could not. Habits of self-deprecation persisted, but under ghetto conditions it was sometimes hard to distinguish between condemnation and reassurance. Four things are unconquerable: the German army, the British fleet, the American dollar, and Jewish smuggling. Though the fourth of these symbols of power obviously subverts our expectations, Jewish smuggling in the ghetto
was
a form of triumph over those who allowed no traffic in or out.

We owe our knowledge of ghetto humor to contemporary diarists and chroniclers—among others, the historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the team he assembled to preserve a record of Jewish life within the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of the joking recorded by Ringelblum was hermetic in the extreme, as in the wit of the candle seller who used the peculiarities of local pronunciation—in which
lakht
could mean either “light” or “laugh”—to advertise his wares:

“
Lakht
, Jews,
lakht
for 20 groschen. They burn day and night without mercy.
Lakht
, Jews,
lakht
…” While a smiling crowd gathers in the narrow lane, the peddler shouts louder: “Buy, Jews, and may they burn on memorial days and during festive occasions, on days commemorating the dead, and God be willing, on days to commemorate the scoundrels!
Lakht
, Jews,
lakht
for 20 groschen and may Jews at long last be able to celebrate!”
⁵

The dialect makes it impossible to know whether the seller is asking to be rewarded for his humor or actually expected Jews
to buy candles for the named purposes. Analogously, the hallowed nature of Ringelblum's archival project, euphemistically called
Oyneg Shabes
—“celebration of the sabbath”—makes us reluctant to pluck comic items out of what was designed to be a comprehensive documentation of Jewish society and all that transpired within it. Some have even questioned the moral valence of discussing humor during the
hurbn
(Holocaust). But their worry is pointless: the Jews whose catastrophe it was could no sooner have dulled their wit than altered the fundamental powerlessness of their condition.

Vilna, for example, resembled Warsaw in boasting an extraordinarily rich prewar repertoire of folk humor, some of it playing on the several languages Jews spoke in tandem. The Vilna proverb “Three things come too late: wisdom, regret, and the fire brigade” was funnier in Yiddish, where the first two terms,
der sekhel
and
kharote
, were borrowed from Hebrew, and the final, deflationary one,
di pozharne komande
, from Polish. Similarly, by a mere flick of consonants, Vilna Jews turned a call for progress,
di tsaytn baytn zikh
—the cliché “the times they are a-changing”—into its riposte,
di baytn tsaytn zikh
—“innovations grow stale.” No surprise, then, that along with songs and sayings, the Vilna Ghetto should have produced comedy revues like
Di yogenish in fas
, punning on “Diogenes [here, in two words, ‘the hustle'] in a barrel.” The title yoked the legendary Greek thinker, who was said to have lived in a barrel, to the reality of ghetto Jews chasing around frantically in their cramped space.