No Joke (7 page)

This ironic vision of Rothschild bending to the whims of a little Jew became a staple of Jewish comedy. It was at the opposite remove from German high culture where von Platen and Heine competed for supremacy. And it was a fantasy, designed to mitigate the actual growing rifts between rich and poor within Jewish communities, and demonstrating Jewish unity against the double threat of anti-Jewish aggression and
assimilation. Yiddish referred to this unifying intra-Jewish quality as
dos pintele yid
, “the little marker of the Jew,” signifying the quintessence of Jewishness that remains when all else may have been lost. (The term was itself a bit of a joke, punning on the dot beneath the
yud
, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet.)

Heine's comedy thus highlights the diminutive aspect of those who preserve their innocence. In the reverse hierarchy of moral standing, Hirsch-Hyazinth defers to Little Lump, Dr. Heine to Hirsch-Hyazinth, and Rothschild to them all—and the Gentiles to Rothschild. Correspondingly, however, Heine, the one furthest from the ghetto, is the freest to speak his mind. Only the baptized Dr. Heine can really attack the anti-Jew, since Jews within the fold, even one as loose-tongued as Hirsch, must stay under the cover of comedy, preemptively cautious, fearing collective as well as personal reprisal. Indeed, it is at the point where Heine's comedy lurches out of control, where he breaches the boundaries of good taste and humor itself, that we see the full gain of the freedoms he flaunted along with the full cost.

German Jews who converted or stood close to conversion—in a progression that extended from Heine's contemporary Ludwig Börne (1786–1837) to the satirist Karl Kraus (1874–1936)—produced some of the most aggressive comedy in Europe. Accused of “self-hatred” because of their delight in assailing Jews, they were equally hard on Gentiles. As one can see in the epigraph to this chapter, where the author reminds Börne, his fellow convert, that “one does not talk of ropes in
the house of the hanged,” Heine leaves ambiguous whether the metaphoric hanging (read: conversion) was by the deceased's own hand or another's—whether, that is, the Jews had more to fear from Gentiles than from their own impulse of surrender. The Enlightenment abandoned the dreadful measures used by the Inquisition to deal with suspected aliens and backsliders, but still there remained something toxic in the encounter between Jewish and German cultures—something that was conspicuous in the comedy from early on. At the same time, comedy's predilection for inversion and incongruity was richly served by a society that enticed Jews into conversions that it necessarily distrusted, and Jews who distrusted the society into which they were voluntarily coerced.

Kafka

This cultural predicament received its iconic treatment in the work of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, though by the time of his death in 1924 historical conditions were hardening in ways that made it hard to laugh at his comic turns. German was Kafka's language and formative literary tradition, but unlike with Heine, his circle of Jews in Prague sought not so much a cultural synthesis as a cultural give-and-take. Kafka, for example, became for a time a devotee of Yiddish theater, to the point of championing the language against those who considered it merely an inferior version of German. He read up on Jewish history and frequented a Jewish study group where the philosopher Martin Buber came to lecture. Multiethnic
Prague, with its built-in competition between Czech and German, was much more conducive to Jewish self-awareness than unilingual German cities or German-monopolized Vienna.

The monument to Kafka in the former Jewish quarter of Prague is a bronze statue by Jaroslav Rona, unveiled in December 2003. According to the sculptor, it is based on a paragraph in Kafka's story “Description of a Struggle” in which the narrator leaps on another man's shoulders and urges him forward into a trot. Here, a smaller Kafka sits atop a headless, handless, and footless, but striding, giant of a man. Courtesy of Hyde Flippo.

The deracinated European Jew became Kafka's special subject. One of his funniest send-ups in this vein, the story “A Report to an Academy,” appeared in 1917 in the Zionist periodical that Buber edited, demonstratively called
Der Jude
(The Jew).
²³
Talking animals have made people laugh since before Aristophanes, and in this “report” one of Charles Darwin's subjects returns the compliment of his theory by describing how the ape turned human.

Five years after his capture in the wild, an ape appears before the members of an unspecified academy to describe his evolution into their cultivated guest speaker. Dubbed Red Peter, he recalls his capture on the Gold Coast, the sensation of the shots that felled him, his journey across the ocean to Europe inside a closely guarded cage, and his determined efforts to find his way out of his confinement by mimicking the crew that taught him by example how to spit, drink, and speak. Much as Heine ridicules through exaggeration the bigot's contempt for the Jew, Kafka literalizes the simian imagery in which the Jew was often cast. But all his emotional investment is in the ape. No one could say about him what was said about Heine: that he internalized the standards of the enemy.
²⁴

The ape's attitude is as generous to his captors as their treatment had been cruel to him. Wonderfully urbane, he registers the indignity of having been made to ape the Gentiles, while accepting full responsibility for deciding to make the switch and become human: “I could never have achieved what I have
done had I been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrance of my youth. In fact, to give up being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid upon myself, free ape as I was. I submitted myself to that yoke.” Since he stands closer than does his audience to their common origins, he knows things they may be forgetting. “[Everyone] on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.”
²⁵
The grotesque features of this parody—the ape addressing his vanquishers—are sweetened thanks to the far lower levels of sensitivity and thoughtfulness in the society of his betters.

It is easy to see the assimilating Jew under the ape's disguise—for instance, in the extended sequence where he tells how he first proved his adaptive capacities by drinking schnapps from a bottle. “The smell of it revolted me; I forced myself to it as best I could; but it took weeks for me to master my revulsion. This inward conflict, strangely enough, was taken more seriously by the crew than anything else about me.”
²⁶
Contempt for Gentile drunkenness was a trope of Jewish culture, which prided itself on relegating the consumption of alcohol to prescribed religious functions. Yet if the anomalies of Jewish assimilation inspired this parody, its Jewishness is nowhere made explicit. In this ape, one also can see Freud's human patients, ensnared by the demands of, in a word, civilization.

Kafka does not sentimentalize the primitive wild, and the ape understands that although adopting human form gives him greater agency than he could have had as a jungle creature, there is no ultimate liberation from constraint. He deliberately does not use the word freedom, nor does he any
longer seek the actual greater freedom of movement. He has met human beings who yearn for it, but thinks that they are too frequently betrayed by the word:

As freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. “And that too is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.
²⁷

Freud came to terms, mournfully but realistically, with the sacrifice of libido, eroticism, and swinging from the trees that was the cost of civilization. To our ape, in contrast, those lost freedoms were not so terrific to begin with, which makes people's attempt to win them back ridiculous at best. It is always unsettling to see residual animal aspects in human nature; to see human acrobatics from a simian point of view can make more than the apes laugh.

Yet ultimately the ape, like Kafka's other creature protagonists—Gregor Samsa the insect, the burrowing mole, the investigating dog, or Josephine of the mouse people—elicits more empathy in the reader than comedy can tolerate. Whereas the human heroes of Kafka's works are kept at arm's length in a way that mirrors their impersonal relations with
others, his creatures are so intimately conceived that they pull us into their predicament and hearts. Comedy needs enough detachment from its subject to allow for the enjoyment of its playfulness. If Heine's comedy is overtaken by anger, Kafka's is overtaken by grief.

Thus, of the two possibilities open to him, the ape has chosen the variety stage over the zoo, and concludes his report with a description of how he ends his days.

When I come home late at night from a banquet, or from some scientific society, or a friendly get-together, a little half-trained little chimpanzee is waiting up for me, and I take my pleasure with her after the apish fashion. I have no wish to see her by day; you see, she has the crazy, confused look of the trained animal in her eyes; I am the only one to recognize it, and I cannot endure it.

In any case, I have on the whole achieved what I wanted to achieve. Do not say it was not worth the trouble. Besides, I am not asking for a judgment from any human, my only wish is to make these insights more widely known; I am simply reporting; to you, too, honoured gentlemen of the Academy, I have been simply making a report.
²⁸

The ape's refusal of pity is belied by the sympathy he feels for the creature that is just beginning the transformative process he has successfully traversed. By the point where the ape says, “I cannot bear it,” the comic potential of the story has dissolved, and the bewildered half-broken animal stares out at us with an insane look in her eye.

The same pressures that produced
taufjuden
—baptized Jews who appeared to continue in their Jewish ways, somewhat like Marranos, the secret Jews who outlasted the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, but now were tolerated though seen as equally suspect by both Christians and Jews—fueled German Jewish humor. Taufjuden humor claimed the right to mock from the perspective of Jew or Gentile, or the perspective of both or neither—demonstratively free, yet aware of the forces that had brought it into being. Feeling threatened, Jews sublimated their anxieties in joking, which did not eliminate the threat. In Heine and Kafka, warnings against the limits of comedy emerge from the comedy itself. This is the quality that seemed prophetic in retrospect, when their premonitions were actualized by fellow Germans, and to an extent far beyond their imagining.