No Joke (8 page)

German Jewish humor influenced all other branches of Jewish culture. The man who stood at the helm of modern Yiddish culture in Poland, I. L. Peretz (1852–1915), came to regret what he considered the excessive influence of Heine while he tried to find his own literary voice. But no such qualms troubled other Yiddish writers who likewise discovered literature through Heine. The humor magazines published in New York City by Yiddish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century regularly featured translations from Heine and imitations of Heine (some unacknowledged). In 1918, a group of these writers put out an eight-volume Yiddish edition of Heine's work—the only such literary tribute in U.S. Yiddish letters—reflecting not only the esteem in which the German writer was held but also a publisher's (no doubt exaggerated) estimation of his public appeal.

It is worth noting, however, that the introduction to these collected works casts Heine as a “tragic Jewish poet, perhaps the most tragic poet who every climbed the sacred mount of the muses…. Tragic in his poetry, his life, his loves, his suffering, his pathos, his thought, his ridicule, his cynicism, his sanctity, his pain, and his death.”
²⁹
In this reappraisal of Heine's comic writing, one can sense the catastrophic impact of the First World War on Jewish sensibilities, but perhaps also something of the difference between Yiddish and German Jewish humor.

By the lights of Yiddish humor—our next subject—Heine's humor
was
tragic.

2

Yiddish Heartland

A skeleton is shown into the doctor's office.
The doctor says: “
Now
you come to me?”

—Heard from Yosl Bergner, in Yiddish, Tel Aviv, 2012

The Yiddish humor of the East European Jew, or
Ostjude
, was as different from the German
Judenwitz
as
aleph
and
kometz-aleph
are from alpha and omega. In brief, Yiddish humorists peered out from inside Jewish life rather than, like Heine's narrator in “The Baths of Lucca,” from outside in. This made their mockery not necessarily kinder but certainly more intricate and better informed. While the German language developed the stereotype of the “rootless cosmopolitan”—the Jew who is nervously trying to fit in while everywhere displaced—Yiddish conjured up a stuck-in-the-mud Jewish nation that was only belatedly lifting up its head.

One homely example of the distinction is the nose—the same nose that stigmatizes the Jew in the German writings of Heine, but that makes a very different sort of appearance in the 1905 story “Two Anti-Semites” by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.

In this story, the telltale protuberance appears on the face of a traveling salesman, Max Berliant (not quite “Brilliant”).
Max has lately begun to sample the forbidden pleasures of the surrounding Gentile world. Travel through Russia, though a mere baby step on the road to assimilation as portrayed by Heine, nevertheless affords Max the chance to shed some of his Jewishness while evading the opprobrium of a watchful community. He is therefore annoyed by the intimate insinuations that his nose evokes from fellow Jews who squeeze into his share of a train compartment.

By the time of the story, though, Max has something even bigger to worry about: the 1903 killing spree in Kishinev—a vicious mass attack on Jews that had occurred in the same territory he is about to traverse:

It must surely have happened to you while sitting on a train that you passed the place where some great catastrophe has occurred. You know in your heart that you are safe because lightning doesn't strike twice in the same spot. Yet you can't help remembering that not so long ago trains were derailed at this very point, and carloads of people spilled over the embankment. You can't help knowing that here people were thrown out head first, over there bones were crushed, blood flowed, brains were splattered. You can't help feeling glad that you're alive; it's only human to take secret pleasure in it.
¹

In this passage, Sholem Aleichem is deploying the Aesopian strategy that writers in Russia adopted to avoid czarist censorship, transposing a hypothetical railway accident for the brutal images of Kishinev: the first pogrom of the twentieth century and the first whose images of butchered bodies were disseminated
by newspapers. The narrator invites us to experience Max's anxiety and relief—
there, but for the grace of God, lies
my
ravaged corpse
—while noting his hubris in trying to separate himself from the Jewish community—a serious taboo in traditional Judaism—during a time of national danger. Max is clever. As the train penetrates the region of peril, he gets off at a station and buys a copy of the
Bessarabian
, a regional anti-Semitic paper said to have incited local pogroms. Once back in the compartment, he stretches out on the bench, and drawing the newspaper over his face, reckons that he is safe from interference. “What a great way to get rid of Jews and at the same time keep a seat all to myself.”

The reader can guess the rest. Another Jewish salesman enters the compartment, but unlike Max, this one, Patti Nyemchik by name, can't get enough of his fellow Jews and enjoys entertaining them with funny stories. Here he has stumbled on to one in the making! Taking in the scene—“during his sleep, the newspaper had slipped off Max's face to reveal his stigma”—Patti steps out on the platform to buy his own copy of the
Bessarabian
; once back in the compartment, he assumes Max's identical position on the opposite bench.

After a night of torturing dreams, Max wakes up, disoriented. He touches his nose and finds it gone—with a copy of the newspaper in its place. When he catches sight of the person on the opposite bench, he thinks it must be himself, but is at a loss to grasp the meaning of his out-of-body self. As he slowly comes to, his stirring wakes Patti, who smiles across at his fellow “anti-Semite” and tentatively starts whistling a popular Yiddish tune. Soon they are both singing it aloud,
Afn pripetchik brent a fayerl …
, a little fire burns in the old woodstove, and the teacher sits reciting with the children the sounds of the Hebrew alphabet,
aleph
and
kometz-aleph
. The comedy of errors resolved, the two Jews continue on their journey, the more secure for being in harmony.

Is it any wonder that by the time of this story's publication, Sholem Aleichem—the Hebrew-Yiddish pen name means “peace be upon you,” or in a word, “welcome!”—had become the Jews' most beloved writer, overcoming their increasing internal factionalism with his near-universal appeal? Like Patti, he enjoyed entertaining his fellow Jews with stories and jokes—a kind of company salesman whose product line was comedy. But this was a comedy that fed off the disquiet that it temporarily seemed to dispel.

Modernity, in the form of increased economic opportunity and social mobility, had simultaneously undermined Jewish social cohesion. Gentiles, meanwhile, were channeling some of
their
insecurities into violence against the “stranger in their midst.” The comforting harmony of “Afn Pripetchik” was itself based on a flimsy premise, since the song was a fairly recent composition by the Kiev lawyer Mark Warshawski (1848–1907), and Sholem Aleichem, who had helped to popularize it, knew that no one could possibly mourn the antiquated Jewish education it sentimentalized. What is more, educated readers would have recognized in Max's dream the dark humor of Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol's Russian story “The Nose,” in which the feature in question is unaccountably shaven off a client's face to assume a life of its own. While the crisis in Sholem Aleichem
remains safely on
this
side of grotesque, in actual life the Jewish presence in Russia was evoking hostility more disturbing than anything in Gogol's fiction.

On the basis of this story and others like it, more than one critic has described the effect of Sholem Aleichem's humor as “being awakened from nightmare,” a kind of self-soothing that parents try to develop in their children to calm the terrors of life. In her study of child development, the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg introduces us to “Laughing Tiger,” an imaginary companion invented by a two-year-old to calm her fear of animals. The creature never scares children and never bites, and you see its teeth only because it is laughing benignly. Fraiberg speculates that the transformation of a wild into an obedient beast “is probably a caricature of the civilizing process the little girl is undergoing,” and that her make-believe gives her a kind of control over a danger that had left her helpless and anxious.
²
The U.S. comedian Mel Brooks offers a similar connection between fear and “civilization” in his comic routine of the two-thousand-year-old man. Asked about the principal means of transportation in his younger days, Brooks answers, “Fear. An animal would growl, you'd go two miles in a minute.”
³
Along the same lines, Sholem Aleichem's humor, often called “laughter through tears,” is more accurately understood as laughter through fears.

Born in 1859 in one Ukrainian Jewish town and raised in another, Sholem Rabinovich turned his given name into a term of common greeting as though he were standing on the doorstep welcoming one and all into his world. Thanks to the language in which he wrote, he remained bound to the Yiddish-
speaking society. But there was also something of Max in him: the author was not identical with his fictional persona.

At the age of seventeen, Rabinovich was hired by a wealthy Jewish landowner to serve as a live-in secretary and tutor to the man's only daughter. Within a few years, pupil and instructor married, at first against the father's wishes. Happily, reconciliation ensued, and when his father-in-law died, the aspiring and now-wealthy writer was able to take up residence in Kiev, a city that was legally out of bounds to all but a privileged minority of Russian Jews. There he began a serious literary career while enjoying, albeit briefly, an affluent life. His longtime literary associate Yehoshua Ravnitski recalls that at their first meeting, he had trouble reconciling the homespun author he had been reading with the dandy in white spats who stood before him. Incongruities were the stuff of Rabinovich's life.

The man who became known as Sholem Aleichem liked to trace his comic genius to a childhood talent for mimicry; his earliest work, he said, was an alphabetized list of his stepmother's curses that won her over by making her laugh. His audience was meant to believe that in similar fashion, he had continued to pick up from commonplace Jews the sayings, anecdotes, and stories that he then artlessly repackaged for their enjoyment. And indeed, his male and female monologists, speaking “in their own voices,” became beloved personalities in their own right. His fellow writer Yosef Haim Brenner called him a unique amalgam, a poet who was “a living essence of the folk itself.”
⁴
He played the role so well that the extent of his influence on the folk's perception of itself went largely unnoticed.

In fact, Sholem Aleichem revolutionized Jewish culture more profoundly than any figure of his time. Almost single-handedly, he invented a Jewish people that laughed its way through crisis and an imaginary Jewish town, Kasrilevke, whose very name connoted merry pauperdom. His comic protagonists Menahem-Mendl, Sheyne-Sheyndl, and Tevye the Dairyman became national prototypes like the biblical Abraham, Esther, and Job. What Heine had celebrated as the “sabbath spirit” of the Jews was now presumed to function not as a sacred interval from the rest of the week but rather as an innate capacity for transmuting humiliation, subjugation, misery, and dread into funniness. This image would later be used in film and story to deactivate even the horrors of the Holocaust, though the salvific properties of laughter had clearly failed to save the population that allegedly sought refuge in it. Sholem Aleichem was not merely the alchemist but also the inventor of a putatively magical people.

Historians of the so-called Age of Nationalism that culminated in the First World War point to the heightened importance of a sustaining national culture in the struggle for the sovereignty of ethnic minorities like the Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The national cohesion of Jews, who lived outside their ancestral territory, was even more dependent than those others on the nonpolitical underpinnings of peoplehood such as common language and literature. Sholem Aleichem's “fictional territory” of Jewish towns and cities with train compartments as their mobile prayer houses was a brilliant surrogate for national autonomy, and it was duly harnessed by all the emerging Jewish national movements of the time—including Zionism,
which he actively promoted. The consummate insider and virtuoso of the insider's language, Sholem Aleichem seemed to offer a complete contrast to Heine—and so he did, until he was forced into exile from the Russia he had so ingeniously reimagined as his own. At that point, the homey language that had been his insulation betrayed the degree of his displacement. Once Jews abandoned Yiddish, they could no more understand the intricacies of his humor than could any Gentile.