Poetics Today
Call It Jewspeak:
On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing
David G. Roskies
Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Abstract This essay seeks to demonstrate how the spoken language became a central
feature of modern Yiddish literature. This vocal strain was used at first to replace
otherworldly with enlightened discourse, esoteric book culture with colloquial style,
hackneyed phraseology with straight talk, and Hasidic speech with parody. Not until
1864 – 66, however, did the new orality enter its second phase, when the Hebrew writer
Shalom-Yankev Abramovitsh fashioned an autonomous Yiddish-speaking voice and
manipulated the Jewish textual tradition at will. Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz
further developed the new orality by introducing gendered speech and professional
argot, creating in turn a Yiddish of the common man, woman, and child and a Yiddish
Sublime. In the next phase, two verbal artists, Eliezer Shteynbarg and Itzik Manger,
perfected a single, minor speech genre that was performable, accessible, and sophisticated at the same time. Shteynbarg’s Mesholim (Fables; 1932) and Manger’s Khumesh-lider
(Bible Poems; 1935) created a sovereign space for spoken Yiddish where all communication occurred in the mother tongue. Even while the oral-based writings of Sholem
Aleichem and Peretz were enjoying extraordinary popularity in the major urban
centers of North America, new dialects of spoken and written Yiddish came into
being there: this new vocal strain ranged from Yiddish humor magazines to the
Yiddish American polyphony of Jacob Glatstein’s Yidishtaytshn (Yiddishmeanings; 1937).
After the destruction of European Jewry, Glatstein, Yitskhok Bashevis Singer, and
This essay was written in dialogue with the work of Hana Wirth-Nesher in Call It English (2006),
whose title it so clearly echoes. Inspired by our conversations over many years about voice in
Jewish writing, the essay ends precisely where her research and writing in the field begins: with
the translation of Yiddish and “Jewspeak” into the multilingual setting of American English. In
its final stage, the essay was rewritten under the incomparable guidance of Meir Sternberg.
Poetics Today 35:3 (Fall 2014) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2803518
q 2015 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
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Aaron Zeitlin made the monologue into a vehicle of inner-cultural dialogue. As if to
compensate for the ever-dwindling number of Yiddish speakers, professional actors,
notably Hertz Grossbard, turned the written-as-spoken classics of modern Yiddish
literature into performance art, so as to capture and commemorate the language.
The representation of speech in modern Yiddish writing was not ethnography but
the replacement of the old with a new orality, and it happened in five phases. By the
final, post-Holocaust phase, the vocal strain moved from the periphery to the center
of Yiddish literary culture, becoming “Jewspeak,” an essential expression of the onceliving folk.
My grandmother used to say: “[S’shlimazl kon tsunoyffirn a vant mit a vant] If
the devil wants to, he can make two walls come together. If it is written that a rabbi
will fall off a roof, he will become a chimney sweep.” The Gentiles have a proverb:
“[ Kto ma wisieć nie utonie] He who must hang will not drown.”
I. B. Singer, “Zeitel and Rickel” (1966)
1. A Vocal Strain Is Heard in Ashkenaz
Of the several names that Yiddish goes by, loshn Ashkenaz (the tongue of
Ashkenaz) is the oldest and most exalted (Weinreich 2008, 1:317 – 18). As
old as Franco-German Jewry itself and as far-flung, Yiddish was the vernacular language of Ashkenaz, the language of here and everywhere, of all
spheres of activity, legal, commercial, and intellectual. The language in
which these activities were later recorded and memorialized, however, was
Hebrew (Turniansky 1996: 185). Whatever status Yiddish achieved within
the system of traditional Ashkenaz, it was achieved by virtue of the language
being used and referred to as taytsh, “meaning, sense”; that is, by mediating
the canonical texts written in loshn-koydesh, the sacred tongue, HebrewAramaic (Weinreich 2008, 1:316 – 17). Starting from the age of three, boys
were taught the Pentateuch through a three-tiered system of taytsh, word-forword translation; khibur, filling in the gaps, adapting the pithy syntax of a
Semitic language (Biblical Hebrew) to the wordier medium of an Indo-European language (Yiddish); and oysredenish, an expanded interpretation that
drew upon classical Bible commentary (Rubin 2013: 28 – 31; Shtern 1950b:
17 – 20). Western Yiddish, the oldest stratum of the language, was replete
with such expressions as der shlekht pshat, “the simple meaning”; dos iz aza taytsh,
“this is how it’s said in Yiddish”; dos iz in taytshn, “this is what it means in
Yiddish”; or fartaytshn, “to translate, explicate, explain” (Rubin 2013: 197). As
the sole means of oral interchange among European Jews themselves, Yiddish functioned as loshn Ashkenaz; as a textual medium — well into the modern
era — Yiddish functioned primarily as taytsh.
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After the advent of printing, anything considered to be of cultural significance in Ashkenaz was preserved in a seyfer, a “sacred tome,” and the measure
of a book’s sanctity was its allegiance to the textual core of Jewish civilization,
passed down from ancient Palestine and Babylonia. The most popular were
muser-sforim, works of moral instruction. They boasted the greatest variety
of genres (prose, verse, story, fable, exegetical, discursive, and anthological
forms), the largest number of titles and editions, as well as unequaled geographic reach and longevity (ibid.: 9 – 42). It was here that the orality of
Yiddish should have been its greatest asset, since the essential components
of moral instruction are stories, sermons, and proverbial expressions, all three
of which were indigenous to Yiddish culture in medieval Ashkenaz. Yet such
was not the case. The many interpolated stories there, even those of medieval
provenance, were all translated from Hebrew manuscripts or published
tomes (ibid.: 167 – 69). Likewise, no surviving sermons in Western Yiddish
have been preserved; born of oral performance, that is where their spirit
lingered and died. Why commit a sermon to writing if not to appeal to a
higher class of reader by making it more learned, showy, and complex (Turniansky 1996: 185 – 87)? Most telling, however, was the use of proverbial
sayings, an intercultural bridge in every society. As a modern Yiddish proverb puts it, “A goyish vertl iz lehavdl a toyre, a non-Jewish proverb, though not of
the sacred sphere, is [equal to] an item of traditional [ Jewish] learning”
(quoted in Silverman-Weinreich 1978: 17). In medieval Ashkenaz, by contrast, the vast majority of proverbial sayings that made it into manuscript or
print derived from biblical and rabbinic sources (see Maitlis 1978: 227 – 28),
and even when their European derivation might have seemed obvious, the
authors would never credit a foreign source (Rubin 2013: 222). What did
survive, here and there, was a touch of vulgarity (“dos gelt fargeyt, der drek
bashteyt” [money disappears, but the shit remains] [ibid.: 223]) and some
local color (“der sotn zitst im af zayn gelt” [the Devil sits on his money] [ibid.:
225]), said of a miser who refuses to part with his money.1
Ethical literature preserved the vestigial remains of Yiddish orality:
through the use of stories, parables, and proverbs; through repetition, associative thinking, rhetorical questions, direct address, direct reported speech,
and dialogue (ibid.: 27, 145 – 64); but always in the guise of taytsh, as a translation or paraphrase from a Hebrew source. Yiddish literary language
itself, moreover, was becoming increasingly arcane and incomprehensible.
As the Jews of Ashkenaz migrated eastward, to Slavic-speaking lands, one
would expect literary Yiddish to have kept pace with the syntactic changes,
differentiated dialects, new idioms, and lexical borrowings of the spoken
1. Unless otherwise noted, translations throughout this article are the author’s.
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language. In fact, the opposite occurred. The advent of print stopped the
evolution of literary Yiddish dead in its tracks. In the hope of attracting a panAshkenazic readership, editors and printers, whether in Basle or Kraków,
Venice or Lublin, still adhered to a crusty, bookish, artificial, and lexically
conservative style. Thus, the immensely popular Seyfer lev tov (The Good Heart;
1620) contained a single Slavicism, although it was the work of Isaac ben
Elyokum of Posen (dates unknown), who was Polish born (Rubin 2013: 194,
221). From the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
distinctive cursive typeface used for Yiddish books, popularly known as
vaybertaytsh, “women’s Yiddish,” underscored their linguistic conservatism
(Shmeruk 1981: 150 – 51; Weinreich 2008, 1:277, A264). One literary language fit all (Rubin 2013: 194, 221, 236).
Oral performances did not fare much better when the nerve center of
Yiddish relocated to the East. In the Pale of Jewish Settlement, the Kingdom
of Poland, and the crown land of Galicia, which were carved out of Poland
after the partitions of 1772 – 95, the cultural performance of the spoken word
was limited to hearing a sermon specialist called a maggid or bal-darshn,
an itinerant or resident preacher, deliver a droshe, in Yiddish. A droshe was a
traditional explicatory sermon, an “oral commentary on written texts rather
than an autonomous oral creation,” which appealed to an audience raised in
the “complex Jewish mode of exegesis” (Veidlinger 2009: 144 – 45). The best
of these preachers, like the Dubner Maggid (Yaakov Kranz, c. 1740 – 1804),
threw in fables, parables, tales, visions of heaven and hell, and a joke or two,
but the redemptive, restorative message was a constant factor. The droshe was
a form of ritual entertainment, not known for its brevity. At weddings, the
more well-to-do could also hear a badkhn, a “wedding jester,” perform in
semi-improvised rhymes. The badkhn was “the symbolic inversion” of the
maggid (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1974: 300). Together, they created a highly
stylized school of Jewish utterance and a carnivalesque mode of Jewish listening (Veidlinger 2009: 146).
Yiddish reading habits in nineteenth-century eastern Europe remained
much the same as before. Thanks to a few enterprising editors and printers,
standard homiletic works, such as the Tsene-rene (Come Out and See; c. 1622), the
Yiddish Bible commentary of Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów, or
the Kabbalistically inspired Kav hayosher (An Honest Portion 1705) by Tzvi Hirsh
Koidanover, were reissued in a literary language that more closely approximated modern Eastern Yiddish in spelling, phonology, lexicon, morphology,
and syntax (Kerler 1999: 57 – 115; Shmeruk 1981: 147 – 64). Such linguistically modernized editions of the textual canon were more prevalent in Podolia, the Hasidic heartland, than in Greater Lithuania, the center of Talmudic
learning (Roskies 1974); technical and political conditions also varied greatly
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across the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Like the men, Jewish
women recited their sacred texts out loud. On the Sabbath, women chanted
from the Tsene-rene in a special recitative: they chose the perfect text for oral
recitation, because ben Yitskhok’s commentary was the first to be structured
sermonically. To convey ethical instruction, the author chose only certain
biblical passages, which he presented in a rhetorical style that mimicked
study-house debates (Finkin 2010: 82 – 103; Turniansky 1996: 187 – 91). Perhaps the most visible sign of change was that the printing of Yiddish books
in the cursive vaybertaytsh was gradually replaced by the same square typeface
that was used for Hebrew, the new look appropriately labeled ivre-taytsh,
“Hebrew-Yiddish” (Rivkind 1954: 50; Weinreich 2008, 1:A252). If anything,
Yiddish writing and reading remained more loyal than ever to the core
curriculum of sacred texts.
The effort to wean Ashkenazic Jewry away from exclusive adherence to
this core curriculum was launched in the last decades of the eighteenth
century, as the Kulturkampf that began in Köenigsberg, Berlin, Wrocław
(Breslau), and Vienna spread eastward to such cities and trade centers as
Vilnius (Vilna), Shklov, Warsaw, L’viv (Lemberg), Brody, and Odessa. It was
here that pockets of Maskilim began to wage their war of words on behalf of
enlightenment and moderate social reform, which led some of them to the
realization that the masses of eastern European Jews might best be reached
in their spoken vernacular (Miron 1973: 1 – 15; Shtif 1993 [1932]: 45 – 50). But
how was one to write in Yiddish? Should one continue writing in the artificial
bookish style of the Tsene-rene? Were one to choose a colloquial style, would
the local dialect be understood by Yiddish readers in other regions? At this
transitional moment, in the contest for the hearts and minds of the Jewish
body politic, a new vernacular style, or what may be called a “vocal strain,”
made itself heard in Yiddish writing.
For Moshe ben Mordecai Markuze from Slonim, one of the first medical
crusaders in Ashkenaz, the orality of Yiddish made it the perfect vehicle for
hands-on instruction. Markuze’s Seyfer refues hanikro eyzer Yisroel bimdines Polin
(The Book of Medicines Called an Aid to the People of Israel in the Country of Poland;
1790) introduced Yiddish readers to more than the latest advances in
preventive medicine, cribbed from a French source (Shmeruk 1981: 184 –
203). To gain their trust, this medical doctor, supposedly from Köenigsberg,
offered to share sixteen years of halokhe-maysies, the practice of medicine
among his benighted brethren, in lowly poylish-taytsh. But what really inspired
confidence was the structure and style of his preface to the volume, full
of stories, parables, digressions, and dialogues, bound together by the biblical
precept “veohavto lereyakho komoykho,” loving your neighbor as yourself
(Lev. 19:18). If Polish Jews were ever to wean themselves away from
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alte vayber, fun shlekhte bobes, fun aynore-opshprekhers, . . . fun baley-sheymes,
ameratsim, fun groyse reshoyim; fun vaksgisers, fun trefers vos trefn ale krankeytn;
fun shlekhte baley-darshonim vos firn sgules tsu farkoyfn far a gute vetshere, far a
kleyn nedove vegn; un far di dokterlekh vos zikh aleyn oder alte narishe vayber
hobn zey gemakht far dokters (Markuze 1790: 6a – 6b)
old wives, from bad healers, from charmers, miracle workers, ignoramuses, from
great evildoers; from wax-pourers, diviners who divine all illnesses; from bad
preachers who peddle their remedies in return for a square meal or a small handout; and from the two-bit doctors who’ve been made into doctors by their very own
selves or by stupid old women (punctuation modernized)
If there was any salvation to be had from this epic list of charlatans, quacks,
and faith healers, then it lay in the principles of brotherly love and of trusting
the voice of Markuze, a true preacher, teacher, and healer in Israel. So far
as Markuze was concerned, the social and spiritual culture of traditional
Ashkenaz was one archaic and deleterious system of customs, superstitions,
folk medicine, and folk meteorology transmitted through such magical
speech genres as sgules, opshprekhenishn, and trefenishn, “remedies,” “exorcisms,”
and “omens,” and exploited by an unholy alliance of faith healers, diviners,
and worst of all, shlekhte baley-darshonim, “bad preachers” (cf. Weinig and
Khayes 1929: 13 – 15). So even before he offered practical advice and delivered the proper cure, Markuze stooped to conquer. He pretended to have
taught himself the Yiddish native to that region and adopted the folksy,
ever-popular maggidic style, moving effortlessly from ancient past to debased
present to a better tomorrow with the aid of scriptural and rabbinic
quotations, idiomatic expressions, and a constant, repetitive flow of words.
Markuze was the first Yiddish writer on record to don the mask of an enlightened maggid in order to speak directly to the Jew-on-the-Street.
By nature, a maggid and a medical doctor are a contradiction in terms. In
the new Yiddish writing to emerge in eastern Europe, an enlightened maggid
was the best of both worlds. The speech, style, and discourse of Seyfer refues
made it the perfect segue from seyfer to secular bukh. Markuze was the first to
fold spoken Eastern Yiddish into writing (Kerler 1999: 256 – 57); he simply
wrote (and translated) as if he were speaking. Performing the role of doctor of
the Jewish soul as well as of the body, he adopted the style of a maggid. But to
wean his benighted brethren away from their medieval beliefs and practices
in the name of brotherly love, he used this style against itself and effectively
replaced otherworldly with enlightened discourse.
For Shloyme Ettinger (1803 – 56) from Warsaw and Zamość, the first
modern Yiddish playwright, the orality of Yiddish made it the ideal moral
compass: how you spoke was the most accurate measure of who you were.
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The familial intrigue, the three romantic subplots, and the typical bourgeois
setting of Serkele, oder di yortsayt nokh a bruder (Serkele; or, In Mourning for a Brother;
1839) were lifted straight out of Molière, complete with a soubrette named
Chava (Ettinger 1935: 193 – 291, 2006 [1839]; see Wiener 1945b [1929]:
267 – 69). Unique to Ettinger’s comedy, however, was the decomposition of
spoken Yiddish. The villains or morally ambiguous characters in the play all
speak a superidiomatic Yiddish overloaded with archaic phrases, quotations,
dead metaphors, clichés, curses, and epigrams; in short, a whole arsenal of
bound, formulaic phrases that make it impossible to express anything new, to
think analytically, to articulate the sublime. In his pathbreaking studies, the
Soviet Yiddish literary scholar Meir Wiener (1928; 1945a [1940]) called this
literary dialect shprakhfolkor, “folkloric language,” or shablonishe frazeologye,
“hackneyed phraseology.” By subjecting the play to a statistical analysis,
Wiener (1928: 104 – 19; 1945c, 1:354 – 61) demonstrated that the negative
characters used twenty-eight fixed phrases, Hebraic quotations, or Yiddish
folk sayings for every hundred lines of dialogue, while the positive characters
used half that number (cf. Erik 1993 [1935]: 146). Shprakhfolklor was orality run
amok, conforming to several of the characteristics of orally based thought
and expression, according to Walter J. Ong (1988 [1982]: 36 – 46): a load of
epithets and other formulary baggage, an additive rather than an analytic
style, redundancy, a conservative or traditionalist mind-set, personal engagement, and complete lack of distancing. The way these characters speak, they
seem to still embody “the feudal-clerical backwardness of [ Jewish] life”
(Wiener 1945c, 1:355), certainly as opposed to Marcus, the idealized, enlightened hero, “his sweet little speeches, his honeyed words! He speaks just like
a book” (act 1, scene 10; Ettinger 2006 [1839]: 129).
But Ettinger did much more than that. In his comedy, he decomposed
Yiddish into several dialects. There is Serkele’s shrewspeech, punctuated
most famously by her histrionic “oy, mayne koykhes!” (oh, I feel faint!); the
parasitical wedding broker Yoykhenen, who throws up a linguistic smoke
screen with his “kumt mayn shmue afir” (let me tell you something); and
Shmelke Troyniks, whose rural, Lithuanian Yiddish dialect sounded all the
more provincial in the Galician metropolis of L’viv (Lemberg), where the
play was set (see Wiener 1928: 120 – 21; 1945c, 1:354 – 61; English translations
from Berkowitz and Dauber 2006). Freyde-Altele, Serkele’s self-indulgent
daughter, gives herself away by her faulty German speech, which was really
comically adulterated Yiddish (Wiener 1945c, 1:360 – 61), as much as by her
vanity and greed; this moral-linguistic failing would thankfully be rectified
once she married Shmelke, whose Yiddish, at the very least, “promises
authenticity” (Quint 2004: 110). The positive norm, if you had to speak
Yiddish, was to speak plainly, to the point, without the dead linguistic
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weight of the past, the way Hinde and her trusted servant Chava spoke and
the way the Stranger spoke once he dropped his disguise (Wiener 1945a
[1940]: 298, 306 – 7). Yiddish was Caliban, to borrow a phrase from Dan
Miron (1973: 34 – 66). Given the right stage, it could be tamed into plainspokenness or superseded by German.
A strange thing happened, however, when the bound, hackneyed phrases
were allowed to compete for attention on an open stage: they stole the show
from the other voices. Of the five modes of discourse in Serkele — shprakhfolklor,
provincial dialect, plain speech, faulty German, and high literary German —
the first was by far the most memorable. Not only did the grotesque and
villainous characters, with their comical speech and various machinations,
upstage the virtuous and openly sentimental ones, who spoke just like out of a
German book (Dubilet 1993 [1935]: 156; Erik 1993 [1935]: 143 – 44; Wiener
1945a [1940]: 303). The bound phrases, perfectly matched to individuals and
to the negative traits that Ettinger was trying to expose, gained a new lease
on life. “The wedding broker’s expressions,” wrote Wiener (1945a [1940]:
298), “are full of pious platitudes, his Hebraisms — ecclesiastical and always
affecting a fake intimacy; Gavriel Hendler’s are cocky and cynical, thievishmischievous and crude; Serkele’s — hysterical-vituperative and disingenuously modest; . . . Shmelke Troyniks’s — craftily commercial.” Since Serkele
the parvenu is always “on,” always dissembling, her signature phrase, “oy,
mayne koykhes,” changes with her changing moods, whether she is laying on
her feminine charms, lording it over her hired help, or simply betraying her
true petty, jealous character (Dubilet 1993 [1935]: 155 – 56). Serkele’s tagline,
the first of many in the vocal strain of Yiddish writing, also marks the rise of
gendered speech. Thanks to Ettinger, mayne-loshn, “invective,” became synonymous with shrewspeech, and shrewspeech came to typify the Jewish
market woman, once Serkele moved from the pages of Ettinger’s closet
drama to its first live performance in 1863 at the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary, with the young Avrom Goldfaden playing the lead role (Berkowitz and
Dauber 2006: 35). A little over a decade later, Goldfaden founded the
professional Yiddish theater, taking Jewish comedy in new directions
(Dauber 2008; Quint 2008).
Medical manuals and comedies were as yet but limited media when compared with the cultural revolution that was gathering steam on the opposite
side of the ideological divide. Hasidism was a mass movement based on oral
performance. It represented a dramatic turn to orality from the bookish,
elitist, closed world of classical Kabbalah (Green 1983: 64). This change
happened in two ways: (1) through maggidim, who spread the Hasidic gospel
in synagogues and houses of study; and (2) through the scripted performance
at the zaddik’s tish, or “communal table,” where each discourse stood alone,
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the zaddik’s teaching perceived as a type of revelation. Personal attendance at
the zaddik’s performance, “reinforced by periodic interruptions for enthusiastic song and liquid refreshment” (ibid.), was the core experience of Hasidic
discipleship. The turn toward orality occurred most dramatically in the brief
and brilliant career of Reb Nahman ben Simha of Braslav (1772 – 1810), both
in his esoteric teachings before a small group of disciples and in his bilingual
Tales, designed from the outset for public consumption (Siff 2009: 37 – 42).
From the margins of the oral tradition, Nahman, the first Yiddish storyteller in modern times, resuscitated the vunder-mayse, the most fantastic and
therefore most potent of genres (Nahman 1978, 1979). To stay the messianic
course, the storyteller needed to convince his listeners that between the real
and the wondrous stood a porous border, which was negotiable by means of
an intricate spiritual map (Wiskind-Elper 1998). To dramatize the quest for
tikkun, or “cosmic restoration,” Nahman used an additive and repetitive style
and a syntax that showcased the living spoken dialect (cf. Krogh 2007).
Exploiting the especially rich repertoire of periphrastic verbs in Eastern
and Hasidic Yiddish (ibid.: 207 – 9), Nahman thus made repeated use of
the verb zikh meyashev zayn (to deliberate, reflect), because no quest could
succeed without spiritual endurance and radical self-confrontation. No
oral source, however, could be considered sacred unless it was accompanied
by a translation into loshn-koydesh, the “holy tongue.” To this end, Rabbi
Nathan Sternhertz (aka Nosn Nemirover, 1780 – 1845), Nahman’s chief disciple, invented a Hebrew vernacular style, in which, to stay with the same
example, hot er zikh meyashev geven (he deliberated) was rendered (in violation
of standard Hebrew usage) as “vehoyo meyashev atsmoy” (see the “Tale of the
Lost Princess,” Nahman 1979: 1). Sternhertz published a bilingual edition
of Nahman’s Seyfer sipurey mayses (The Tales) in 1815, and Braslav Hasidim
has preserved the same format, with the Hebrew translation at the top of
the page and the Yiddish transcript at the bottom, to this very day (Caplan
2011: 52 – 65; Roskies 1995: 25 – 55; Shmeruk 1988: 250 – 54; Werses 2005).
In both Hebrew and Yiddish, the text’s vernacularity, its spokenness, was the
next best thing to actually being in the zaddik’s living presence.
Four voices, then, could be heard among the first literary transcripts of
actual spoken Yiddish in eastern Ashkenaz, the first three being the enlightened maggid, who labored on behalf of his Polish brethren, cajoling and
coaxing them toward a better conduct and future by means of proverbs,
quotations, and folk sayings; the superabundant verbiage of the parvenu,
the innkeeper, the wedding broker, and the speculator, still and forever
feeding off the feudal past in their mores and manner of speech; and
the divinely inspired storyteller, the zaddik of his generation, Nahman,
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who crafted complicated tales both familiar and strange in a distinctive,
colloquial style.
The fourth voice was strictly parodic. It targeted only one group — credulous, devious, and boisterous Hasidim — and demanded a good ear for their
dialect, exaggerating certain aspects of their speech to make the listener
or reader laugh. “Kum aher, du filozof ” (come here, my philosopher),
sang Velvl Zbarzher-Ehrenkrantz (1826 – 83), one of the first secular Yiddish
folk bards,
mit dayn ketsishn moykhl
kum aher tsum rebns tish
un lern zikh do seykhl.
(Mlotek and Mlotek 1974: 464 – 69; Roskies 1999: 95 – 96)
with your catty little brain
to the rebbe’s table
where you’ll learn [true] intelligence.
How would the listener of this song identify the dramatized speaker as
a Hasid? (1) Since the hallmark of Hasidism at this point in time was the
veneration of one’s particular rebbe, or zaddik, or guter yid (good Jew), the
singer devotes the entire song to extolling his (unnamed) rebbe’s virtues. Each
stanza adds exponentially to his powers, from intellectual to supernatural
to cosmic. (2) The arena of the rebbe’s powers is the tish, or communal table,
where his male disciples congregate from far and wide, so anyone who joins
him there must immediately come under his spell. (3) The pseudo-Hasidic
speaker knows that there are still a few skeptics at large who must be won
over, and these skeptics, who fancy themselves to be “philosophers,” place
great store by seykhl, “intelligence,” rational and scientific thought. (4) What
better way, then, to hoist them on their own petard than to reduce their credo
to a simple (off-)rhyme: moykhl with seykhl (little brain with intelligence)? Both
rhyme words, moreover, derive from the Hebrew-Aramaic component of
Yiddish, and this scores a point against the enlighteners’ pretense at having
cornered the market of book learning. True knowledge, wisdom, and intellect, the speaker boasts, cannot be learned from newfangled books but only in
the living presence of the rebbe. The use of the reflexive lernen zikh, “to study,”
as opposed to lernen, which in this context would mean to learn Torah, is also
significant. You wanna study? Come to us! (5) To round out the parody,
the folksinger throws in a “bim-ba-bam,” a neo-Hasidic nigun, a contemplative
melody-without-words.
Parody is more than mimicry; it rests upon what Mikhail M. Bakhtin
(1984: 156) called the “double-voiced utterance”: the author appropriates
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the utterance of another and uses it for his own purposes; the audience is
meant to hear both a version of the original utterance as the embodiment
of the speaker’s point of view and the reporter’s evaluation of that utterance
from a different point of view (see Morson 1989: 65). If the reporter’s intent is
to parody, the relationship between the original and the second utterance
is antithetical; if the intent is to stylize, the relationship is “corroborative”
(Bakhtin 1984: 160; Morson 1989: 66). Bakhtin’s approach allows us
to situate the antithetical relationship between one kind of utterance and
another within a broader literary-historical framework; that is, to recognize
that anti-Hasidic parody was one of four attempts to replace the old orality
with the new: otherworldly discourse replaced with enlightened discourse,
esoteric book culture with colloquial style, hackneyed phraseology with
straight talk, and Hasidic speech with parody. Taken together, these represent the first phase in the evolution of the vocal strain within Yiddish
writing.
2. A People of the Spoken Word
The second phase began when that most dialogic of genres — the novel —
burst onto the Yiddish literary scene. Enter Sholem-Yankev Abramovitsh
(1836 – 1917), the young Hebrew literary critic (1860), the translator of
a natural science textbook from German into Hebrew (1862), and the writer
of Hebrew prose fiction (1862). In 1864, he opened a new chapter in Jewish
cultural history when he turned himself into Mendele the Book Peddler
(Miron 1973). Mendele was a peripatetic preacher who preferred the company of his horse to any mortal congregation, a man of letters who despised
his lowly trade, a spectator over the crumbling house of Israel. Above all, he
was the grand master of Jewish speech, a mime and quick change artist, a
parodist, a soliloquist, a voice so commanding and compelling that it eventually outperformed its author. His was the first Yiddish voice that could
make itself understood wherever and by whomever Yiddish was spoken, even
as it orchestrated a cacophony of other voices. Mendele was the first connoisseur of both written and spoken Yiddish. There was no manuscript so
crippled or chaotic that Mendele could not rehabilitate it; no part of speech
that he could not force to yield its innermost secret. By anatomizing the single
expletive beh!, Mendele laid bare the hypocrisy and venality of the entire
Jewish merchant class (Miron 1979: 374 – 77).
Two things defined Mendele’s spoken discourse: his signature phrase,
“nisht dos bin ikh oysn” (but that’s beside the point), and his art of quotation.
Nisht dos bin ikh oysn signals the intimacy of real speech. “If you bear with
me, dear interlocutor,” it suggests, “and backtrack to what I have just half-
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seriously dismissed as irrelevant, you will not fail to miss the innuendo,
my subversive insight, my global indictment, when for but a moment I
have allowed my pious, learned, and conventional mask to slip.” Nisht dos
bin ikh oysn was designed to train the listener’s ear to follow the speaker
through the rhetorical byways of a speech pattern and a controlling consciousness that were at core not logical but analogical (Miron 1973: 159 – 63).
Nisht dos bin ikh oysn, however, was not a license to free-associate. The Mendele
voice was fully in charge, pulling, dragging the disparate and, yes, disgusting
parts of Jewish life back into the center, where they could be examined
more closely. Mendele’s penchant for compiling epic lists (reminiscent of
Markuze), his obsessive compulsion to look for analogies, his unerring eye
for grotesque detail — the controlled mess of it all — were what defined his
spoken discourse as quintessentially Jewish. Indeed, Benjamin Harshav
(1990: 100) might have had Mendele in mind when he laid out the three
common features in Yiddish communication: “(1) associative digression;
(2) resorting to a canonized textual store; and (3) assuming that all frames
of reference in the universe of discourse may be analogous to each other.”
If Mendele’s analogical style identified him as Every Jew, his art of quotation singled him out as the source of “an autonomous epic art of quoting,”
in the memorable phrase of Herman Meyer (1968: 11), an art that “can
originate only at the point where the narrative is borne by a personal narrator
who can exploit the quotation in sovereign freedom, putting it into unique
contexts of form and meaning.” Mendele is obviously conversant with
the ruml-sforim, the standard Hebrew-Aramaic texts with their parallel authorized translations into ivre-taytsh — “khumoshim, makhzoyrim, sidurim, slikhes,
tkhines” (Bibles, festival and daily prayer books, penitential and personalized
prayers) — that he carries in his wagon (Abramovitsh 1984: 128n33), but
never does he cite from these sources merely for homiletic or exegetical
ends. Every textual utterance is double voiced, beginning with the “citation”
of his own name.
From 1866, which is to say, from the opening lines of Dos vintshfingerl
(The Wishing Ring) until the preface to his Complete Works in 1907, the formula
“Omar Mendele Moykher-sforim, zogt Mendele der moykher-sforim”
placed living speech at the center of the Jewish literary system.
Omar Mendele Moykher-Sforim, zogt Mendele der Moykher-Sforim:
Geloybt zay der boyre, vos hot in zeks teg bashafn himl un erd mit ale bashefenish: malokhim, khayes, un oyfes, tsign, shof, katshkes, un dem mentshn, vos er
hot im gelaytzelikt mit a seykhl, tsu farshteyn tsu redn un tsu shraybn. Ikh bin
oysn aykh do tsu bashraybn dem vunder, vos hashem yisborekh hot mir getun
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far a yorn zumer (5625). Hert oys libe yidn, es vet aykh kh’lebn hanoye ton.
(Abramovitsh 1994 [1866]: 27)2
Thus spake Mendele the Book Peddler: Praised be the Creator who hath in six
days created heaven and earth and all living creatures: angels, beasts and fowl;
goats, sheep and ducks; and man, whom His grace has endowed with a mind to
understand, to speak and to write. My intent here is to describe the wonder that the
Lord, blessed be His Name, hath wrought the summer of yore (1865). Hear me
out, dear Jews, and you will surely take pleasure therein.
To establish his literary credentials, Mendele must have recourse to loshnkoydesh, Hebrew-Aramaic. Not only does he use Yiddish as the handmaiden
of the holy tongue, to taytsh (translate) a Hebrew citation, but he also weaves
learned locutions into his speech in order to achieve a high linguistic register,
adding gravitas to every pronouncement of his, in imitation of the maggidic
style. As in Markuze’s Seyfer refues, moreover, all this appears in a chatty,
informative preface, under a separate rubric that he calls “A mayse iber a
mayse” (a story-before-the-story) (Abramovitch 1910 [1888]: 3, 1994 [1866]:
27), or what we would call a frame tale. The convention we have adopted
of using boldface to identify words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin does not distinguish between normal and stylized usage. Mendele’s mock-epic list of
God’s creation — literally, of God der boyre, the Creator — begins with malokhim, khayes, un oyfes, where malokhim and khayes are the standard words
for angels and animals, while the addition of the Hebraic oyfes, instead of the
Germanic foygl, is designed to sustain the aura of homily and eternal truths,
which is then offset etymologically and semantically by the menagerie of tsign,
shof, katshkes, goats, sheep, and ducks, before introducing the supposed crown
of Creation: dem mentshn, humanity. Mendele’s opening praise for hashem
yisborekh, the Lord, blessed be His Name, ends with the promise to recount
a wonder that occurred in 1865; this presumably refers to the discovery of
The Wishing Ring, with Which Everyone Can Achieve Whatsoever His Heart Wishes and
Desires and through Which He Can Become Useful to Himself and to the World (my
translation), as the full subtitle of the novel spelled it out in storybook style.
The avoidance of Hebrew can also speak volumes. Why does Mendele
choose the word vunder (from the same Germanic root as the English wonder)
instead of the Hebrew nes, “miracle”? Because the purpose of the new orality,
ever since Markuze, is to cultivate a sententious and idiomatic style that
communicates sincerity, intimacy, and piety, the better to legitimate a secular
and scientific set of values: preventive medicine for the good doctor,
the enjoyment of nature and the study of natural science for “Mendele.”
2. Throughout this article, words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin are rendered in boldface.
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So The Wishing Ring, supposedly translated from the German, can be read as a
parody of the miracle tales that were enjoying a comeback with the spread
of Hasidism, just as all this talk of God’s munificence is meant to spoof the
stodgy conventions of muser, Jewish ethical literature. Mendele’s literariness
draws heavily upon his subversive art of quotation, which has a damaging
effect on the “canonized textual store”: on the quotations themselves, on their
original sacred context, and sometimes on the naive reader, who is not quick
enough to catch what is happening (Miron 1973: 179).
To establish himself as a living, speaking presence, however, Mendele
must convince the reader that “Omar Mendele Moykher-Sforim” is
no mere literary trope. The Hebrew-Yiddish doubling of “Omar Mendele
Moykher-Sforim, zogt Mendele der Moykher-Sforim” turns the Hebrew
formula into a kind of self-citation, in which the lower register of Mendele’s
speaking voice represents the higher register of his supposed textual voice
from an antithetical point of view. The Yiddish Mendele is not merely translating the Hebrew Mendele. He is making fun of him and thus spoofing his
own performance. In its Yiddish translation, moreover, “so says Mendele
the [ lowercase] book peddler” audibly announces someone speaking in the
present (zogt, unlike the past-tense omar of the Hebrew “original”) about
something that happened to him just recently, as he plied the route between
Kapstansk (Paupersville) and Glupsk (Foolstown). “Hert oys libe yidn,” “listen to me, hear me out, dear Jews,” is the intimate, familiar voice of someone
richly endowed to use God’s sadly neglected gift of the human mind “to
understand, to speak and to write.” To write was henceforth to speak
and to speak was henceforth to mock. “Zogt Mendele der Moykher-Sforim”
announced the invention of the mock-maggidic preface as an autonomous
speech genre, freed at last from all homiletic, exegetical, and textual
constraints.
The “personal narrator” who could exploit the Jewish textual tradition “in
sovereign freedom” (Meyer 1968: 11) was a child of the Yiddish press, which
made its first appearance in Russia during the reforms of Czar Alexander II
in 1861 – 64 (Novershtern 2000: 27 – 33). The newspaper Kol mevaser, where
“Mendele” made his debut in 1864, was a short-lived affair (1862 – 73). So was
the Yudishes folksblat (1881 – 90), where a very young Solomon Rabinovitsh
(1859 – 1916) hit upon his greatest invention in 1883, namely, the fictional
delegate, Sholem-aleykhem, Mr. How-Do-You-Do (Miron 2000: 128).
Though Rabinovitsh would later refer to the paper as the Yudishes folksblote
(Roskies 1995: 152), not the People’s Paper but the People’s Mud, it lasted just
long enough for him to display his mimicry and mastery of a more recent
“textual tradition” — the epistolary style of the petty Jewish merchant class.
The staple of Sholem Aleichem’s satiric feuilletons written “en route” from
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one place to another in the Pale of Jewish Settlement were supposedly ibergekhapte briv, intercepted letters stolen from the post office in 1883 – 87 (Sholem
Aleichem 1948, 1:54 – 146, 151 – 55, 487 – 514). The best of these was the
1885 “Kontor-gesheft: A drame in 2 melitse-briv, 18 handls-brivlekh un 20
depeshn” (“The Counting Room: A Drama in Two High-sounding Missives,
Eighteen Business Letters, and Twenty Telegrams”; Sholem Aleichem 1948,
1:250 – 78). Yiddish, in Sholem Aleichem’s scheme, was the great equalizer,
playing off the heavily Hebraicized style of business Yiddish against the
highfalutin style of Deutschefied Yiddish; the formulaic salutation of the
letter-writing manual against the colloquial shrewspeech that followed;
the long-winded style typical of a commercial scheme in the making against
the hysterical telegraphic style regarding a deal that was about to be exposed.
Commercial correspondence and telegrams, supposedly the mark of modern, open, rational, and standardized communication, revealed a corrupt
and imploding social structure. Male and female epistolary style, rather than
helping husband and wife communicate, marked the breakdown of family
values. From this satiric hybrid, Sholem Aleichem would within a few years
craft his comic masterpiece, Menakhem-Mendl (1892 – 1910).
In which of the new literary forms of self-expression could one best exploit
the enormous geographic range and superabundant energy of spoken Yiddish? Surely, considering Abramovitsh’s example and stature, it must be the
novel. And so it was that in 1888 Sholem Aleichem (1979) published Stempenyu, the first of his “Jewish novels,” as he promoted it in a letter of dedication
addressed to “mayn libhartsikn zeydn [my dearly beloved grandfather], Reb
Mendele Moykher-Sforim” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 11:123). Blithely ignoring the old man’s explicit advice to stay away from the novel (“for your taste,
your genre, lies elsewhere entirely”), the young Sholem Aleichem took very
seriously Abramovitsh’s mandate to write a work taken directly from “the life
of our people” (ibid.). Not only did the aspiring novelist make a special visit
to Berdichev to interview the family members of the “real” folk fiddler named
Stempenyu (Roskies 1995: 151), but he also transcribed the argot specific to
klezmer musicians. This coded, colorful, and sexually charged language he
inserted into chapters 3 and 26 of the novel, accompanied by footnotes.
A literary language stratified by class, profession, and gender, Yiddish
demanded the services of a bona fide ethnographer.
In order to take full advantage of the gender specificity of spoken Yiddish,
Sholem Aleichem went back a generation to the epistolary novel (of Josef
Perl) and the popular letter-writing manuals of Lewin Liondor, among others
(Elzet 1927; Sadan 1986: 60; Weinreich 1941). As a more active protagonist
than his wife, Menakhem-Mendl is a conduit for new ideas and new concepts;
he introduces words and expressions that he acquired in moving from town
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to town and trying his luck at different professions. Sheyne-Sheyndl, the wife
he leaves behind, responds with open hostility to her husband’s linguistic
innovations (“ What is this strange language, Turkish?” [Sholem Aleichem
1917 – 23, 10: book 1, letter 4). New expressions are dangerous; they signal a
reality in which she plays no part. Like her husband, she observes etiquette by
using a stock Hebrew salutation in her letters (“Likhvoyd baali hayokor
hanogid hamfursem hakhokhem mufleg” [To my dear husband,
the esteemed, illustrious, and extraordinarily learned] [ibid.]). But her
main frame of reference is not the patriarchal world of biblical and Talmudic
wisdom but her mother and her mother’s store of proverbs (“vi zogt di
mame”), well-known Slavic and Yiddish expressions (“kreplekh in kholem
iz nit keyn kreplekh, nor a kholem” [dumplings in a dream are a dream
and not dumplings] [ibid.: letter 8]) interspersed with invented folklore.
While the older or small-town Jewish men continue the study-house practice
of citing sacred authority — the Bible and other “universalistic” texts written
in Hebrew-Aramaic — their wives cite female speechlore, drawn from the
particular everyday experiences of other women. Unlike her husband, who
never swears and does not have a bad word to say even against the sworn
enemies of Jews, Sheyne-Sheyndl draws from a rich arsenal of Yiddish curses
and invective. Unique to her lexicon are many Slavic words and expressions
(“dali oche, dali serdste” [out of sight, out of mind] [ibid.: letter 4]) that lend
local color to her descriptions (Rothstein 2009; Spivak 1940: 122 – 29).
Children too, Sholem Aleichem was among the first to discover, inhabit
a separate realm, a world of fantasy, parody, and play — if only the grownups
were not intent on destroying it with their deadly curriculum of Jewish textual
study (Shmeruk 1984). The trauma of the time he spent in the traditional
heder was still fresh in Rabinovitsh’s mind when he wrote Dos meserl (The
Penknife; Sholem Aleichem 1983) in 1886, half autobiography, half pamphlet
for heder reform. To the litany of complaints against the heder (Zipperstein
1999: 42 – 62), Sholem Aleichem added these: it was a means for the rich to
oppress the poor and was designed to stifle the innate creativity of the child.
When he launched a new series, Stories for Jewish Children, at the start of the
new century, these stories did little to vindicate the countless hours once spent
by male Jewish children learning classical texts by rote. His ethnography of
childhood (collected in vols. 8 – 9 of the Folksfond edition, Sholem Aleichem
1917 – 23) memorialized the “national” holidays of Hanukkah, Purim, and
Passover, replete with special foods, symbols, and recreational activities, but
was remarkably spare when it came to the heder lore passed on from one
generation of teachers to another or to the speech play of children, the word
games, the alphabet rhymes, and the parodic and scatological songs created
by children and passed on to other children (cf. Lehman 1923; Shtern 1950a:
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164 – 69). For the sake of his newest audience, children enrolled in modern
Jewish schools, Sholem Aleichem fashioned a Childspeak Lite.
The didactic purpose of these stories is made manifest in two ways: most
are narrated by an adult looking back, and not a few betray the bias of
first-generation rebels, who viewed Jewish folk belief and practice with
deep ambivalence (Miron 2000: 49 – 80, 204 – 13). Describing the children
going house-to-house to collect “Khanike-gelt ” (Hanukkah money) is Sholem
Aleichem’s (1917 – 23, 9:29 – 50) narrative hook for a lively anatomy of oral
lore across the generations. After the first stop, the children break into a
spontaneous jig accompanied by the counting rhyme “Enge benge / tsupe
tsenge, artse bartse / gole shvartse” (ibid.: 32) — a rare instance of authentic
Yiddish speech play. The children’s second stop, at Uncle Itse and Aunt
Dvoyre’s, reminds the narrator of the comically stylized way that Torah
honors were auctioned off in the synagogue, using an arcane currency called
gildoyn, “guldens.” At the fourth stop, the home of their sister Eydl, the narrator is reminded of her wedding day, when the badkhn, the wedding jester,
intoned his doggerel. It is not memory and nostalgia alone that flatten this
rich and variegated folk culture into repetitive and rote performances, each of
which is cut short by the narrator before it gets too monotonous. The author,
by implication, betrays his deep-set bias against ritualized, formulaic, ossified
language, the relics of medieval Ashkenaz that must now be archived in
stories for children and put to rest.
The noisy, messy, and highly differentiated utterance became for Sholem
Aleichem the ABC of a new kind of writing: no longer the mock-maggidic
preface with its elaborate rhetorical structure; no longer the “story-beforethe-story”; no longer the arcane document that needs expert editing; but
age-specific dialect and argot, speechlore and speech play — proverbs, curses,
blessings, jokes, and rhymes — that seemed to be lifted directly from life.
Under Sholem Aleichem’s energetic tutelage, Yiddish literature was evolving
into the artful representation of the Jews as a people of the spoken word.
But the road to Yiddish orality never did run smooth. Through the first
decade of his career, in 1883 – 92, Sholem Aleichem’s literary ambitions
lay elsewhere. As the self-appointed moral and aesthetic arbiter of Jargón
(i.e., Yiddish) literature, he launched a one-man campaign against shund,
“pulp fiction” (Cammy 2008), and as Abramovitsh’s heir apparent, he
wrote three novels drawn from the real life of Russian Jews (Stempenyu [1888],
Sender Blank and His Family [1888], and Yosele Nightingale [1889]). Not to
mention his Yidishes folks-bibliotek ( Jewish People’s Library: Journal for Literature,
Criticism, and Scholarship; Kiev, 1888 – 89), the first highbrow literary journal to
appear in Jargón, which he edited and published, at considerable expense.
Despite the critical acclaim that greeted his first story of Jewish childhood,
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The Penknife (1886), he waited fourteen years to pen another. And when,
having relocated to Odessa and in the hope of reclaiming his position as a
publisher and editor, he put out a modest Kol mevaser tsu der yidisher folks-bibliotek
(Harbinger to the Jewish People’s Library) in 1892, he did not regard the letters of
Menakhem-Mendl from the Odessa stock exchange to his Sheyne-Sheyndl in
Mazepevke as anything more than a journalistic escapade: he waited another
four years to write a sequel (Erik 1986: 25). In short, Sholem Aleichem had
not yet discovered that his comic muse was wedded to the monologue, the
genre that gave maximum play to the spoken word.
Along with that discovery came a decisive shift of the social venue he
represented, from the lives and loves of the Jewish merchant class in midto big-size cities back to the agrarian-based market towns known as shtetlekh
and their rural surroundings. Hadn’t Nikolai Gogol, Sholem Aleichem’s
favorite Russian author, returned in his imagination to the Ukrainian village
in Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1834), introducing a new way of rendering
the living speech of the people: the spontaneous, colloquial, dialogic, and
hilarious speech of the common man and woman, which drew in equal
measure on oral lore and on everyday experience (Roskies 1995: 154; Schmid
2013)? The shtetl folk were their own kind of peasantry; they could read and
write if they had to, but their favored forms of self-expression were talking,
joking, swearing, and storytelling. These Jews, moreover, were under siege,
from without and within: their livelihoods threatened by czarist decree, by
the railroads, by the rise of capitalism; their physical stability threatened by
expulsions and occasional mob violence; their traditional values threatened
by new secular and political ideologies of socialism, anarchism, and nationalism. Powerless to affect the changing, imploding world around them, talking was their only means of self-defense — and aggression. By letting the most
vulnerable members of that traditional society speak; by allowing them to
protest and push back; by giving maximum play to their repetitive, redundant, additive, circular, clichéd, and proverbial manner of speech, Sholem
Aleichem created a veritable comedy of dissolution. Proceeding from the
bottom up, he started with the confessional monologues of a kurelap’nitshke,
a “chicken dealer,” who lived with her only son Dovidl in a quarter of a house
on Pauper’s Street, and a simple hardworking Jew with seven daughters, who
lived in a village not far from Anatevke.
“Dos tepl” (“ The Pot”; 1901), Sholem Aleichem’s (1917 – 23, 21:7 – 25) first
and most brilliant monologue in a woman’s voice, is based on a typical joke
situation (Howe and Wisse 1979: 71 – 81). A yenta, appropriately named
Yente, comes to the rabbi to inquire about a ritual matter: is her pot kosher
or treyf ? But this question is merely a pretext for her to vent her spleen against
her tenants, against all men in positions of authority, against her tragic fate,
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and the rabbi, who doesn’t get a word in edgewise, faints before he can make
a ruling. Quoted toward the end of Yente’s rambling monologue is a wellknown joke about a shtsherebate, a “crippled” pot:
Dos heyst, hobn hob ikh gehat dray teplekh fleyshike, hot bay mir Gnese, af keyn
gut ort zol zi aykh nit shteyn, eyn mol antlien a tepl, a shpogl-nay tepl, un geyt un
git mir op a shtsherebate tepl. Zog ikh tsu ir: “Vos iz dos far a tepl?” . . . Zogt zi:
“S’iz ayer tepl.” . . . Zog ikh: “Vi kumt tsu mir a shtsherebate tepl, az ir hot bay mir
genumen a gants tepl?” . . . Zogt zi: “Shat, shrayt nit azoy, me vert fun aykh nit
gliklekh! Ershtns, hob ikh aykh opgegebn a gants tepl; tsveytns, az ikh hob bay aykh
genumen dos tepl, iz dos geven an ongeshtsherbet tepl; un dritns, hob ikh bay aykh
keyn mol nit genumen keyn tepl, ikh hob mir mayn tepl, un tshepet zikh op fun
mayn lebn!” . . . A hultayke kon! (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 21:24)
That is, as for pots, I used to have three meat pots. But then Gnessi [may she sink
into the earth] once borrowed a pot from me, a brand new pot, and then she goes
and gives me back a crippled pot. So I said to her, “ What kind of pot is this?” So
she said, “It’s your pot.” So I said, “How come I get back a crippled pot when I
gave you a brand new pot?” So she said: “Shut it. Don’t yell like that, who needs
your things? First of all, I gave you back a brand new pot. Second, the pot I took
from you was a crippled pot. And third, I never even took a pot from you. I have my
own pot, so get off my back!” There’s a slut for you! ( Howe and Wisse 1979: 80)
The key and comic-sounding, polysyllabic word shtsherebate, “crippled,” is
repeated three times, as if to underscore that the lexicon of Slavic words is
the special domain of women (and for whom, as in Gogol, the sound of a word
is more important than its meaning). This joke not only pits one woman
against her rival. By presenting mutually exclusive possibilities, which comically deflate the dialectical rigor of Talmudic discourse, it also challenges
the moral and intellectual authority of learned Jewish men (Finkin 2009:
92; 2010: 107 – 9, 174n110). From beginning to end, Yente’s speech mimics
the associative-digressive flow of Talmudic debate and is full of HebrewAramaic terms like lemay (how come?), meyle (well, anyhow), mistome (probably), terets (rebuttal), rayes (proofs), avade (to be sure), and tomer (in case), which
have entered colloquial Yiddish via the heder and the house of study (Finkin
2010: 107). These in turn create a double-voiced utterance in which Yente’s
diatribe represents the authoritative, analytic masculine voice from an antithetical, female point of view. At one point, she even says to the rabbi: “Kukt
nisht vos ikh bin a yidene! A mansbil oyf mayn ort volt dos gevis nisht ibergetrogn!” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 21:15) (Don’t think that I’m just a
woman! A man in my place couldn’t bear it! [Howe and Wisse 1979: 75]).
The men in this monologue, for all their book smarts, have absolutely no
wisdom to impart, whereas the women, in their speech and speechlore, are
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privy to the dark secrets and absurdity of life. As narrated by Yente, it is her
archenemy Gnessi who most eloquently gives voice to her unspoken grievance and indictment: in addition to Gnessi’s joke about the crippled pot,
which lies at the heart of Yente’s personal, tragic fate (her only son Dovidl,
dying of tuberculosis like his father before him, is the crippled pot), the society
in which Yente is fated to live is best captured by two folk expressions about
pots that she quoted earlier in Gnessi’s name: “Loz der zayn di kapore, ver es
kukt arayn in yenems tepl” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 21:14) (Whoever
keeps an eye on someone else’s pot, let that person be the scapegoat [Howe
and Wisse 1979: 74]) and the much pithier “kadokhes fun daynetvegn in
a kleyn tepele” (Sholem Aleichem 1971 – 23, 21:22) (the plague in a little
pot especially for you [Howe and Wisse 1979: 70]) (see Miron 2012: 33 – 76;
Wirth-Nesher 1981: 162 – 67). Jokes and proverbial sayings are the poetry of
Jewish life, and women are their major repository.
Folk speech, then, was proverbial speech, no longer the dead weight of the
past, as it was in the first stage of the evolution of the vocal strain in Yiddish
literature, but thanks to Sholem Aleichem, reassessed now as a fount of wit,
wisdom, and righteous indignation. Folk speech was a vehicle for giving
everyone a voice and giving that voice free rein. Thanks to Abramovitsh,
the ultraconservative speech of the maggid, the rabbi, and the rebbe had
been upstaged by Mendele, who, from his lowly perch atop a rickety book
peddler’s wagon, revealed himself to be a connoisseur of the spoken and the
written languages of the Jews and, from the silence of the printed page, made
himself heard as an autonomous, imperious, and ubiquitous Yiddish-speaking voice. Thanks to Sholem Aleichem, even Mendele was recast, in 1895, as
a member of the folk: reborn as a seasonal dairyman, who similarly preferred
to commune with God when out of doors, routinely confided in his horse, and
never stopped talking. Like Mendele, this rustic Jew loved to quote, to paraphrase, and to parody the canonical sources of Jewish wisdom and lore. But
so thoroughly were those works absorbed into his speech that they became
a species of folklore, the main source of his proverbial expressions, which he
freely mixed and matched with Slavic sayings. While Mendele proper could
not exist outside the dense world of Jewish texts, Tevye, his “grandchild,”
went on to become the most fully realized speaker of proverbial folk Yiddish
in world literature.
3. Tevye: Folk Speech in Situ
Speech is what defines him, confounds him, and defends him. His rich store
of Ukrainianisms mark him as a yishuvnik, a “country bumpkin,” salt of the
earth, not to speak of the technical terms specific to dairymen (Spivak 1940:
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108 – 9, 111 – 14). Besides his seven daughters (Zibn tekhter iz nisht keyn
gelekhter, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “seven daughters is no laughing
matter” [Wisse 2000: 32]), his major source of pride and self-worth is his
ability to quote, to gloss, to interpret the textual tradition: everything from
the exploits of Alexander of Macedon in a Yiddish folk book to the High
Holiday liturgy and the five megillot read on the festivals, especially the
Scroll of Esther, so relevant to his own daughter, named Hodl-HadassahEsther. Much has been written on Tevye’s orality — by Elye Spivak (1940:
108 – 21), Wiener (1986 [1941]), Miron (1973: 169 – 79; 2004; 2009; 2012:
241 – 369), Dov Sadan (1982), Michael Stern (1986), Hillel Halkin (1987),
Janet Hadda (1988: 43 – 55), Ruth R. Wisse (2000: 32 – 64) — and there is
much still to be written. What we do know is that Tevye’s monologues are
not soliloquies, not sermons, not stories but a form of skaz, the illusion of oral
speech as performed by a lower-class character (Erlich 1964: 46 – 47; Frieden
1995: 184 – 85; Roskies 1995: 153 – 56), related to a du-monolog (Spivak 1940:
88), or monologue-in-intimate-dialogue, with his horse, his wife and daughters, his daughters’ various suitors, God, and most immediately, “Sholem
Aleichem.” It operates on three levels: (1) events are reconstructed from
memory, not told as they happen; (2) events are broken up into dramatized
dialogues among the characters; and (3) Tevye’s supermonologue creates a
philosophical-ironic frame, a perspective on the dialogues embedded in it
(Harshav 1990: 102 – 7). Tevye’s art of misquotation comes into play mostly
on level 3 and usually at the very beginning, as when he introduces the story of
his second daughter, Hodl:
Ekh-ekh, ekh! Ven ir zolt visn mit vos far tsores, mit vos far veytikn ot der Tevye
trogt zikh arum! Vi azoy shteyt dort bay undz geshribn: odom yesoydoy
mi’ofor vesoyfoy le’ofor — a mentsh iz shvakher fun a flig un shtarker
fun ayzn . . . take nor a bashraybung mit mir! Vu ergets a shlak, a tsore, an
onshikenish — mikh oysmaydn tor es nisht. Fun vanen nemt zikh es, veyst ir nit?
Efsher derfun, vos beteve bin ikh a pesi ya’amin, vos gloybt itlekhn af
nemones? Tevye fargest, vos undzere khakhomim hobn undz ongezogt toyznt
mol: kabdeyhu vekhoshdeyhu; beloshn Ashkenaz heyst es: “ne vir sobaki.”
(Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 5:95)
Ah, if you only knew the troubles, the heartache, that Tevye’s been through! How’s
it written in our sources: odom yesoydoy mi’ofor vesoyfoy le’ofor, that a man can be
weaker than a fly and stronger than steel — I tell you, that’s a description of me!
Wherever there’s a calamity, a trouble, a misfortune, it always comes my way.
Maybe you can tell me why that is? Do you think that’s because I’m a credulous
fool who believes whatever he’s told? If only I’d managed to remember what our
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sages said a thousand times, kabdeyhu vekhoshdeyhu; in Yiddish that means: ne vir
sobaki. (Sholem Aleichem 1987: 53; emended)
He makes embedded allusions to the book of Job (“ Wherever there’s a calamity, a trouble, a misfortune, it always comes my way” — a comic paraphrase of
the “Jobian” plot) and the book of Proverbs (“pesi ya’amin lekhol dovor”
[Prov. 14:15], “a simple person believes anything”), designed to position
himself within an unbroken chain of human suffering and folly. He quotes,
moreover, one of his favorite passages from the High Holiday liturgy, “man is
but dust [and dust is all that remains of him]” (Birnbaum 1951: 363), which he
reframes as an article of stubborn, existential faith — humans are weak in the
face of historical upheaval but strong in their ability to respond. But Tevye
also turns rabbinic wisdom into folklore. “Kabdeyhu vekhoshdeyhu” (as the glossary to the Hallel Halkin translation teaches us) is a rabbinic adage meaning
“respect him and suspect him” (Sholem Aleichem 1987: 292), that is, some
people must never be trusted even though you honor them with all
due respect. In this tale of woes, someone whom Tevye trusted will end up
betraying him. Will this spell Tevye’s downfall?
This practice of comic paraphrase, quotation, and misquotation lies at the
heart of Tevye’s monologues and worldview. If we accept Wisse’s (2000: 38)
portrait of Tevye as an exegetical parodist, a comic Rashi, who knows exactly
what he is doing when he quotes and misquotes, someone who is not
just playing for laughs, then Tevye is trying the divine promise on for size.
“Tevye’s comedy accepts the ontological disparity between what is possible
and what is necessary, refusing to homogenize the competing claims of hope
and skepticism” (ibid.). Tevye’s comical glosses are not, in fact, his own; they
derive from the store of folk humor that Sholem Aleichem was the first
to mine systematically, whether by following “the pattern of those Yiddish
proverbs that simultaneously credit and subvert the quotations from which
they derive” (ibid.: 39) or by exploiting the arsenal of wordplay, elision,
macaronics, “euphemism and frivolity,” and other parodic means that
were fully sanctioned in traditional Ashkenaz (Roskies 2004; Sadan 1982;
Weinreich 2008, 1:232 – 41, A222 – A225). Exegetical parody is for Tevye
what proverbs are for Sheyne-Sheyndl and for Yente: the poetry of everyday
life. Folk speech is proverbial, and the main sources of Tevye’s proverbs are
the Bible and the weekly prophetic readings, the five megillot, the daily and
festival prayer books, and those works of rabbinic wisdom that were known to
all (Stern 1986: 95). By creating a male folk character who spoke in proverbs,
Sholem Aleichem wished to memorialize how Yiddish-speaking Jews turned
scripture and the store of rabbinic wisdom into a living (and therefore irreverent) vernacular. To speak is to misquote.
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Seguing from the timeless past to the mundane present, Tevye playfully
inserts the phrase beloshn Ashkenaz. But rather than translate the rabbinic
adage directly into Yiddish, Tevye introduces yet another language:
a pithy, gritty, Ukrainian folk saying. Ne vir sobaki means “a man mustn’t
trust his own dog.” Thus, beloshn Ashkenaz serves multiple purposes. It prepares his interlocutor, Pani Sholem Aleichem, for a sudden jump from high
to very low, in what the linguist Spivak (1940: 81) called Sholem Aleichem’s
“transformational wordplay.” It reveals that Tevye is really “on”; he’s gearing up for a dramatic monologue, one even better than that he gave the last
time he sat before Pani Sholem Aleichem. Perhaps it is because this time he
has even greater cause to lament his daughters’ behavior and his own. Whatever the reason, the trilingual wordplay signals the presence of multiple voices
and languages within Tevye’s folk speech. Tevye is the master of speech
because he speaks several languages in the same sentence (cf. Hoge 2012:
166 – 67).
If understood literally, loshn Ashkenaz can mean “the language spoken in
Germany,” playing on the dissonance between Yiddish and Goyish. Signing
off an introductory letter to Sholem Aleichem, in the only instance of his
writing style, Tevye gives his return address as “peredat gospodinu Tevelyu
Molotshnaho yevrei” (deliver to Mr. Tevel of-the-milk, Jew) (Sholem Aleichem
1917 – 23, 5:11). Four of these words are grammatically correct Imperial
Goyish (Russian), but Tevye is hard-pressed to find a Slavic equivalent for
his very Yiddish nickname, milkhiker. To this end he must enlist Ukrainian,
Vernacular Goyish. Molotshnaho roughly translates as “of-the-milk.” Tevye
remains at that address until the expulsion from the villages of 1913, which
allows Sholem Aleichem to showcase how Yiddish flourished within a rich
multilingual mosaic. Remember Ettinger’s Shmelke Troyniks? A Lithuanian
Jew who had moved to L’viv (Lemberg), in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, Shmelke first addresses the Stranger in Vernacular Goyish (Polish),
mistaking him for a squire, then speaks to him in Imperial Goyish (German),
before reverting to plain Yiddish when it emerges that the Stranger is really a
fellow Jew (act 5, scene 2; Ettinger 2006 [1839]: 180). Shmelke’s Lithuanian
dialect and his shprakhfolklor, or hackneyed phraseology, mark him as a comical character. Tevye, by contrast, speaks Yiddish “without an accent,” just as
his use of Vernacular Goyish is totally unexceptional; for him, perhaps,
Ukrainian is loshn Ashkenaz in the primary sense; that is, a dialect of Yiddish.
Tevye uses a theatrical gesture to signal the code switch to Ukrainian because
he is talking to someone from the big city, but he still does so without a
translation. Who doesn’t understand Ukrainian?
Yiddish speech when represented in writing retained a stratum of Vernacular Goyish, which, depending on the region, could be either Ukrainian or
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Polish. It represented a lower register of speech — but how low exactly? What
ever happened, for example, to the dirty words? If Tevye’s folk speech is
clean as the day is long, and even his peasant neighbors never use a four-letter
word, it can be for only one of two reasons: either Tevye is on his best
behavior in front of his amanuensis, or Sholem Aleichem, responsible folk
writer that he is, has censored his speech — this, in marked contrast to
another salt-of-the earth character named Shimen-Elye Shma Koleynu,
whom Sholem Aleichem created in 1901 (Howe and Wisse 1979: 2 – 36).
Shimen-Elye is a patchwork tailor, and his speech is likewise a patchwork
of fixed phrases, hackneyed expressions, and mock quotations, repeated ad
nauseam, which provoke laughter or scorn. Tevye, compared with him, is
a folk aristocrat (Sadan 1982). And nowhere is the debasement of ShimenElye’s language more apparent than when he faces off against his relative,
Dodi the Innkeeper, a demonic character, who has nothing but disdain for
the tailor’s ostentatious display of what he calls lokshn-koyletsh, “noodles and
challah,” a parody of loshn-koydesh, the holy tongue (Sholem Aleichem 1917 –
23, 16:19). “Mertseshem, mertseshem, God willing, God willing, bli
neyder umaskone, but without swearing to it,” says a thoroughly inebriated Shimen-Elye, promising to stop at the tavern on his way back from
Kozodoyevke, where he is headed to buy a milk goat. “Avade, vi den iz
andersh? Men iz dokh nisht mer vi a boser-vedos. Vi zogt ir: Odem a mentsh,
tsipoyr a foygl, katshke ruk zikh . . . ” (Of course! How else? I am mere fleshand-ass. You know what they say: Odem, a person; Tsipoyr, a bird, ducky — get
out of the way!) (ibid.: 22). Here, for Dodi’s benefit, Shimen-Elye is pulling out
all the stops. Parodying the word-for-word method of learning the Hebrew
Bible in heder, he prefaces it with boser-vedos, a vulgar pun on boser-vedom,
(a creature of) “flesh-and-blood.” Dos can also mean “prick,” which may be
the more apposite meaning, given that Dodi is masculinity personified, while
poor Shimen-Elye is nothing more than an emasculated, henpecked husband, who cannot for the life of him tell a male from a female goat (Miron
2012: 298 – 301). Nowadays, when schmuck and putz have entered the universal
lexicon as quintessentially Yiddish, it is useful to recall that the vocal strain
within Yiddish literature did not valorize vulgarity. It was the lexical tool of
last resort.
Shimen-Elye is trapped in a mock storybook world where every paragraph
begins in Hebrew to mimic the style of ancient chronicle; he is trapped in a
cyclical — and cynical — joke situation, for unknown to him, Dodi will keep
switching the goats; trapped in “Zlodeyevke, a town near Mazepevke, not far
from Haplapovitch and Kozodoyevke, between Yampoli and Strishtch, just
on the way from Pitsche-Yabede and Petschi-Khvost to Tetrevetz and from
there to Yehupetz” (Howe and Wisse 1979: 2); trapped in a bad marriage with
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a bevy of starving children; trapped at the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder; but most fundamentally and fatally, trapped in the labyrinth of
Yiddish. “Shimon-Eli uses quotations and linguistic jokes as clichés,” writes
Wisse in a letter to Irving Howe, “the same stock phrases reappearing whoever the listener and whatever the situation. He moves instinctively back and
forth through his repertoire, just as he passes through the same phases of
his journey [from Zlodeyevke to Kozodoyevke and back] over and over again
without reflection or insight. At the end, his failure to adapt, his application
of tried explanations instead of fresh, deductive questions, dooms him to
madness” (ibid.: xxi). Shimen-Elye’s lowly status (that of a patchwork tailor),
grotesque physical appearance (that of a goat), marital predicament, and
guttural voice are perfectly matched by his hackneyed phraseology. Nicknamed Shma Koleynu, “hear our voice,” a leitmotif of the High Holiday
liturgy, and considered something of a cantorial talent among his fellow
tailors, he turns the utopian liturgical phrase “hayoym horas oylem” (today
the world was created!) into an all-purpose mantra. No more plausible is his
standard response to the verbal and sometimes physical abuse that he suffers
at the hands of Tsipe-Beyle-Reyze, his wife. “Vehu, un er, der man heyst dos,
yimshoyl, zol tun ton geveltikn, bakh, in dir ” (And he, that is, your husband,
shall rule, shalt verily rule, over thee, over you!) (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23,
16:12): so he would quote the Lord’s punishment to Eve in the Garden of
Eden (Gen. 3:16), glossing each word into the archaic Yiddish that he learned
in heder. Shimen-Elye cannot intercede with God on behalf of his congregation, any more than he can defend himself against the imprecations of
his wife, because the world — and the textual world — he inhabits is beyond
repair.
Shprakhfolklor, Sholem Aleichem came to realize, was much more than a
comic device: children in their games, women in their curses, men in their
misquotations, men and women in their proverbial expressions — all had a
repertoire of bound phrases that they adapted to the concrete situation and
to their subjective needs. Tevye rarely repeats the same quotation twice,
perhaps because, as Miron (2012: 321 – 29) reminds us, he knows his words
are being recorded for posterity. In “Chava” (1906), the one monologue
where this is not the case, the repetition of the quotation from Psalms 103:13,
“kerakheym ov al bonim” (as a father has pity on his children), which he
interprets literally as bonim, meaning “sons” as opposed to “daughters,” serves
as his emotional anchor and theological crutch (Wisse 2000: 54). Despite his
liturgical nickname, Shimen-Elye is undone by the very texts that were supposed to prop up his manhood, his standing in society, his sanity. On the night
he goes mad, the goat and he change places. Pursued by the he-goat through
the streets of Kozodoyevke, Shimen-Elye cries “Shma Yisroel, Hear O Israel!”
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in mortal terror, the ultimate cry of a Jew in distress, and as if with a human
voice and the intonation of a cantor, he hears the goat bleat, “Mehhh . . . lekh,
King who metes out life and death” (Howe and Wisse 1979: 31). So the tailor’s
cantorial skills avail him not. His repertoire of misquoted texts direct him
through a cycle of defeat; proving to be beyond his control, the “canonized
textual store” (Harshav 1990: 100) leads this most hapless of men from comedy to tragedy.
In the ever-growing gallery of Sholem Aleichem’s folk characters, their
fates can often be measured by their proverbial expressions, their verbal tics
and mannerisms, as well as their ability — or inability — to switch from one
language, dialect, social register, and gendered speech to another. As Sholem
Aleichem returned in his imagination to the Slavic outback, to the storybook,
to the decaying shtetl, he found that the speech habits of the “folk” were an
essential key to their character: the surest way of telling apart the circular and
solipsistic speech of a Yente challenging the righteousness of God from the
shrewspeech of a Sheyne-Sheyndl chafing against the constraints of textual
etiquette; the men who were dairy from the men who were boser-vedos.
4. Peretz and the Art of Hadidic Speech
Who spoke for the shtetl? Was it the folk or the intellectual? The Hasid or the
Maskil? The rabbi or the rebbe? The men or the women? The adults or
the children? The rich or the poor? Even while Sholem Aleichem was busy
establishing his own cultural hierarchy, in which speech outranked writing,
his great contemporary and rival, I. L. Peretz (1852 – 1915), took a completely
different approach. In “Bilder fun a provints-rayze” (1891), translated as
“Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region” (Peretz 2002:
20 – 84), Peretz shared these impressions with the readers of Di yidishe bibliotek
(the Jewish Library), a new and self-published journal of literature, society, and
economics. This detailed daily reportage gave each member of Shtetl-land a
distinct voice, yet none of them sounded familiar. To begin with, they did
not speak in the Ukrainian (i.e., Southeastern) dialect that was adopted by
Abramovitsh-Mendele and Sholem Aleichem in their effort to standardize,
and by the Odessa-based Yiddish press in its effort to disseminate, literary
Yiddish. Peretz insisted on transcribing Polish Yiddish, with all its regional
peculiarities, Germanicisms, and heavily Hebraicized diction (Caplan 2007:
70 – 71; Mark 1949: 73 – 74; Spivak 1940: 16 – 21). More innovative still
was the narrator, who presented himself as a shrayber, a “statistician,” no
less, trying to prove by gathering testimony that science would dispel societal
hatred and alleviate Jewish poverty but whom the market women from
Lashchev sized up immediately as just another busybody Germanizer, who
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“spoke Yiddish like a Goy” (Peretz 2002: 50). Peretz’s transcript, finally,
was accurate to the point of being stenographic, bespeaking a “compressed
intimacy” and “cultural intricacy” that demanded of his urban and secular
Yiddish audience a very close reading, indeed (Wisse 1991: 21). Who knew
Yiddish could be so difficult?
No one spoke for the shtetl, least of all the shrayber. So long as he stayed
in Tishevitz, his first stop, the disparate voices were containable: a chorus of
market women followed by an interview with Reb Baruch the tavern keeper,
followed by a monologue by the beadle of Tishevitz; the women taking turns
with the men; the rabbi in his threadbare caftan sandwiched between
Shmerl, the lone and boorish Maskil, and Reb Elye, the true, hapless
believer. But at night, the border between hope and delusion, myth and reality, children and grownups became blurred; and not long after Tishevitz, one
impoverished shtetl began to look just like another in the eyes of the shrayber,
and Levi-Yitskhok Bernpeltz of Lashchev, who could not remember how
many children he had, began to sound just as deranged as the Rabbi of Skul’s
aristocratic widow. Yiddish was the cacophony of a civilization in collapse.
On the fifth leg of his journey through the town of Tishevitz, between
late afternoon and evening prayers, the narrator engages a group of “terribly
optimistic” (Peretz 2002: 35) Hasidim in conversation, and out of this chorus
of male believers there emerges the voice of one Reb Elye, Peretz’s first
Hasidic raconteur. Encouraged by the other men, Reb Elye recounts — not
for the first time — four miracle tales about the Vorker Rebbe, except that two
of the four actually reveal the utter failure of the zaddik to work a miracle in
Reb Elye’s domestic tragedy. The Maskil alone remains unmoved, and his
skeptical behavior is critical to the story. For something of that Maskil would
always remain with Peretz. He grew up in Zamość, a bastion of rabbinic
rationalism, and took up permanent residence in Warsaw, the fast-growing
hub of Jewish cultural, political, and economic life, where Hasidism was now
a dominant force. Male Hasidim, the writer in him noted, were an excitable,
irascible lot, who seemed to thrive on a siege mentality and (like Reb Elye)
used many learned expressions to get their point across. They spoke a voluble
Yiddish native to the region. What marked their speech as “Hasidic” was its
remarkable compression, “that manner of speech in half-sentences and insinuations” (Weinreich 2008, 1:229). When relocated to an urban setting, what
would Hasidic speech sound like?
The first exemplar of transplanted Hasidic speech was Yoykhenen the
teacher, who eked out a living giving private Talmud lessons in well-to-do
Warsaw households (“Ver es git lebn, git fun vanen tsu lenb” [“He Who
Bestows Life Bestows the Wherewithal to Live Also”] [1897]). At odds
with his employers, with their pampered sons, and with the secular city
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around him, Yoykhenen begins each homespun tale on a polemical note.
“On occasion, when I read the Talmud with ardor” — so a typical discourse
opens — “my pupils who have rich parents simply cannot understand, and ask
if it is possible that I, too, have to go on studying, and who my teacher is.”
Di shoytim! Zey veysn gornisht, az di velt iz gor a voyler rebe, az daygesparnose iz a rebe! Tsores tsrures zenen gute melamdim . . . Der yatush,
vos kratst alts-in-eynem in moyekh mitn “im toymar: ma noykhal,” iz gor
a fayerdiker rebe! Un zey aleyn, di talmidim mayne, un di foters zeyere — di
balebatim mayne, zenen oykh gor fayne melamdim . . . oy, vi fayn!
Alts traybt tsum lernen!
Ober zu toyro vezu skhoro! (Peretz 1947 – 48, 4:56 – 57; words of HebrewAramaic origin rendered in boldface)
The foolish ones! They are utterly unaware that God’s world is a splendid teacher,
that worrying about one’s daily bread is a good teacher. Endless sufferings
are exceptional teachers. The important thought, “What is there to eat?” which
incessantly goes through one’s brain is an outstanding teacher. And they themselves, these pupils of mine, and their parents, my masters, are also splendid
teachers. Oh, how splendid! Everything in the world compels one to study. But
what a reward there is for studying! (Peretz 1958: 307)
This free translation by Moshe Spiegel captures the incremental, rhetorical
structure of Reb Yoykhenen’s impassioned speech and the way that he systematically yokes together the abstract with the mundane. The world and its
economic woes are likened to a rebe or melamed, a traditional teacher of children and young men, whose core curriculum consists of a scriptural passage
rendered here as “ What is there to eat?” The Yiddish original is anything but
fluid, however, each thought unit being punctuated by an exclamation mark,
the leap from one thought to another marked by ellipses, and its coded
cultural references crying out for elucidation. Here is a literal translation of
the same passage:
The foolish ones! They are utterly unaware that the world is an exceptionally fine
[traditional] teacher, that worrying about one’s daily bread is a teacher! Endless
troubles are good teachers [of the classical curriculum] . . . the gnat that incessantly
gnaws at your brain with the [biblical question from Lev. 25:20] “and should you ask:
What are we to eat?” is a fiery teacher! And they themselves, these pupils of mine,
and their parents, my masters, are also splendid teachers . . . oh, how splendid!
Everything in the world drives one to study [the Oral Torah, the Talmud]!
But what a reward there is for studying [the Oral Torah]!3
3. Scriptural passages are rendered in italics.
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The best of all schools is the school of hard knocks: that is the plain meaning
of Reb Yoykhenen’s peroration. But at the same time that Reb Yoykhenen
admits to be being a long-suffering pupil in this punitive school, standing
as he does at the bottom of the food chain, he also parades his mastery of
the Torah and the Talmud. In face of the harsh realities of life, he is talking
Talmud; he uses the discourse of Talmud study in what Jordan D. Finkin
(2010: 128) has called Peretz’s “meta-Talmudicity” to play off the exalted past
against the debased present. With heavy irony, he appropriates scripture
and rabbinic lore for his own purpose, which is the defense of Talmud
study against all odds. Reb Yoykhenen reaches the resounding rhetorical
conclusion that “Everything in the world drives one to study [the Talmud]”
by means of a highly compressed use of quotation and allusion. Marshaling
the full weight of scriptural authority, he cites the passage “and should you ask:
What are we to eat?” completely out of context. That rhetorical question was
posed by the Lord when he instructed Moses about the laws of the year of
jubilee, which would take effect when the Israelites crossed into the promised
land. “And should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may
neither sow nor gather in our crops?’ I will ordain My blessing for you in
the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (Lev.
25:20 – 21, Jewish Publication Society [ JPS] translation). When applied to
Jewish life in exile, where for some every year is a jubilee because there is
never enough to eat, Reb Yoykhenen turns biblical law on its head, as if
foraging for the next meal were ordained by God. This parodic proof text in
turn is embedded within another exalted moment in the story of the Jewish
past, when God punished the Emperor Titus for destroying the Second
Temple by having a gnat ( yatush) enter his nose and gnaw at his brain (moyekh)
for seven years until he died (as recorded in the Babylonian Talmud [B.]
Gittin 56b). But Jews like Reb Yoykhenen remain stiff-necked, upholding
God’s Torah in the face of God’s apparent absence from the world; indeed,
they are ready to martyr themselves for the sake of the Torah. How does Reb
Yoykhenen make this conceptual leap from the mythic past to the spiritually
and materially impoverished present? By means of a cryptic reference to the
martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva, whose flesh was torn with iron combs by the
Romans for teaching the Torah in public. According to the version preserved
in B. Berakhot 61b, Akiva died proclaiming the oneness of God, and a bat kol, a
“heavenly voice,” was heard to protest, “Is this the Torah, and is this the
reward for [studying] it?” By a rhetorical sleight of hand, Reb Yoykhenen has
cast himself in the role of a latter-day martyr, turning the anguished ancient
cry into a statement of personal resolve and stubborn faith: “zu toyro vezu
skhoro!,” “what a reward there is for studying [the Oral Torah]!”
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Yoykhenen the teacher is in a constant state of mental anguish (note the
plethora of exclamation marks) and speaks a hyper-Hebraic Yiddish, with the
rhetorical flourishes and leaps of logic that are the mark of Talmud study
among Jewish men. Judging by his speech, he is a fully realized character.
But the discrepancy between past and present, the grandiose application of
the sacred sources to his own abject condition, the litany and posturing, turn
him into a flawed and grotesque figure, who cannot sustain the double role
that Peretz intended for him. Eking out a miserable existence in the crowded
Jewish quarter of Warsaw, and beset, like Reb Elye before him, by myriad
family tragedies, Reb Yoykhenen is also meant by Peretz to represent the
healthy voice of social protest (“Endless sufferings are exceptional teachers”)
(Mehalel 2014: 347 – 53). Peretz had too much of himself invested in Reb
Yoykhenen to make him a credible Hasid.
Peretz’s women, both young and old, also drew their vocabulary and
ethical sensibility from the books that they read. Older women still read
and quoted extensively from muser-sforim, medieval ethical tracts, while
younger women began to absorb the vocabulary of romantic love from reading mayse-bikhlekh and romanen, Yiddish popular literature geared mostly to a
female readership (Roskies 1977). Providing young women with scientific
and historical reading material in the mother tongue, as well as with fiction
that addressed their specific plight, lay high on Peretz’s agenda during the
1890s (Mehalel 2014: 40 – 56). In a series of tightly scripted dialogues, like
“Inem postvogn” (“In the Mail Coach”; 1891), “Farshterter shabes” (“The
Destroyed Sabbath”; 1892), and “A kas fun a yidene” (“A Woman’s Anger”;
1893), Peretz launched a devastating critique of the traditional book culture
of East European Jewry. The nameless, penniless couple of the latter story —
“an er un a zi” (a he and a she) as the narrator puts it with seemingly clinical
detachment (Peretz 1947 – 48, 2:229) — barely talk to one another, so busy is
he poring over his tractate of the Talmud, until one day, in the hovel they call
home, a single phrase of his, chanted out loud in the singsong of Talmudic
study, ignites her stifled rage. “Er lernt un zogt: ‘Shma miney — tlas . . . ’ un
taytsht zikh oys beneimes: ‘iz dokh fun danen gedrungen . . . ’ He studies
out loud [in Aramaic]: ‘Shma miney — tlas,’ and translates it to himself ever so
pleasantly: ‘from this we can deduce.’” But before he can finish glossing the
phrase, she lashes out at him: “Gedrungen zogstu, gedrungen? Oy! A dringenish zol af
dir kumen, riboyne-shel-oylem” (Deduce, did you say, deduce? The deuce should
take you, God Almighty!) (ibid.: 232). The story ends with her crying infant
calling her back to life just as she is about to commit suicide.
With less dire consequences, but no less trenchant, is the story “The
Destroyed Sabbath” (Peretz 1947 – 48, 2:211 – 19), telling about a young
married couple still living at home. The omniscient narrator can scarce
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contain his sarcasm when describing Serl, the materfamilias, who knows her
Yiddish Bible commentary by heart, has mastered the most arcane ethical
tracts, and knows the inner workings of hell like the back of her hand. Serl is
quietly at war with her son-in-law for being flippant about the laws of sexual
purity. “An avle, a groyse zind” (it’s a crime, a great sin), she cries out to her
daughter.
Nor a mansparshoyn iz shoyn beteve azoy . . . Imshteyns gezogt, zey veysn,
zey veysn den . . . Un vos hot azoyner moyre? Er khapt a mol arayn a perek
mishnayes, vern im zeks blat khatoim oysgemekt fun bukh! Un ven iz zeyer
yoym-hadin? Eyn mol in yor — yomim noroim . . . Ober an ishe, nebekh, a
“sheosani kirtsonoy,” dos iz vi inditshkes! A lyade vos, iz af zey, rakhmone
litslan, a pgire! Haynt ze, beshasn trogn, beshasn hobn — demolt hengt dokh
yo di neshome af a hor! Same yomin noroim! Un vos imshteyns gezogt, zol
undz matsl zayn? Dos taytsh-khumesh?! . . . A katoves, a mentsh on tsitses,
in gantsn dray mitsves: khale, nide, hadlokes haner . . . Mit khale iz nokh
nisht azoy geferlekh! Men kon nokh yoytse zayn! Hadlokes ner oykh . . . Fraytik, tsvelfn, makht men shabes, ober yents . . . Es iz zikh den gor tsu derhitn?
(Ibid.: 214 – 15)
But that’s what a man is like by nature . . . They know, they think they know it all,
poor things . . . And what does he have to be afraid of anyway? All he has to do
is down a chapter of Mishnah and six pages full of sins are erased from his book!
And when is their Judgment Day? Only once a year — on the Days of Awe . . . But
a female, poor thing, someone [who recites the morning blessing for women] “who
hath made me according to His will,” they’re like turkeys [for the slaughter]! For
the slightest infraction, they croak, God help us! Just think of it: when pregnant,
when giving birth — that’s when the soul really hangs by a thread. Every day is the
Day of Awe! And what is that can save us [then], poor things that we are? The
Yiddish Bible?! What a joke, a person who doesn’t even wear ritual fringes [to
protect her], has only three commandments: [to separate the] challah, [to observe
ritual purity during] menstruation, lighting the [Sabbath] candles . . . [Separating
a piece of dough for the] challah is not so terrible! You can always find a loophole.
Even lighting the [Sabbath] candles . . . On Fridays, you can start the Sabbath
[as early as] at noon, but as for that [the rigidly regulated and time-bound laws of
menstruation] . . . is there any way to protect yourself [against a transgression]?
(My translation)
Because sexuality cannot be spoken of directly, Serl’s hellfire sermon is cryptic to the point of being almost incomprehensible; to translate it, one needs to
compare it with Peretz’s (1953: 187) more straightforward Hebrew version.
Were this ethnography, a transcript of authentic women’s speech in a Polish
shtetl at the end of the nineteenth century, the reader would marvel at the
density of Hebrew-Aramaic expressions gleaned from years of strict ritual
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observance and considerable book learning, with an overlay of superstition.
For example, when Serl asks rhetorically, “And what is that can save us
[then], poor things that we are? The Yiddish Bible?!” she is referring to
the folk practice of putting a copy of the Yiddish Bible under the pillow of
a woman in labor. Serl’s speech draws no distinction among the normative
realm of rabbinic law, sexual taboos, and folk belief. For the narrator, they
are the detritus of medieval Ashkenaz: primitive, puritanical, and cruel.
Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, against the backdrop of a personal
and ideological crisis, Peretz determined to salvage Hasidic, Hebraic, and
pious speech as voices for the good within a new humanistic Jewish culture
(Garrett 2011; Roskies 1995: 113 – 15). To this end, he salvaged Hasidism
from the squalor of the present and returned to the glory days of the movement, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
Eventually, Peretz was to collect most of his Hasidic speakers into a
separate volume he called Khsidish, “Hasidic,” or “in the Hasidic spirit”
(Finkin 2010: 110 – 11), where, in the volume’s final form (Peretz 1947 – 48,
4), Reb Yoykhenen was to come first in a long line that stretched from fin de
siècle Warsaw all the way back to the Ba‘al Shem Tov. From the beginning
of the lineage — the “golden chain” of Hasidism — to its end, Hasidic speech
in Peretz observed these five rules:
(1) It was voiced exclusively by men;
(2) These men used a high linguistic register (Mark 1949: 74 – 75);
(3) The economy of their language, its “telescopic quality” (Finkin 2010:
120 – 21), was its most singular feature;
(4) Complex ideas were expressed by yoking the abstract to the concrete
(Mark 1949: 76 – 78); and
(5) Their speech was strictly dialogic, both in the common sense of
“Two Jews Talking” (Wisse 1994 [1984]) and, less commonly, of one
Jew conducting an argument with himself (“The foolish ones! They are
utterly unaware”); and dialogic in Bakhtin’s sense, as a double-voiced
utterance. No Hasidic narrative is complete without a Litvak lurking
beneath the bed (see “If Not Higher” [1900]); there is always a second,
skeptical voice undercutting the speaker’s voice of faith, either explicitly
(as with Reb Yoykhenen) or implicitly (Finkin 2010: 125). Recent
scholarship views Peretz’s Hasidic speakers with greater (ibid.: 109 –
46; Frieden 1995: 281 – 309) and lesser (Ross 2013) skepticism.
Fearing that Yiddish might become a language of mere utility, a means of
rallying or entertaining the masses (Wisse 1991: 71 – 109), Peretz placed the
Hasidic speech act center stage, whether in the form of monologue (“Between
Two Mountains” [1900]), dialogue (“A Conversation” [1900]), or the re-
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ported discourse of the rebbe (“Reb Nakhmenke’s Stories” [1904]) or
through a whole Hasidic dynasty speaking in blank verse (“The Golden
Chain” [1907]). Hasidic speech could be acerbic, witty, whimsical, or
sad — but never vulgar. It was both distinctively audible, through the syncopated rhythm and remarkable concision of the prose, and visible, through the
deft employment of ellipses, the famous dray pintelekh (three dots) that
suggested to the reader everything that remained unsaid. Hasidic speech
was not so much about the distinctive discourse of this character or that as
it was the principal locus of elevated speech. It was Yiddish Sublime.
Peretz transposed his Hasidim from the present back to the past, from the
teeming metropolis back to the semirural shtetl. He did so to make their
Yiddish timeless. There, in a place outside of time, Reb Noyekhke could
debate the Brisker rov on the difference between a Torah of mere words and
a Torah of pure music, or Reb Nakhmenke could ruminate about wandering
in the wilderness, or Reb Shloyme could call for the cessation of time. There,
a tractate of Talmud always lay open on the table. There Yiddish was a
sovereign tongue.
“Our Yiddish,” Peretz had famously complained in 1888,
has but jokes,
has but quips and flashes
words that fall on us like lashes,
giants that both laugh and cry,
words that stab like poisoned spears,
and laughter that is full of fears.
(Howe et al. 1987: 14; emended)
When Peretz first picked up his pen to write serious verse in Yiddish, he saw
the language as essentially acerbic, anarchic, masculine, and plebeian. What
Peretz viewed as his main impediments to crafting a modern literary idiom
is precisely what drew the young Rabinovitsh to the language at roughly the
same time: its scope for satire; the ways in which associative digressions,
nicknames, gesticulations, and body language accompanied the speech of
Jewish men and women, artists and artisans, adults and children, dupes and
crooks, whether in the marketplace or the stock market (Sholem Aleichem
1926b [1884]). Unlike Peretz, Sholem Aleichem rarely gave rabbis a speaking role; Talmud scholars and Hasidim were neither seen nor heard. Out of
Mendele’s Jewish discourse, exegetical parody, bilingual letter-writing styles,
the speech play of children, the shrewspeech of women, professional argots,
Slavic speechlore, and a number of folk expressions of his own invention
(Mark 1946) — out of all these, Sholem Aleichem crafted a new vernacular,
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comprehensive enough to embody the usable past, light enough to travel
from Anatevke to Yehupetz and beyond.
5. Taking Yiddish on the Road
No one knew better than Sholem Aleichem that Jews were on the move and
with them their lively language. The advent of the trains a century later than
in the West was both a blessing and a curse. Train travel not only divided
humanity into classes, he wrote in a sketch called “Third Class” (1902;
Sholem Aleichem 1987: 279 – 84), it created three distinct speech habitats
as well. In first class, a Jewish passenger felt constrained by the formality of his
fellow passengers to sit in complete silence; here, a Jew could almost forget
how to use his voice! To pass as a Gentile when traveling second class, the
upwardly mobile Jewish passenger had to speak Russian or Polish and swap
anti-Semitic jokes with the girl in the opposite seat if he wanted to impress
her. (Of course, the joke was on him, because she turned out be Jewish, too.)
But in third class, he was home free. Here, among his own, it was nonstop
Yiddish, day and night; intimate and intrusive. Jewish men, liberated
from the social and religious constraints of the shtetl but traveling on a
route that led nowhere, fathers half-crazed with their tales of woe, shysters
fast-talking their way to an easy ruble — these and many more provided
Sholem Aleichem with a veritable sociopathology of Jewish speech (Garrett
2003: 90 – 122; Hoffman 2012; Koller 2012; Miron 2000: 256 – 334, 2008).
This was not the historical shtetl anymore, where each dilapidated house
and every empty plot of land had its own story and its designated narrator.
These were stories narrated live on board a czarist train, mostly in a thirdclass compartment packed to the rafters, but also aboard the Leydikgeyer, the
straggler special or slowpoke express, a narrow-gauge train that traveled
a sleepy, provincial route. And instead of a high-minded shrayber, armed
with questionnaires, the narrator in the Railroad Stories (completed in 1910)
was a seasoned salesman, who refused to divulge his name. He preferred to
call himself the komi-voyazher, the “commercial traveler,” a Russian loanword
that resonated with komish (comic) while preserving the panache of modernity
and commerce (Hoffman 2012: 153). Whoever he was, this man fancied
himself a connoisseur of character, dress, and speech. “Show me a hundred
ordinary men,” he bragged, “and I’ll pick out the one oddball right away
(“The Happiest Man in All Kodni”; Sholem Aleichem 1987: 144). He sometimes heard fellow passengers as “a thick bass voice,” “a squeaky voice,” “a
surprisingly good-natured tone of voice” before he could see their faces
(“Competitors”; ibid.: 138, 140). Alternatively, he described a Jew from
Kaminka as “a generously proportioned individual with a good silk cap on
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his head, twinkling eyes, a rosy face, and no front teeth” before noting that
“he whistled when he spoke” (“Baranovitsh Station”; ibid.: 153).
If Jews liked to talk, and talked all at once, how was one to make his
voice heard above the fray? One way was to have a tagline, a species of
shprakhfolklor. This would be a piece of hackneyed phraseology retained
from the shtetl past but raised to a new level of individuation by the angst
and anomie of modern life. The tagline separated the men worth recording
from the gray mass of ordinary travelers.
A tagline is also a time-tested way to keep your listeners hooked. “Vos art
aykh?” (What do you care?), says the narrator of “Baranovitsh Station” (the
guy with no front teeth) nineteen times (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 28:41 –
59; 1987: 152 – 63; translation, Halkin 1987). “Loz zikh aykh dakhtn” ( Just
imagine), say the featured storytellers in “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabba,”
“The Wedding That Came without Its Band,” and “The Tallis Koton”
(Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 28:113 – 51; 1987: 186 – 207; translation, Halkin
1987). But watch out for a slick passenger who keeps repeating “ir vet mir
gloybn, tsi nit” (believe it or not) as he seduces his traveling companion
with cognac and Havana cigars (“The Man from Buenos Aires”; Sholem
Aleichem 1917 – 23, 28:71 – 88; 1987: 166 – 77; translation, Halkin 1987).
A really belligerent tagline, by contrast, signals the breakdown of communication, because the speaker is drowning in his tale of woes, in what
Sholem Aleichem originally called his pekl, or “bundle of troubles” (Miron
2008: 204). “Vorem az zi vil, iz epes a terets?” (because when she wants it,
she gets it?), says the husband of his shrewish wife, or “when she wants it, she
damn well gets it”; it alternates with the more contemplative “nor vos zol men
tun? A yid iz geveynt gevorn” (but what could I do about it? I wasn’t the first
or last Jew) (“High School”; Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 28:175 – 93; 1987:
217 – 29; translation, Halkin 1987). “Un a ruekh zey in tatn, un gornit!” (To
hell with them all and forget it!): so the narrator of “Burned Out” keeps
swearing a blue streak (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 28:231 – 42; 1987: 247 –
55; translation, Halkin 1987), as well he ought to, morally speaking, because
he has considerable criminal activity to cover up (Miron 2008).
Abramovitsh had endowed his Mendele persona with a single, all-purpose
tagline, “nisht dos bin ikh oysn” (but that’s beside the point). Given Mendele’s
wildly associative turn of mind, this tagline carried out a unifying function
and helped the reader organize Mendele’s analogical discourse. It slowed
things down and broke things up into smaller units. Not so Sholem Aleichem’s various taglines, distributed among a gallery of speakers: they
perform a differentiating role. They animate and authenticate the act of
speech, giving each speaker a special identification, a kind of musical motif
that was more emotive than denotative.
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You would think that such a densely Jewish environment, so much male
camaraderie, hearing so many familiar taglines, and being directed by such
a friendly and practical guide would foster instant and intimate communication between speaker and listener, storyteller and audience. Sometimes it
did, but sometimes it didn’t. In a synoptic reading, Miron (2000: 312 – 34)
classified the Railroad Stories according to eight different types of miscommunication, misunderstanding, obfuscation, camouflage, and confusion
between speaker and listener. In story number 4 (“Tsugenumen” [“Eighteen
from Pereshepena”]), for example, two men talk in code about Jewish boys
being “taken” (tsugenumen) and draw a third man into their lively conversation,
until they discover the source of misunderstanding. Given the draconian
quota system for Jews, the interlocutor naturally assumes that “taken”
must mean getting one’s son admitted to a Russian gymnasium. “ What
student?” yells the first man at the end of their seemingly intimate exchange.
“A soldier! He was taken to the army to be a soldier! A soldier!” So victory is
suddenly turned into defeat, because what Jewish father wants his son to be
inducted into the czarist army? “I was curious to see,” writes the commercial
traveler in conclusion, “how the three had become total strangers. Not only
had they stopped speaking to each other, they no longer even looked at one
another, as if they had done something shameful, something that could never
be lived down” (Sholem Aleichem 1987: 166; translation, Rosenfeld 1954).
Intimacy ends in estrangement; shame replaces a shared fate; dialogue ends
in silence. A good thing these men will never see each other again.
At journey’s end, the stars must be perfectly aligned for Yiddish to function
as a means of cultural communication. Fortunately, this is what happens
in “On Account of a Hat,” written in 1913. Like “Station Baranovitsh” and
“The Miracle of Hoshana Rabba,” this is a story-within-a-story-within-astory-within-a-story-within-a-story, each with its own distinctive rhetoric,
dialect, and point of view (Roskies 2001). What makes “On Account of a
Hat” different is the presence of “Sholem Aleichem,” whom the narrator
addresses directly as they meet up on the same train, both men heading home
for the seder.
The chain-smoking dealer in stationery from Kasrilevke who narrates the
story is in particularly good form today. Not only is he heading home for
Passover on the right train and according to schedule, but he has also found
the ideal traveling companion, his audience-of-one, the celebrated folk writer
Sholem Aleichem, and he will not miss this rare opportunity. Twenty-nine
times in the course of the story will he interrupt himself to ask, “ir horkht, tsi
neyn, are you listening to me or not?,” a tagline that insists on his presence
and prerogative, adds considerable energy and rhythm to his telling, and
prevents his interlocutor’s attention from flagging (Howe and Greenberg
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1954: 111 – 18; Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:241 – 54). There are so many
stories competing for this illustrious author’s attention, and apparently even
stories about Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain, that a second tagline, “SholemShakhne heyst es” (Sholem Shachnah, that is), is repeated eighteen times to
underscore that this madcap comedy of errors actually happened to someone
from Kasrilevke, whom he (and everyone else in town) knows personally.
The reason he must keep repeating Sholem Shachnah’s name is that
“On Account of a Hat” is an elaborate retelling of an old joke (cf. Druyanow
1951: joke no. 113).
One paragraph into the stationer’s story and the author admits as much:
“Ikh muz moyde zayn, az di rayele mayse, vos der doziker kasrilevker yid
hot mir dertseylt, khapt take dem opbild fun an anekdot” (I must confess that
this true story, which the Jew from Kasrilevke related to me, does indeed
sound like an anecdote) (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:23). A rare instance,
this, of the author mentioning a speech genre by name, much less a genre that
ranks entertainment above truth (Finkin 2009: 93; Miron 2005: 289 – 91).
Even more unusual is the belabored explanation that follows:
un ikh hob mikh deriber lang geshlogn mir der deye, tsi ikh zol zi aykh ibergebn,
tsi neyn? Nor tsurik hob ikh mikh batrakht: a kasrilevker yid a soykher, vos handlt
mit obryezkes, iz nit shayekh tsu literatur un ker zikh klal nisht on mit keyn
sforim, lokheyn, az er zogt s’iz rayel, iz er bagloybt; un ikh gib aykh iber di
dozike mayse mit zayn loshn gufe, nisht tsugeleygt mayns a vort afile. (Sholem
Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:244)
and so for a long time I debated with myself whether or not I should pass it on to
you. But I thought it over again and decided: If a merchant from Kasrilevke, who
deals in stationery, is not connected to literature and has no truck with religious
writings either — therefore, if he vouches for its authenticity, then it must be true;
and I pass this story on to you in his very own language, without adding a single
word of my own. (Howe and Greenberg 1954: 112)
Judging from the author’s syntax, legalistic reasoning, and use of Hebraisms,
he too is a native son, having spent the requisite number of years studying the
Talmud. Why doth the author protest so much in establishing the truth of
his recorded narrative? Can it be because, by the story’s end, most readers
will recognize the story for what it is — a terrific joke about a guy who loses
his head when he loses his hat? If so, then, as in some of his most elaborate
adventures in orality — Menakhem-Mendl, Tevye the Dairyman, and the Railroad
Stories — a “factual” and “authorial” foreword is called for. Lest anyone object
that fictional domestic correspondence, monologues, and chance encounters
are less truthful than novels drawn from real life, the storyteller presents us
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with a complete fabrication that contains the kind of truth that merchants
don’t deal in (cf. Miron 2005: 292 – 95). First and foremost, “On Account of a
Hat” preserves its marked orality. Indeed, what grabs the listener’s attention
is not its arbitrary and transferable holiday hook (the same story could be
told about an absentminded Jew rushing home in time for the Sabbath), and
certainly not its veracity, but rather its dialogic, syncopated, intimate, and
multilingual manner of narration.
As in the Railroad Stories, the nameless narrator has an identifying tagline;
two, to be exact, both of which he trots out the moment he starts talking. “Alts
heyst bay aykh tsetrogn?” (Did I hear you say absentminded?). “Ot iz bay
undz in Kasrilevke, heyst es, faran, ir horkht tsi neyn?” (Now in our town, that
is, in Kasrilevke, we’ve got someone — do you hear what I say?) . . . “a yid
a tsetrogener, Sholem-Shakhne heyst er, nor rufn ruft men im ‘SholemShakhne drey zikh’” (a real scatterbrain Jew. His name is Sholem Shachnah,
but as to calling him, we call him “Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain”) (Sholem
Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:23). That last phrase, which sounds rather comical
in English, harks back to the traditional heder pedagogy of word-for-word
translation of the Pentateuch into Yiddish: from its unique features of biblical
syntax as the tautological infinitive, the doubling of verbs entered the spoken
language. When naturalized into Yiddish, as Finkin (2010: 17 – 29) has shown,
the tautological infinitive became a marker of cultural intimacy. Just the one
phrase, “nor rufn ruft men im ‘Sholem-Shakhne drey zik’” (but as to calling
him we call him “Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain”), reveals that we are on
native and oral ground.
The narrator is just warming up for a command performance, in which
he will demonstrate how well-read and well traveled he is, at least within the
multilingual Pale of Jewish Settlement. The story proper begins with Sholem
Shachnah Rattlebrain clinching the first real estate deal of his life, although,
like Menakhem-Mendl before him, what he really accomplishes is to learn
the lingo, leaving the transactional work to the Brothers Drobkin, “great big
fearsome rattlers” (Howe and Greenberg 1954: 112) from Minsk Province.
The stationer has ample opportunity to pepper his narration with technical
terminology and Russian loan words: ime’nyes (transactions), folvar’kes (farms),
leva’des (homesteads), bud’nikes (plots), tshornozyo’m (acreage soil), and the like.
From the narrator’s ironic voice and performance style, it becomes clear that
Russian (Imperial Goyish) is a colonizing language that only recently has
penetrated into the Yiddish heartland. Even the Ukrainians speak it with
quotation marks. By assimilating these words and expressions into a trilingual, multivalent, live Yiddish narration, the storyteller is effectively mocking
the pretensions of Russian to serve as the universal, vehicular language. To
put it differently, in this story, as in the Railroad Stories that came before, “the
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Russian vocabulary items . . . constitute a minority language,” and despite
Sholem Shachnah’s own abject failure to negotiate the Gentile world,
Sholem Aleichem has turned Yiddish “into a powerful vehicle for demonstrating the linguistic superiority of the politically inferior” (Koller 2012: 136).
With the stationer’s mediation as narrator, here is how Sholem Aleichem
does it.
Before recounting Sholem Shachnah’s trials and tribulations in the
purgatorial train station of Zlodeyevke (Roguesville), located somewhere
between the big world of business and the safe haven of Kasrilevke, the
stationer delivers a soliloquy on the difficulties of train travel, which ends
with a spectacular, trilingual wordplay: “Nisht umzist zogn undzere
kasrilevker khakhomim un fartaytshn, vi ayer Tevye taytsht: ‘Tov shem
mishemen tov — svami dobre, a bez vam lutshe.’ Der pshat iz: az on der
ban iz geven a sakh beser, vi mit der ban.” Here is an English translation
with glosses on the original text: “Not for nothing do our wise men of Kasrilevke quote the passage, ‘Tov shem mishemen tov’ [A good name is better than
fragrant oil; Eccl. 7:1], and translate it the way your Tevye does: svami dobre, a
bez vam lutshe, [which in Ukrainian means, when I’m alone, I’m happy; without you — I’m even happier]. The plain meaning is that without the train we
were much better off than with the train” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:246).
Train travel (read “modernity”) has made it more difficult for Jews to live as
Jews — that may be the story’s bleak message. Sholem Shachnah never makes
it home in time for the seder, because he loses his hat and also — for one
critical moment — his Jewish identity. Then again, depending on the listener,
this could simply be a familiar joke retold with extraordinary panache.
Whatever truth there was to this story, Sholem Aleichem used “On
Account of a Hat” to showcase the kind of narrative performance that was
made for the road. Recounted en route, in a manner specifically designed to
hold the listener’s attention and to keep him laughing at every turn (“do you
hear what I say?”), its very subject was the tribulations of train travel and
the dangers (whether real or imagined by the hyperactive mind of “Sholem
Shachnah”) of leaving home. Never did Sholem Aleichem betray greater
self-confidence in his written-as-spoken medium than here, in “a tale in
honor of Passover [his favorite holiday], told by a Jew from [the legendary
town of ] Kasrilevke [that he invented], who deals in stationery and smokes
thin cigarettes, as retold in his very own words” (from the story’s précis;
Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 2:241). Here, let me present in a nutshell the
five rules that inform Sholem Aleichem’s speech-based writing:
(1) The dramatized speakers (or correspondents, as in Menakhem-Mendl )
may be men or women, young or old.
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(2) Their Yiddish is replete with words, proverbial sayings, and everyday
expressions in Vernacular and Imperial Goyish.
(3) Their speech pattern is repetitive (full of taglines, for example).
(4) Their speech becomes an independent source of oral lore.
(5) The stories they tell are open-ended.
The new orality brought to perfection by Sholem Aleichem knew no borders;
it accompanied the Jews wherever they went: from the shtetl to the metropolis, from east to west, from one continent to another. The unprecedented
popularity of Sholem Aleichem’s writings, epitomized by the monologues
of Tevye the Dairyman, established a new kind of proverbial speech. Sholem
Aleichem’s loyal readers could always have a good laugh at the world’s
expense.
Laughter alone could not, of course, protect the speakers of Yiddish in
times of acute trouble, which were becoming more frequent for the Jews
of czarist Russia. When under siege, it was essential to keep the channels of
internal communication open, and this in turn required an in-group code
that the enemy could not crack. Beginning with 1903, in the wake of the
Kishinev pogrom, Sholem Aleichem began to anatomize the cryptic uses of
Yiddish, dividing them into a High and a Low Cryptic Style (Roskies 1984:
165 – 83). The High Cryptic Style was epistolary Hebrew, a mixture of fixed
phrases and biblical locutions, the more allusive and elusive the better. The
Low Cryptic Style was Yiddish interspersed with nonstandard Hebraisms,
which were not part of one’s normal, daily speech and were therefore unintelligible even to the most trained Gentile ear. In “The Great Panic of the
Little People,” for example, written in 1904, Sholem Aleichem showed how
this in-group code was used by Jewish merchants to take advantage of their
Gentile clientele (ibid.: 169 – 70). But when, in Motl the Cantor’s Son (1907),
young Motl was about to be hauled off to the police station for selling tainted
kvass, a fellow Jew gave him this coded warning: “Motl! Rays aroys dem yad
funem yovn un heyb oyf di ragloyim un makh pleyte!” With the Hebraisms emphasized, this means: “Motl! Take your yad [hand] from the yovon’s
[the Russian policeman’s] and pick up your ragloyim [legs] and make a pleyte
[make a run for it]!” (Sholem Aleichem 2002: 150; 2003: 54). Max Weinreich
(2008, 1:181) called this technique “yehudi beloy” ( Jew, beware!) and traced its
origins back to early Ashkenaz.
When even this time-honored form of in-group communication proved
inadequate, the next best solution was to seek refuge elsewhere. Sholem
Aleichem had Motl and his family emmigrate to America, providing the
author with a golden opportunity to trace a further process of linguistic
assimilation. The moment they cross the border into Galicia, Motl encoun-
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ters other dialects of Yiddish, which he is quick to mimic. But the real challenge would be English, which he encounters in the Whitechapel district of
London, before making the ocean crossing to America. On the streets of the
Lower East Side, new words enter his lexicon with the speed of an eleveydeh
(elevator) and a tsobvey (subway); even the older generation is forced into the
act (Rosenwald 2008: 102 – 19).
America was Sholem Aleichem’s last stop. Here he had enough time
to gauge just how much English the Jewish vernacular could admit before
becoming thoroughly un-Jewed. That distance can best be measured in
Sholem Aleichem’s Monologues, which like all other volumes of the canonical
Folksfond edition, were published in strict chronological order. What a
chasm divides “The Pot” (1901), in which Yente harangues the local rabbi
in superabundant, superidiomatic Yiddish, from Mr. Green’s dramatic
monologue, addressed to Mister Sholem Aleichem on the streets of
New York. Both “Mr. Green Has a Dzhab” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23,
21:245 – 49; 1998: 154 – 57), written in 1915, and its 1916 sequel, “A Business
with a Greenhorn” (Sholem Aleichem 1917 – 23, 21:253 – 59; 1998: 158 – 62),
require a glossary of farenglishte verter, “Anglicized words” (Sholem Aleichem
1917 – 23, 21:260 – 61) in order to be understood by Yiddish readers back
home in Europe. In both of these late, Anglicized dramatic monologues,
linguistic hybridity is the measure of how far a man is willing to go tsu
makhn a lebn, “to earn a living.” The former Mr. Greenberg, it turns out, is
a man for one season, the High Holy Day season, to be precise, when for three
years now he has managed to parlay a talent for blowing the ram’s horn into
a stable dzhab and a sterling reputeyshon. (The rich sprinkling of Americanisms,
he explains to Mr. Sholem Aleichem, is on account of his boyes [boys], who
refuse to speak a word of Yiddish.) Mr. Baraban, the self-righteous biznes
broker in “A Business with a Greenhorn,” however, preys upon recent immigrants who have attractive young wives and makes no apologies for the way
he speaks. Baraban is a kind of “language traitor,” who uses “English villainously, on its own or through the incorporation of English terms into their
Yiddish” (Rosenwald 2008: 92). Baraban’s English “reflects his wicked cosmopolitanism” (ibid.: 129), while in Ted Gorelik’s translation, Baraban signs
off with “So det’ll loin him, goddamn grinnhorn!” (Sholem Aleichem 1998:
162), which leaves even a far more brutal impression. Within Sholem
Aleichem’s moral stenography of American Yiddish, cut short by his death
in 1916, Mr. Baraban is the last of his New World characters.
Sholem Aleichem held the language, the literature, and the culture together for as long as he could. Through various publishing ventures and voluminous correspondence, he tried to gather his fellow writers behind the cause
of Jargón. Through his extraordinary popularity, he established the Jewish
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writer as an institution and created a community of secular readers for
Yiddish literature, first in czarist Russia, then in the great urban centers of
North America (Litvak 2012). And above all, it was he, through his public
readings, who forged a community of listeners, a live and lively audience for
Yiddish. As early as 1890, Sholem Aleichem took his show on the road under
Zionist auspices, gaining celebrity status after the limited freedom of assembly granted by the 1905 October Manifesto (Roskies 1995: 173; Veidlinger
2009: 142). Hearing one’s beloved writer read aloud from his most popular
works brought the art of orality to the masses. It taught Jews how to listen — to
original oral creations — even as it taught such Jewish “national” writers as
Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Hayyim Nahman Bialik what worked onstage
in front of thousands of people without a microphone and what didn’t
(Veidlinger 2009: 148 – 57). Late in life, Sholem Aleichem (1926a: 345 – 46)
even taught himself how to perform a story directly, rather than read it aloud
from a printed text, and how to adapt the Old World vocabulary to a more
urbane audience (Dobrushin 1929). In a wonderful combination of old and
new, the experience of reading and interpreting a piece of Yiddish speech
existed side by side with the experience of hearing the creator himself
perform it.
6. The Fabulist and the Folk Bard: Creating Habitats for Speech
So long as Yiddishland was divided into three main groups — the Hasidim
(pietists), the Misnagdim (rationalists), and the Maskilim (reformers) — and
two main dynasties, the Romanoffs and the Hapsburgs. So long as Yiddish
itself consisted of three main dialects — Lithuanian (Northeastern), Polish
(Mideastern), and Ukrainian (Southeastern) (Weinreich 2008, 2:575 – 91)
and so long as Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz were still alive,
the vocal strain within Yiddish writing expanded on all fronts. Sholem
Aleichem’s monologues and Peretz’s pseudo-Hasidic tales circulated in hardback and especially in chapbook form on both sides of the Atlantic (Litvak
2012: 20 – 22). In the mass-market editions produced by the Hebrew Publishing Company, for example, Sholem Aleichem’s monologues “The Pot” and
“Advice” sold for three cents each, while Peretz’s Hasidic Tales and Travel
Pictures (i.e., “Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region”) sold
for ten cents each. The tremendous popularity of these oral-based writings
suggests how fast they were becoming a brand of urban speechlore for a
people on the move; a way of keeping faith with the cadences of the Old
Country even while staying atuned to the myriad ways in which the language
was changing.
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The representation of speech in modern Yiddish writing was not ethnography. From the 1790s onward, the written-as-spoken word became the
audible measure of change, the old orality replacing the new, slowly but
surely: the traditional bal-darshn was replaced with the enlightened maggid
(Markuze); the esoteric Kabbalist with the storyteller (Nahman); shprakhfolklor
with comedy (Ettinger); the badkhn with the secular folk bard (ZbarzherEhrenkrantz). That was the first phase (1790 – 1864). Then came Abramovitsh, who turned the literary trope of Omar Mendele Moykher-Sforim into
an utterly distinctive and autonomous Yiddish-speaking voice, a connoisseur
of the spoken and written languages of the Jews. His chief disciple, Sholem
Aleichem, went further. He replaced the mishmash of vernacular speech
with gender specificity and professional register; heder lore with childspeak;
repetitive, redundant, additive, circular, clichéd, and proverbial folk speech
with a distinct and valued speech genre called the “monologue.” Peretz
rehabilitated an idealized, contemplative Hasidic speech from the glory
days of Polish Jewry by substituting it for the hermetic, defensive, almost
hysterical way that “real” shtetl folk spoke in situ. The new, improved orality
was also designed to be a bulwark against runaway linguistic assimilation. If
you had to speak Goyish, better speak it in and through Yiddish. Meanwhile,
with everyone talking all at once, Sholem Aleichem created distinctive
taglines and story lines.
One language did not fit everyone. Committed to creating a male and
female readership for modern Yiddish writing, Sholem Aleichem and Peretz
met the challenge by endowing women with a distinct voice. Gone were
the days when men and women copied entire Yiddish letters from the same
letter-writing manual, complete with Hebrew salutations. Sholem Aleichem
demonstrated how the Sheyne-Sheyndls who stayed behind in Kasrilevke
used a different diction and wrote in a very different register than their
Menakhem-Mendls, who dreamed of taking Yehupetz by storm. Moreover,
gone were the days when mothers and daughters read the same Yiddish
works. The mothers, according to Peretz, were still imbued with the language
and ethical sensibility of medieval Ashkenaz, while their daughters had
become lezerins, readers of popular fiction and consumers of secular culture.
The representation of authentic Yiddish speech was itself a cultural
countermeasure, as ever-larger segments of eastern European Jewish society
shifted their linguistic allegiance. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and
Peretz knew this firsthand, because Yiddish was no longer the lingua franca
in their own homes (Even-Zohar and Shmeruk 1990: 157). The streets of
Odessa, where Abramovitsh had lived since 1881, the Kiev stock market,
where the young Sholem Aleichem lost his father-in-law’s fortune, and the
offices of the Warsaw Jewish Community Council, where Peretz spent the
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worse half of every day, could not be negotiated in Yiddish alone. That is why
the shtetl, its surrounding villages, and the third-class compartments of the
train that ran among them loomed so large in their writings. They defined the
boundaries of Yiddishland, the sovereign space of Yiddish.
Attempts to enlist the new orality to resuscitating the old met with mixed
results. That is what happened when the celebrated Hebrew-German writer
Micah Josef Berdyczewski (1865 – 1921) made a brief visit back to his native
landscape of Dubova, Uman, and Miezdybozh in the spring of 1902. Deeply
moved by this encounter with the Old Country, he began to publish Yiddish
chapbooks, conversations, monologues, and travelogues, transcribed into
what he thought to be authentic colloquial speech (Berdyczewski 1924,
1981). For Berdyczewski, Yiddish was synonymous with folk speech;
any attempt to modernize the language, or to use it as a mode of personal
expression, he considered inadmissible (Werses 1981: xvi – xxix). A product
of the shtetl, the shtetl is where Yiddish belonged. Rather than earning him
a place of honor alongside Peretz and especially Sholem Aleichem, to whom
he was so clearly indebted, however, Berdyczewski’s Yiddish writings were
greeted with almost universal scorn (Holtzman 1993: 74 – 84; Werses 1981:
xi – xiii, xxvii – ix, xxxv – vi, xlviii). Peretz (1947 – 48, 7:158 – 61) considered
his diction too vulgar; unfit for literary consumption. But it was Yosl the
Rabbi’s son, Berdyczewski’s narrative persona of a wise and middle-aged
Jew, who was most off-putting to the average reader. The density of the
narrator’s learned, Hebrew-Aramaic locutions in even the most straightforward of his tales made Peretz’s Hasidic speech look easy by comparison
(see, for example, the glossary to Berdyczewski 1981: 209 – 25). Although
direct citations from Hebrew-Aramaic sources were glossed into simple
Yiddish, the narrator’s overtly religious sensibility ran afoul of the secular
ethos of the new Yiddish reader. By the time two volumes of Berdyczewzki’s
Yidishe ksovim fun a vaytn korev (Yiddish Writings of a Distant Relative) appeared in
1912, the “staged simplicity” of his folk narrator, “naively spinning his tale,
and the irony which hides behind the lines” (Werses 1981: xli), eluded the
majority of readers and came across to others as a complete anachronism
(Wiener 1928: 102n1).
Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, to repeat, formed a new class of professional
“folk” writers, the live performance of whose oral-based writing improved
over time. First they mastered the art of orality. Then, through trial and
error, they learned what and how to perform before a live audience. Not so
the Yiddish-Hebrew pedagogue from the small Bessarabian town of Lipkani
named Eliezer Shteynbarg (1882 – 1932), who captivated local audiences
with performances of his fables for close to thirty years before he agreed
to have them published. What Jean de La Fontaine was to French and
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Ivan Krylov was to Russian, Shteynbarg was to Yiddish. The fable is what he
is known for and the essence of what he wanted to be known for. Shteynbarg
chose the fable in order to incubate — and interrogate — the full range of
spoken Yiddish across gender, social class, profession, professed belief, and
even species (animals and inanimate objects were also given a voice). In this
way, he ushered in the third phase of the vocal strain in Yiddish writing.
Shteynbarg’s Fables, bite-size mock-epic verse designed for recitation, were
conceived in live performance and reborn in live performance. Shteynbarg,
as Ofer Dynes (2013) reminds us, was an ungainly man, who perfected a
minor genre as low in stature as he was himself. But in performance, according to eyewitness accounts, his body language rose to the occasion, even as his
fables staged a fantastic-allegorical contest between the lowly, ugly, and seemingly uncouth and the mighty, privileged, and learned (ibid.). An average
fable of his was only thirty-eight lines long, the line length varying greatly, so
the fabulist needed to cut to the quick in order to establish the power relations
between the bayonet and the needle, the pig and the rooster, the brush and
the boot, the cat and the salami, the clock and the sewing machine. Within the
first few lines, Shteynbarg endowed each side with a different diction, intonation, and moral perspective.
“S’treft a mol zikh oykhet / az a shaytl holts tsezegn muz a shoykhet”
(Shteynbarg 1969: 39). “Sometimes, it should be understood, a shokhet has to
saw a piece of wood” (Shteynbarg 2003: 164). This is the fabulist speaking, to
set the dramatic stage for the fable “The Slaughtering Knife and the Saw”
(Shteynbarg 1969: 39 – 40; s: 164 – 67), which Shteynbarg placed second, after
the signature fable “The Hammer and the Iron Scrap,” in the published
version of his Mesholim (Fables; 1932). From the outset, two worlds are
in collision: the Hebraic-ritual realm of the shokhet, or “ritual slaughterer,”
and the plainspoken realm of hardworking Jews, where “it sometimes happens” that even a clergyman named Reb Elkonoh must do manual labor of
the coarsest kind. Oykhet is the more emphatic, inflected, and idiomatic form
of oykh, “also,” which means that plain Yiddish already enjoys a rhetorical
advantage over hallowed Hebrew. Like master, like servant. No sooner does
the slaughterer’s (Hebraic) khalef, which “must be razor-sharp and without
the slightest nick” (as Curt Leviant, the English translator, explains in a
footnote; Shteynbarg 2003: 165) in order that the slaughtered animal’s
meat will be kosher, catch sight of the (Germanic) zeg, which is nothing
if not jagged, uncouth, the bigger, the better, than a verbal contest ensues
between two opposing parties, a contrast that turns the fable “into a highly
dialogic literary form in which no subject is more insistently probed than
speech itself ” (Udel-Lambert 2006: 379). So ugly is the saw in the eyes of the
fastidious, sanctimonious, socially superior slaughtering knife that the very
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sight of him provokes his opening peroration (ibid.: 385). As in so many other
fables, “Shteynbarg creates a vivid oral and aural world in which there is
mutual reinforcement between, on one hand, the sounds that two objects or
animals make upon meeting, and on the other, the morally charged conversation that ensues between them” (ibid.: 379).
What the knife finds most revolting is the saw’s coarse serration, his rough
mode of cutting, which he mimics aurally with grating, guttural sounds such
as shtshuret, “grinds,” and kritsn, “gnashes”; that shtsh sound, we may recall
from Yente’s shtsherebate (crippled pot), is reserved for words of Slavic, rustic,
low origin. At stake here, as Miriam Udel-Lambert’s analysis makes clear, is
much more than the built-in social inequality between the pedigreed and the
poor, the religious establishment and the hoi polloi. Shteynbarg’s project is
the moral anatomy of speech in general and spoken Yiddish in particular.
Enemy number one in Shteynbarg’s scheme is khkire: a technical term that in
Hebrew means search, speculation, or study but in the Lithuanian Talmudic
academies came to mean argumentation and in spoken Yiddish evolved into
meaning specious philosophizing, rationalization, or excessive ratiocination.
Speaking with false refinement, the slaughtering knife represents the religious
poseur, who is ultimately outsmarted by the kharifes (literally, sharpness) of the
speech of the ragged-toothed saw (ibid.: 382). Out of thirty-nine lines, fully
twenty-eight are given over to dialogue, unevenly distributed between the
slaughtering knife (eighteen) and the saw (ten). True to form, the former uses
twelve words of Hebraic origin, most of them highly audible as end rhymes,
while the saw uses only two. Shteynbarg pits false and erudite speech, full of
self-importance, against plain Yiddish, that is, shrewd and pithy folk speech.
As he sets the verbal stage, with oykhet and shoykhet, so the fabulist formulates
the moral (the muser-haskl ). He does so with a quadruple Hebraic rhyme,
pulling out the Judaic stops, so to speak. The listener cannot fail to feel the
weight of tradition speaking.
Nokh adhayem iz a zeg, a balmelokhe,
Gor a flek in der mishpokhe,
Un a sharfer khalef hot hatslokhe —
I er koylet, i me makht af im a brokhe!
(Shteynbarg 1969: 40)
To this day, a simple worker is the saw
On the family tree he’s quite a flaw,
The sharpster knife has more success:
When he slaughters, then folks bless!
(Udel-Lambert 2006: 387)
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“The narrator does not urge readers to marry off their children to saws rather
than knives,” writes Udel-Lambert (2006: 388), “but he reflects ironically
on prevailing social mores. The sensibility is clearly socialist, but the only
recourse to social injustice this stanza suggests is its own irony.”
The fable is an original and radical double-voiced utterance. Built into
its narrative structure is a contest between two characters. These characters,
whether beast or bird, knife or saw, whip or horse, cat or salami, are engaged
in dialogue. Narrating the dialogue is the fabulist, whose job it is to make the
medium the message. Built into the Yiddish fable, moreover, is the two-tiered
system of the language, whereby the learned, elite register is rendered in loshnkoydesh, and the everyday, vernacular register is rendered in a mixture of the
language’s other two components, Germanic and Slavic. So even before the
story begins, oykhet faces off against shoykhet. After it ends, balmelokhe, (simple)
“artisan,” and mishpokhe, “family,” the most heymish of words in the Hebrew
lexicon, are yoked in rhyme with hatslokhe, “success,” and brokhe, “blessing,” to
expose the social inequality and crass materialism that will remain, alas, “in
the family.” By decomposing Yiddish into all of its parts, Shteynbarg subjects
it to minute moral scrutiny.
Language for Shteynbarg is the seat of power. Exploiting the wonderful
coincidence that khalef (slaughtering knife) is masculine and zeg (saw) is feminine, the former lords it over the latter by means of his Hebraic learning and
language, exactly as in Peretz’s exposé of gender and generational politics
in the Polish shtetl. When both partners-in-dialogue are feminine, as in “Di
shpiz un di nodl” (“The Spear and the Needle”), the spear’s gigantic ego and
swagger are conveyed grammatically by the consistent use of the familiar
form of address. “Zog mir, bruderl, nit shem zikh” (Tell me, little brother,
don’t be shy), he taunts and ridicules the needle, “emes vos me shmust in
gas?” (Is it true what people say about you?) “Bist a fayer! Kumst in kas, iz
mesukn!” (When you get good and mad, then better watch out!) “Zayt mir
moykhl” (Please forgive me), replies the needle, greatly intimidated, using
the respectful plural form of address. Her spontaneous, ingenuous laughter is
what finally exposes the murderous character of the spear (Shteynbarg 1969:
70 – 71). Grammatical gender, dialect, diction, the derivation of words and
the use of formal and informal address help Shteynbarg dramatize the intricate power relations that govern all levels of society, even as they reveal
language to be the locus of human specificity.
The fable is also a radically closed speech genre, as structurally conservative as the proverb (cf. Silverman-Weinreich 1978). Shteynbarg methodically, meticulously covers the tiny, claustrophobic world of his Fables. Compare
Yente’s circular monologue; Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl
trapped in their formulaic letter-writing manuals; Tevye, who reveals the
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plot of each episode before he begins and always starts with a homiletic
flourish.
The fame of Shteynbarg’s fables spread by word of mouth. Whoever heard
Shteynbarg recite them — the Hebrew poet and publisher Hayyim Nahman
Bialik in Odessa or the young Yiddish literary critic Shmuel Niger paying
a visit to Czernowitz — immediately recognized their unique artistry (Sadan
1969: 11 – 26). After spending forty years in Lipkani, Shteynbarg moved to
the polyglot city of Czernowitz, in the newly constituted state of Romania,
where, in 1928, at a gathering to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the
Czernowitz Language Conference, two things stole the show. One was the
launching of Shteynbarg’s book Durkh di briln (Through the Glasses), the luxury
edition of twelve fables accompanied by Expressionist woodcuts by Arthur
Kolnik, each folio volume selling for the unprecedented sum of $120; the
second was a performance of his fables by Hertz Grossbard (1892 – 1994), the
brilliant actor from the German and Yiddish stage. Later, audiences would
flock to a “word concert” by Grossbard, specifically to hear him perform
Shteynbarg. “Did you ever hear a horse neigh Yiddish? A talking horse?
A horse talking Yiddish with inflections truly equine?” asked the Canadian
Jewish poet A. M. Klein (1987 [1952]: 82) after hearing Grossbard perform
for the first time. The aurality of these fables, in other words, took on a life
of their own. For this reason, presumably in the year of his death, 1932, when
Shteynbarg finally consented to have a fuller edition of his Mesholim published, he insisted, in the face of much dissent and provoking much controversy (Sadan 1969: 18 – 19), on adopting the new orthography, which, by
abolishing the etymological spelling of Hebrew-Aramaic words, brought all
the components of the language under the same writing system. This shift was
trumpeted from the very title page, Mesholim, the traditional Hebrew word
for Fables, spelled not etymologically (‫ )משלים‬but phonetically (‫)מעשאָלים‬. The
subtle interplay of learned, Hebraic speech and everyday life, which lay
at the heart of Shteynbarg’s modernist subversions, was far more difficult
to catch when all Yiddish words looked the same. Conceived in live performance and revitalized in live performance, Shteynbarg’s Fables signaled the
new directions that the vocal strain in Yiddish writing would take in its third
phase: to his protégé, Itzik Manger, who recited all his ballads and lyric verse
by heart, and to the recitational high art of Grossbard.
Like Shteynbarg before him, Manger (1901 – 1969) adopted a genre with
a built-in dramatic situation — in this case, the sacred history of the Jews as
preserved in the Hebrew Bible. Just as the rough and toothy saw rhetorically
deflated the refined and self-important slaughtering knife, so Manger’s
matriarchs elicited greater sympathy than the patriarchs, Hagar the servant
girl than her Jewish employers, and the powerless Esau than the pedigreed
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Jacob. Like Shteynbarg’s Mesholim, Manger’s Khumesh-lider (Bible Poems; 1935),
which later grew into Medresh Itsik (1984 [1951]), or The World according to Itzik
(2002) were both open and closed. Even as Manger adopted the regular
rhyme, free rhythm, and impersonal voice of a folk bard and limited each
poem to eleven stanzas that unfolded as a mini-three-act drama (Roskies
1995: 251), he routinely mixed and matched high and low, comic and serious,
“demerung un hey” (dusk and hay) (Manger 1984 [1951]: 53, 2002: 19). The
Bible replayed against the East European Jewish landscape became native
ground, the sovereign territory of Yiddish.
“Rokhl geyt tsum brunem nokh vaser” (Manger 1984 [1951]: 53 – 54),
“Rachel Goes to the Well for Water” (Manger 2002: 19 – 20), opens with
a famous textual conundrum. “Now Laban had two daughters; the name of
the older one was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah had
weak eyes; Rachel was shapely and beautiful” (Gen. 29:16 – 17). How exactly
were Leah’s eyes “weak”? Rashi, dean of the Ashkenazi School of Biblical
Hermeneutics, explained (ad loc) that since Rebecca had two sons and Laban
two daughters, Leah was distraught at the prospect of being married off to
Rebecca’s oldest son — Esau. Leah’s eyes, in other words, were weak from
crying over her bleak marriage prospects. Manger brings to the verse a more
updated reading. The scene is early evening. Rachel, Leah, and Laban are all
at home. Rachel, who is standing at the mirror braiding the strands of her
long black hair, interrupts her grooming at “the sound of her father’s
cough — / His wheezing on the stair” (Manger 2002: 19) and rushes over to
the alcove to warn her sister to hide her shundroman, the True Romance that
she’s been poring over, in Yiddish. Seeing her sister emerge from the alcove,
Rachel castigates her for ruining her eyes, “red-rimmed with grief ” (ibid.)
because of all that reading.
Taking the water jar, Rachel, in act 2, starts off for the well. “Di demerung
[the twilight] is blue and mild” (Manger 1984 [1951]: 53, 2002: 19), but in
keeping with the Yiddish Bible, the lyric landscape is enlivened by the sight of
a hare darting across the darkling field; by the sounds of a lamed-vovnik, the folk
name for a cricket or grasshopper, chirping tshirik in the grass and of a piper’s
piping “tri-li, tri-li, tri-li”; and by the smell of “dusk and hay” emanating from
the sheep and cows. In act 3, with Rachel rushing now to her rendezvous,
everything comes together:
Zi loyft. Shoyn shpet. In khumesh shteyt:
Baym brunem vart a gast,
Di kats hot zikh gevashn haynt
Un zi hot haynt gefast.
(Manger 1984 [1951]: 54)
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She runs. It’s late. The Bible says
A guest waits at the well;
Today the cat has washed itself.
Rachel is fasting still.
(Manger 2002: 20)
The Bible, as opposed to the shundroman that Leah was reading, tells a story of
true love. But the folk imagination, rich with omens and signs, knows that
when a cat washes itself, guests are sure to come, and a girl from a kosher
home (who spent the day fasting) lives with her own petite bourgeois imaginings: if the crescent moon did not just look like an earring but really was one,
she would give anything to own a pair. Manger’s Bible Poems were that perfect
amalgam of sacred plot and everyday life, folk speech and poetic metaphor,
of the “lyric-pathetic” line that culminated in Peretz and the “grotesquerealistic” line brought to fullest expression by Sholem Aleichem (Manger
2002: 240).
The vocal strains in Yiddish writing were a usable past, out of which
Shteynbarg and Manger generated a modern Yiddish canon: modest in
size, rigidly formal in structure, dialogic in style. Both were verbal artists,
who worked to perfect a single, minor speech genre that was accessible,
performable, and sophisticated at one and the same time. Both were democrats, whose choice of living speech was a means of placing high art in the
service of the folk. Both were positive eclecticists, who reveled in the zany mix
of dialects, styles, and sensibilities, pathos and satire, sacred text and banal
context, which was the hallmark of Yiddish oral discourse ever since the days
of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz. Both were Yiddishists, in the
sense that they created a sovereign space for spoken Yiddish, an imaginary
shtetl where all communication, among all species and through the expanse
of time, occurred in the mother tongue. Fables and Bible Poems became foundational texts because the fable and the Hebrew Bible were native to Yiddish
culture; because Shteynbarg and Manger drew upon the achievements of
their direct and distant forebears; because their stylized folk art was designed
to be performed. Because they appeared in print when Yiddish culture was
on the brink of being annihilated by Adolf Hitler and suppressed by Joseph
Stalin, these works marked the end of the European phase of the vocal strain
in Yiddish literature.
7. Yidishtaytshn: A Yiddish-American Polyphony
In America, where new dialects of spoken and written Yiddish came into
being, the story of the vocal strain started from the beginning. The first
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generation of Yiddish speakers came to America in the great wave of immigration from 1881 to 1905. This wave produced the Yiddish theater, first in
the Bowery, then on Second Avenue; the free and ideologically fragmented
Yiddish press, with most of its offices on East Broadway; the Jewish labor
movement, with its citadel at Union Square; the landsmanshaftn, or hometown
mutual aid associations, and the Anscheis, congregations organized by place
of origin, located here, there, and everywhere. The Lower East Side was a
teeming assemblage of Yiddish speech communities dominated by newspeak
and vaudeville in a Deutschefied dialect, considered more dignified than the
way Jews spoke in the Old Country (Kobrin 2000 [1943]).
Then came the generation of 1905 (Hoffman and Mendelsohn 2008),
mostly single men and women who had graduated from the school of revolutionary politics in mother Russia. The poets among them, called Di yunge,
or Youngsters, imposed stylistic order and philosophical rigor on the orgy of
orality. Reuven Iceland, Zishe Landau, Mani Leyb, H. Leivick, Yoysef
Rolnik, I. J. Schwartz, and I. J. Segal campaigned for the still small voice
of the Yiddish muse (cf. Mani Leyb’s poem “Shtiler, shtiler”; Howe et al.
1987: 124 – 25). In one year alone, 1918, Leyb published a trilogy — Lyrics,
Jewish and Slavic Motifs, and Ballads — each volume showcasing a different
etymological component of the language, a different vocabulary, narrative
voice, imagery, setting, and verse form (Wisse 1988: 66 – 71). Together, these
poets practiced a poetics of estrangement, which divorced the Yiddish word
from the way it was spoken in the home or the street, the study house or the
workplace.
Having been suppressed and abandoned in the rarefied circles of the
Yiddish aesthetes, the spoken language sprang back to life in urban America,
where kibitz and chutzpah and schmuck were entering the American language
and where Yiddish humor magazines, complete with a stable of professional
cartoonists, tested the limits of propriety (Portnoy 2008; Wisse 1988: 84 – 88).
The humor magazines were a school for scandal, offering a brand of in-yourface humor that greatly appealed to a literate, secular, socially conscious
reader. A particular favorite in the pages of the magazines Der kibitser and
Der groyser kundes was the recently arrived poet from Galicia who signed his
occasional verse with the wicked pen name Hel-pen, derived from his real
name, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886 – 1932), and often collaborated with his
fellow Galician, Moyshe Nadir (1885 – 1943) (Wisse 1988: 55). In the Kundes
(1913), there appeared a series of translations that Halpern did of the great
ironist and humorist Heinrich Heine (Grossman 2012: 130). Inheriting
Heine’s mantle with a New World adaptation of Buch der Lieder (1827), called
simply In New York (1919), Halpern positioned himself as the devil-maycare street drummer, the romantic manqué, the poet of apocalypse and
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exile (Grossman 2012: 129 – 39; Kronfeld 1996: 165 – 72; Novershtern 2003:
89 – 131; Wisse 1988: 74 – 104).
Among his many other accomplishments, Halpern launched the fourth
phase in the vocal strain in modern Yiddish writing. He did so in three ways:
(1) Halpern introduced free rhythms into modern Yiddish poetry,
which led eventually to speaking rhythms. Here lies a unique feature
of American Yiddish verse, defined as “a language style which required
everything to be calmly said rather than ‘made conscious’ . . . in an
epically lofty manner or mystically hinted” (Hrushovski 1954: 254).
One favorite way of his to celebrate the spokenness of Yiddish was
through a stanzaic form that juxtaposed rhymed and seemingly lyrical
lines with a prosaic speaking voice. “Zol dos undzer gortn zayn / ot aza
in morgnshayn?” (Is this garden here our own, / As it is, in light of
dawn?), the poet asks in a mock eclogue that opens In New York (Harshav
and Harshav 1986: 394 – 95). Then he himself answers with a prosaic
counterquestion: “Avade undzer gortn. Vos den, nit undzer gortn?”
(Sure, it’s our garden. What, not our garden?”) (ibid.). Later in his
career, Halpern invented “political talk-verse” (Harshav 1990: 107 –
11), in which “the narrator and the poet are one; the poet will not
structure his protagonist’s mental chaos. Through his unbridled breaking out in any unexpected direction, Halpern seems to express the sheer
accidental stampede of life” (ibid.: 109).
(2) Halpern pioneered the use of coarse and vulgar diction in formal
Yiddish verse, sometimes underscored through rhyme, as in his parodic
ballad “The Bird” (Howe et al. 1987: 180 – 85), in which kez (cheese)
rhymes with gezes (ass).
(3) Using the doggerel and monosyllabic rhymes of the Old Country
badkhn, or wedding jester, Halpern championed the use of Yiddish
for parodic ends. With very few exceptions, his poems were double
voiced.
Halpern transformed the orality of Yiddish — its provincialism and street
smarts, its vulgarity and schmaltz — into a gritty and urbane written-asspoken poetic idiom. Colloquial Yiddish and doggerel, always popular
among the masses, Halpern employed as a highly personalized vehicle of
absurdity and despair. Within a derelict, denuded garden, we hear a richly
idiomatic Jewish voice; a mischievous, unruly speaker presiding over a parodic paradise. Halpern turned various strands of Old Country and American
Yiddish into the existential voice of the uprooted Everyman.
America, then, produced four distinct dialects of Yiddish: (1) street
Yiddish, (2) the Deutschefied discourse of the popular press and theater,
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(3) the aestheticized discourse of the Symbolist poets, and (4) the crude
and ironic talk-verse of Halpern. The street spoke “potato Yiddish,” a mixture
of Yiddish and English that would require more than a glossary of farenglishte
verter, “Anglicized words,” to decipher (Fishman 1991: 102). This was a
language so impoverished that its Hebrew component, which made Yiddish
the language of Yiddishkayt, and its Slavic component, which gave it its
regional, provincial flavor, had all but vanished. “Such familiar words as
pomshaf [garbage], sheygets [Gentile boy], dorfgeyer [village wanderer or peddler], and mekler [broker],” lamented the latecomer to America, Yitskhok
Bashevis Singer (Isaac Bashevis Singer [1904 – 91]) (1989 [1943]: 8), “and
such idioms as tantsn far simkhe [to dance for joy], hakn a tshaynik [to bang
on a kettle, i.e., to babble or pester], hobn agmes-nefesh [to have heartache],
esn kadokhes [to eat nothing, i.e., to go hungry], shrayen khay-vekayem
[to scream or protest in vain], zikh kratsn in der linker peye [to scratch one’s
left sidelock, i.e., to be puzzled or undecided], and many, many others, have
somehow remained ‘green’ in America.” To use such outmoded words and
expressions when describing American Jewish life would therefore sound
completely artificial, if not downright laughable.
In this essay, published in 1943, Singer expressed the view that the linguistic impoverishment and creolization of American Yiddish were irreversible
and that Yiddish in America had become an obsolescent language, spoken by
an ever-dwindling and ever-aging segment of American Jewry. His solution
(for the time being) was to turn his back on all the spoken and written dialects
of American Yiddish and to uphold the Yiddish spoken in all its richness
in Poland as the only authentic standard (Even-Zohar and Shmeruk 1990).
These strictures, according to Singer (1989 [1943]: 7), pertained only
to writers of prose but not to poets, however, beholden only to themselves
and therefore free to create their own linguistic universe. Perhaps the poet
he had in mind was Jacob Glatstein (1896 – 1971), cofounder of the cosmopolitan movement of Yiddish modernist poets called Inzikhizm, “Introspectivism,” for whom the polyphony of American Yiddish was a potentially
inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. Inspired by his reading of James
Joyce (Glatstein 1929), he began to explore the linguistic experience of
the modern urban Jew from cradle to grave and the historical layers of the
Yiddish language, from the folk song of a tailor and the doggerel of a wedding
jester to the mellifluous speech of the poets and the Red speech of the secular
prophets. While Stephen Daedalus, moreover, could revisit the sights and
sounds of childhood only in his imagination, Glatstein, armed with an American passport, could actually return home, which he did, in 1934. The fruits
of that trip to Lublin were Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Out; 1938) and Ven
Yash iz gekumen (When Yash Arrived; 1940), two volumes of a planned trilogy
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(Glatstein 2010), and the fruit of his critical explorations of spoken and written Yiddish in the Old Country and the New was Yidishtaytshn (Yiddishmeanings;
1937), his fourth book of poems.
The very title declared the sovereign polyphony of Yiddish. “The choice
of Yidishtaytsh as opposed to Ivre-taytsh,” writes Itay Zutra (2010: 50), “points
to Yiddish as a self-reliant modern language containing a variety of wellintegrated components.” The title’s plural form “demonstrates the eccentric
and endless possibilities open to a highly skilled language artist.” Taytsh, in the
sense of “meaning, exegesis, or gloss,” also hearkens back to the word-forword translation of the Hebrew Bible in the heder: Glatstein thereby signals
to the reader or listener that for a text to yield its manifold taytshn, it would
need to be parsed word-by-word. Out of the “young pluralized Yiddish”
(ibid.: 52), Glatstein wished to generate a new poetic language, but first he
had to expose the enemies of Yiddish, one by one. The opening chapters
of Yidishtaytshn, indeed most of the book, occur at night, a time of solitude,
when people, according to the poet, are particularly susceptible to clichés.
The night is full of competing voices: nursery rhymes turn into nightmares
(“Night, Be Still to Me”); lyrical poets spread their cloying sentimentality in
worn-out rhymes and hymns to the night (“Oy, the Night, Oh the Night. Oho
the Night, Aha the Night”); old grandfather, a garrulous, cynical wedding
jester, is plagued by the sound of the piperfoygl, a combination songbird
and dragon, who sings gibberish about the lovely sorrowful night (“The
Dragonbird Sings”). Especially active on this night are the lamp extinguisher,
who sings lullabies to ward off his fear of the dark, and the dark-haired,
disheveled poet of social protest, with his “words of straw” and “mouthful
of lies” (“Thirteen O’Clock”; Glatstein 1937: 36 – 39).
From there, Glatstein went in search of his own authentic voice and found
what he was looking for by trying several dead Yiddish voices on for size: two
from the New World and one from the Old. The first dead voice, revived in
a poem written in 1929, was the artificial Deutschefied language of Shomer
(pseudonym of N. M. Shaykevitsh [1849? – 1905]), author of sensational
potboilers for women. “Ikh hob, vi du, oyf mayn shteyger, fartaytshmert
dem zhargon” (Like you, I also Deutschefied-and-translated the Jargón, in
my own way), says the poet, addressing the long-dead writer with extravagant
praise (Glatstein 1937: 70). The language of high modernism, Glatstein was
now ready to admit, was as much an attempt to escape everyday reality as was
the highfalutin, utterly artificial speech of Shomer’s narrators and characters.
The second was the vulgar and unruly voice of Halpern. Written in 1932,
the year of Halpern’s sudden death, “The Voice of Moyshe-Leyb” (Glatstein
1987: 56 – 59) both imitated the language and structure of a typical Halpern
poem and alluded to specific poems and phrases (Zutra 2010: 70 – 75).
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Glatstein portrayed Halpern as the master of urban mischief, a mentshele (little
man) locked in a gildene shtayg (gilded cage) placed in the legendary city
of Tarshish, where the biblical prophet Jonah attempted to escape God’s
command. Both Halpern and Glatstein, by implication, were failed prophets,
cut off from their surroundings and therefore left unheard and unheeded
(ibid.: 72).
Another voice left unheeded was that of Yosl Loksh, the rabbi of
the legendary foolstown, Chelm. “Rabbi Yosl Loksh of Chelm,” written in
1935 upon Glatstein’s return from Poland, about a rabbi so naive as to believe
that he can resolve the inequality and divisiveness within the Jewish community, could very well be a genuine Chelm story. To underscore his naı̈veté, the
good rabbi’s speech is punctuated by the old Talmudic phrase yakhloyku — “let
them divide it [equally]!”
Vayl lomir lernen a bisl pshat.
Hunger. Ibergefresnkeyt.
Blut. Milkhomes.
Fun vanen nemt zikh kine-sine
Tsu yenems vayb un yenems rind?
Vayl Ruveyn hot a bisl un Shimen a fule shisl.
Iz bkheyn, zogn di talmidey-khakhomim deroyf
Eyn tayer vort —
Yakhloyku! Ayngeteylt zol alts vern.
(Glatstein 1937: 89 – 90)
Let’s learn a bit of plain meaning.
Here’s a glut. Here — a shrunken gut.
Why rancor? Why do people hanker
For this man’s wife, for that man’s kine?
Because Simon has a lot
And Reuben has an empty pot.
So the wise
Did devise
One word — a precious word.
Divide! Let it all be shared!
(Howe and Greenberg 1969: 252; emended)
Yosl Loksh of Chelm was Glatstein’s first fully realized persona (Wisse 1993:
86*)4 — and the first to speak in folk speech. Harking back to other longsuffering, henpecked Jewish men, Yosl Loksh has his Sheyne-Sheyndl, who
4. The asterisk here and in subsequent cases denotes the pagination in the English section of this
bilingual volume.
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throws her husband’s “wishy-washy liberalism” back in his face, creating a
parody-of-a-parody, as only women who speak shrewspeech can:
Er gerekht un der gerekht
Ikh gerekht un du gerekht.
Nishto keyn gut, nishto keyn shlekht
Nishto keyn shuld, alts gerekht.
Tsitselistn, tsitsenistn,
Anarkhistn, antisemistn
Ale toters, ale kristn,
Nishto keyn yo, nishto keyn neyn
Nishto keyn tome, alts iz reyn.
(Glatstein 1937: 92)
That one’s right and this one’s right.
I am right and you are right.
There is no good, there is no evil.
There is no blame, all are right.
Tsocialists, Tzionists,
Anarchists, Antisemists,
all Tartars, all Christians,
ain’t no Yes, ain’t no No.
There is no impure, everything’s clean.
(Wisse 1993: 88*; emended)
This last passage gives the game away, projecting Chelm as the Jewish
political landscape of the 1930s and tipping the Old Country discourse
toward satire. That the rebbetzin deliberately garbles the names of four
rival camps and links them all in rhyme is funny enough; and among them,
tsitselistn, a corruption of sotsyalistn, “socialists,” coming from a woman’s
mouth, sounds like tsitskes, “tits.” Shrewspeech, since as far back as Sholem
Aleichem, is perfectly pitched to cut all utopian male dreamers down to size.
Given his modernist credentials, Glatstein was the least likely candidate
to join the ranks of the folk speakers, but Yidishtaytshn is where it happened.
Adopting the persona of Yosl Loksh of Chelm and his wife allowed Glatstein
to mimic the cadence and diction of actual folk speech — perhaps the sounds
of Polish Yiddish speech that he heard on the streets of Lublin — not merely
the “professional” dialects of Yiddish poets and prose writers, preachers and
agitators. Determined, like Sholem Aleichem before him, to eavesdrop on
Jews of every stripe, the author of Yidishtaytshn crafted a spoken dialect that
was both funny and deadly serious. As a result, “Yosl Loksh of Chelm” could
and would be read as both parody and requiem (Glatstein 1944).
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In Yidishtaytshn, Glatstein saved the best for last. The volume ends with
“Tsum kopmayster” (“To the Brainmaster”; written in 1929), which has been
aptly described as an ecstatic ode to the modernist muse, a latter-day psalm
to the leader, in the temple of verse (Novershtern 1991: 206, 216). Ecstatic —
and fiercely polemical. The poem is an attack on all fronts: on the sentimental
poets, from Shimon Frug (1860 – 1916) to Ber Lapin (1889 – 1952); on the
professional critics, from Yoel Entin (1875 – 1959) to Niger (1883 – 1955); on
the Reds, the self-haters, the puritans; on the false prophets and preachers.
[Saith the poet:] Hopmayster, ikh hob lib akhtsnkaratike verter
[dance master, I love eighteen-carat words] — shtandhaftikeyt,
konsekventishkeyt un zilbekstsentrishkeyt [steadfastness,
consistency, and syllabo-eccentricity].
[Saith the muse:] Akhzo dem bonmo hob ikk afn shpits tsung, Ach
so [I have the bon mot on the tip of my tongue], ober s’roytlt zikh
der mayrev haynt, vi ven, kh’makh a vet [but the West is turning
red, I’ll bet you, as never before]. S’roytlt zikh der tsunter bunt un
bunter [the tinder is getting redder, bolder and ever gaudier], nisht
gekukt (Zeydelovsky der zhitgoy) vos es iz a kalter vunter [despite
the fact {Zeydelovksy the KikeJew} that it’s a cold winter-wonder].
(Glatstein 1937: 108)
For a vital and vibrant Yiddish to achieve sovereignty, the enemy must be
laughed off the stage. Public enemy number one is the communist scourge,
turning the horizon bloodred, and the intellectuals, like Chaim Zhitlovsky
(1861 – 1943), the chief ideologue of Yiddishism, your kindly zeydee who
is nothing but a goy parading as a Jew. Should the ideologues prevail, the
Yiddish language will freeze to death.
Gut morgn, mayn har Yokl mitn monokl.
Azoy tsu vern asileymirt, atrofirt
Un farshteynirt.
Afile der egotsent iz farshvund fun mund.
Di idvund farlatet, farzatet.
Keyn mamet keyn tatet.
Der funvanet farvyanet,
Glat azoy a vuks a vegituks.
(Glatstein 1937: 109)
Good morning, my lord Yokl with your monocle
My, how assi-limed and atrophied you’ve become
and stonified.
The egocentric has all but perished from your parlance.
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Your Id-and-Jew-wound patched and appeased.
No mothered no fathered.
The wherefrom withered
Just a growth, a vegitoth.
Egocentricity, the eccentricity of true creation, flows from the self with
an acknowledged center. A nokhmayster, a “master imitator,” a would-be
intellectual, an ultra-assimilated cosmopolitan Jew who denies his circumcision, his wounded penis, his mother tongue, his parentage, his past, what
is he if not a growth, a vegitoth? For him, this extravagant, outrageously
funny display of linguistic virtuosity, this celebration of the people’s greatest
creation — its discourse — is devoid of all meaning.
A. Leyeles (1889 – 1966), Glatstein’s partner and chief rival in the ranks
of American Yiddish modernism (Zutra 2010: chaps. 2, 4), was present when
the poet declaimed this poem before an audience “not made up of 18-carat
modernists and lovers of ambiguous poetry.” “It made a very strong
impression,” he recalled. “The audience was most enthusiastic. And what
amazed me more than anything was that they were most taken by the serious,
absolutely unplayful aspects of this magnificent accomplishment. I was
almost ready to revise my [negative] opinion of the Yiddish poetry reader”
(Leyeles 1936: 109).
“Yosl Loksh of Chelm” is written in a populist, highly colloquial style,
the narrator’s included; “To the Brainmaster” is thoroughly elitist, radically
eclectic, allusive, a Joycean Yiddish Sublime. Here, Glatstein created a
new dialect that had to be parsed word-by-word, exactly the way Jewish
children had been trained to parse the Hebrew Bible; a language that was
no mere receptacle of the past, the sum total of what came before, but
the harbinger of a sovereign Yiddish speech that was yet to come. It was a
language that, by making maximal demands, created its own audience;
that thumbed its nose at prudery and censorship; a vocal, public presence
that refused to be marginalized, narrowly politicized, aestheticized. “Tsum
kopmayster” displayed Glatstein’s total mastery of Yiddish and his kinship to
the artful, stylized, highly compressed mode of Peretz, who had sought, via
Hasidism, to purify the language of his tribe in order to fortify it for the
dangers that lay ahead. Those dangers changed the Jewish world — forever.
8. Reclaiming the Lost Language
In August 1943, three months after the final liquidation of the Warsaw
ghetto, the leading Yiddish literary monthly in the United States, Di tsukunft
(the Future), published a special issue with a single word emblazoned on its
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cover inside a thick black border — the Yiddish-Hebrew word YIZKOR! On
the verso were the words of Psalms 34:22, reproduced in Hebrew and Yiddish. “One misfortune is the deathblow of the wicked,” it read, “the foes of the
righteous shall be ruined” ( JPS translation). In lieu of an editorial, there came
a full-page reproduction of Marc Chagall’s The Martyr, which depicted
a Russian Jew bound to a stake in imitation of Christ on the cross (Roskies
1984: 286 – 87). This issue signaled that four fundamental changes were
taking place in the new center of modern Yiddish culture:
(1) The politics that had dominated American Yiddish culture were bankrupt. Only months before, ardent members of the Jewish Labor Bund
inveighed against Jewish statehood and upheld the platform of Jewish
cultural autonomy in Poland; now the same writers were invited to
mourn the destruction of their Polish brethren. The suicide letter of
Shmuel (Artur) Zygielbojm (1895 – 1943), the Bund’s representative to
the Polish government-in-exile, concluded the issue.
(2) The culture’s militantly secular phase was over. The time came
to remove one’s shoes, sit on the ground, and mourn — as Jews. This
was a call for cultural consolidation, however, not for penitent return.
Missing, for example, was the psalmist’s resounding conclusion: “The
Lord redeems the life of His servants; / all who take refuge in Him shall
not be ruined” (Ps. 34:23).
(3) The two dozen contributors to this issue conveyed the realization that
the Yiddish-speaking heartland had been destroyed. Polish Jewry was
no more.
(4) The “future” for Yiddish lay in its past.
With remarkable prescience, all this had been anticipated by Glatstein
as early as April 1938, in “A gute nakht, velt,” a poem that took the Yiddish
world by storm (Norich 2007: 42 – 73). “Good night, wide world,” the poet
shouted angrily, as he demonstratively went back, of his own accord, to
the “ghetto,” there to don the yellow Jew patch with pride (Glatstein 1987:
100 – 101).
Mit dem shtoltsn trot,
oyf mayn eygenem gebot —
gey ikh tsurik in geto.
With proud stride
I decide —
I am going back to the ghetto.
(Glatstein 1987: 100 – 101)
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Tsurik (back) and tsu and tsum (to), repeated eleven times in the course of this
forty-two-line poem, were the new rallying cry, a call to reclaim the cultural
values that the Jews had created within their own sphere (Wisse 1996: 141).
Tsurik tsu mayn kerosin, kheylevnem shotn,
Eybikn oktober, dribne shtern
Tsu mayne krume gasn, hoykerdikn lamtern
Mayne sheymes, mayn svarbe,
Mayne gemores, tsu di harbe
Sugyes, tsum likhtikn ivre-taytsh.
Back to my kerosene, tallowed shadows,
eternal October, minute stars,
to my warped streets and hunchbacked lantern,
my torn-out [sacred] pages, the twenty-four books of the Bible,
my Gemaras, to arduous
Talmudic debates, to lucent exegetic Yiddish.
(Glatstein 1987: 102 – 3; emended)
Glatstein’s list of core Jewish texts presented in random order of difficulty
should be read as a personal and collective manifesto. Svarbe, the Yiddish
pronunciation of esrim ve’arba, the “twenty-four” books of the Hebrew Bible,
were rarely studied in the Talmudic academies of eastern Europe, because
they were considered a distraction (or worse) from serious Talmud study.
Here they are yoked together in rhyme with “harbe / sugyes,” “arduous /
Talmudic debates,” as if they made a seamless pair. Ivre-taytsh (the very
word that Yidishtaytshn had been designed to supersede) denoted the reclamation of a deeply imbedded Jewish speech. This speech celebrated
the cultural specificity of Greater Ashkenaz. There, svarbe could rhyme
with harbe (sugyes) as easily as dribne shtern (minute stars) with hoykerdikn lamtern
(hunchbacked lantern) — to combine heavenly and earthly illumination. The
latter phrase derives from the Germanic Slavic international lexicon (shtern is
a Germanism, dribne a Slavicism).
The speaker in “Good Night, World” is a latter-day Moses leading his
people in reverse, back to the “ghetto,” instead of forward toward secular
enlightenment. He combined rage and sorrow: rage against the enemies
without (“Prussian pig and hate-filled Polack, / thievish Amalekite”) and
against the enemies within (“Jesusmarxists,” two apostate Jews who had
misled the world) (ibid.); and sorrow at the diminished, darkened Jewish
world that was his sad inheritance. Just so, his language combined the folksy
familiarity of Reb Yosl Loksh of Chelm with the satiric precision of the
“Brainmaster.” “Good Night, World” marked Glatstein’s breakthrough
to the sovereign Jewish voice that he had been seeking since the late 1920s.
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When republished in a book, it figured in a remarkable constellation of other
Gedenklider (Songs of Remembrance; Glatstein 1943), the first significant poetic
response to the Holocaust to be published outside of the occupied war zone
(Roskies and Diamant 2012: 21 – 41, 194 – 217). His latter-day Moses joins
a choir of other dramatized speakers in Glatstein’s wartime poetry, the most
distinctive of whom is Nahman.
“Der Braslaver tsu zayn soyfer” (“Nahman of Braslav to His Scribe”; 1943)
is a dramatic monologue in which Nahman is recast as a down-to-earth yet
profoundly introspective thinker. It opens with Nahman proclaiming, “Nosn
daváy haynt nisht trakhtn” (Come on Nathan, let’s not think today) “host
shoyn a mol gezen aza velt / mit azoy fil loytere prakhtn?” (Did you ever see a
world with so many beautiful things?) (Harshav and Harshav 1986: 278 – 79).
Tired of so much intellectual endeavor, Nahman has just decided to take a
break, and with Nathan as his sole companion, he goes in search of simplicity;
direct, embodied experience; and “pure songs — wordless — /di-dana-di”
(ibid.). The measure of his new approach to life is his “slow, weighty, wellconsidered, wise speech,” marked by “maximally non-melodic rhythms,
heavily laden with folk locutions,” as Benjamin Hrushovski (1954: 254)
described this poem’s role in the evolution of free rhythms in modern Yiddish
poetry. Glatstein achieved the illusion of authentic folk speech by means of
both “maximally non-melodic rhythms” and “a synthetic, intensely Jewish
style.” Hrushovski (ibid.) illustrated that style by the following line: “reboyne
dealme hayitokhn, daváy a bisele nakhes, ‘Lord, please, let’s have a little satisfaction’: words derived from four languages — Aramaic, ‘Slavic,’ German, and
Hebrew — and yet a phrase so profoundly Yiddish!” Akin to Peretz’s Reb
Nakhmenke (in “Reb Nakhmenke’s Stories”), the exemplar of refined
Hasidic speech, and the “real” Nahman, whose Dead Hasidim (as they
were called) tried to keep faith with the messianic urgency of his fantastically
elaborated tales through a transcript of his living speech, Glatstein’s Nahman
came alive by virtue of his synthetic folk speech, conversational rhythm,
intimate tone, and direct personal experience. Glatstein (1956: 159 – 90)
returned to the figure of Nahman during the next decade: later poems reveal
the Hasidic leader in elegiac, meditative, amorous, and cantankerous moods
(Harshav and Harshav 1986: 292 – 97). Glatstein turned Nahman into a
Jew for all seasons.
It was enough under wartime conditions for Glatstein to create even one
compelling Jewish voice. Nahman had a trusted scribe, but his audience of
one remained sidelined. A similar monological strategy was adopted by
Singer, who became an American citizen in 1943 and was among the two
dozen Yiddish writers and cultural figures to eulogize Polish Jewry in the
August 1943 issue of Di tsukunft. Asked by the editors to evaluate the accom-
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plishments of Polish Yiddish literature between the two world wars, Singer
used the occasion to proclaim that the politics of Yiddish had been bankrupt
from the outset; that Yiddish culture had no need to temper its radical secularism, for neither its traditional faith nor its claims to worldliness had ever
amounted to much. “It was godly without a God, worldly without a world,”
he pronounced (Singer 1995 [1943]: 120). Here, as in “Problems of Yiddish
Literature in America,” the companion piece that he published three months
earlier, Singer called upon the surviving Yiddish writers to abandon the
present for the past, to reclaim the age-old Jewish folk culture of eastern
Europe as lived in its natural vernacular, and “increasingly draw upon
sforim,” the fund of religious books, for material (Singer 1989 [1943]: 11).
Yiddish speech, if it was to have a future, would have to return to its points of
origin: not only to loshn Ashkenaz, the lingua franca of a lost civilization, but
also and increasingly to taytsh, Yiddish as the essential bridge to Yiddishkayt,
the core set of Jewish values.
Answering his own call, Singer began staging a series of brilliantly crafted
monologues, written and spoken. In each, the speaker engaged others in
dialogue but in solo performance. It was one Jew — male or female, human
or supernatural — talking, seducing, arguing, protesting, justifying, joking
either before an anonymous group of listeners or before an audience of
one — or One. Singer’s immediate response to the destruction of Yiddishland
was to provide a forum for three of its most talkative members: the Evil
Inclination as he busily subverted each of his victims inside of their heads,
a baker named Gimpel as he addressed his life’s story to the men in the
flophouse where he lay dying, and a shtetl matron named Matl as she narrated her chilling tale of everyday evil to a group of other shtetl women.
In a projected series of stories that he called Dos gedenkbukh fun yeytser-hore
(The Evil Inclination’s Diary), designed to be a comédie démonique, Singer created
a demon narrator, as though human speech had now become inadequate to
describe human evil (Sherman 2010). This was devilspeak, inspired by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and introduced into modern Yiddish
writing by Abramovitsh and the playwright Jacob Gordin (1853 – 1909)
(Roskies 2013). Singer had employed the diction and venom of devilspeak
for the first time in the tale of a dybbuk that concluded his historical novel,
Satan in Goray (1933), and which he republished in America alongside the first
of his demonic stories (Singer 1972 [1943]). The dybbuk’s job was to blaspheme and to possess. The devil’s job was to seduce (Udel-Lambert 2008).
Seduction is what devilspeak is all about. To be effective, the seduction
must suit the intellectual level and particular passion of the victim. In
“Zaydlus der ershter” (Singer 1972 [1943]: 273 – 80) (translated as “Zeidlus
the Pope”; Singer 2004: 477 – 87), the chosen victim is Reb Zeydl Cohen, who,
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by the time he was thirty-five, had no equal in learning in the whole
of Poland. In their first encounter, the Evil Spirit, or Inclination, speaks
“mayse filozof ” — in the manner of the philosophers, the freethinkers (recall
Zbarzher-Ehrenkrantz) — and undermines Zeydl’s faith in reason as the guiding principle of life. He does this by establishing a moral and theological
opposition between Them and Us, which he subtly underscores by means of
an aggressive, erudite, richly idiomatic speech, pithy and epigrammatic. The
Evil Inclination, whoever he is, seems to have graduated from some netherworldy yeshiva where, among other things, he studied medieval philosophy
and ethics. By entrusting his best cases to a diary, moreover, he also reveals
his literary ambitions.
Folg mikh, Reb Zeydl, un shmad zikh. Di goyim zenen graylekh
farkert fun di yidn. Oyb zeyer got iz a mentsh, ken bay zey a
mentsh zayn a got. Zey hobn lib groyskayt: groyse baleyrakhmim un groyse akhzorim; groyse boyer un groyse tseshterer;
groyse tsnues un groyse hurn; groyse khakahomim un groyse
naronim; groyse hersher un groyse vidershpeniker; groyse
maminim un groyse leykener. Zey iz alts eyns vos eyner iz — abi
r’iz groys, makhn zey im far a gets. Deriber, Zeydl, oyb du vilst
koved oyf der velt, nem on zeyer emune. Vos shayekh got, ligt im
in der linker peye, tsi me davnt far im in a shul oder me blekekhtst
in a tifle; tsi me fast hafsokes, oder me frest dover-akher. Er iz
azoy almekhtik un geakhpert, as di gantse erd mit ire bavoyner
hobn bay im a ponim vi verem un mikn. Er iz azoy derhoybn un
gegroyst, az er zet afile nisht, di bashefenishlekh vos haltn zikh far
dem bkhir-hayetsire.
— Heyst es, got hot nisht gegebn di toyre tsu Moyshen?
— A sheyn ponim volt got gehat, er zol zikh oystaynen mit a yelud-ishe!
— Un Yeshue iz oykh nisht zayn zun?
— Yeshue iz geven a mamzer fun Natseres.
— Un s’iz nishto keyn skar-veoynesh — hot Zeydl gefregt.
— Neyn.
— Vos zhe iz yo do? – hot Zeydl mikh gefregt a farvirter un dershrokener.
— Epes iz do, nor s’iz nisht doik — hob ikh gezogt mayse filozof.
(Singer 1972 [1943]: 277 – 78)
“Reb Zeidel, listen to me: what you must do is become a
Christian. The Gentiles are the antithesis of the Jews. Since their
God is a man, a man can be a God to them. Gentiles admire
greatness of any kind and love the men who possess it: men of
great pity or great cruelty, great builders or great destroyers, great
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virgins or great harlots, great sages or great fools, great rulers or
great rebels, great believers or great infidels. They don’t care what
else a man is: if he is great, they idolize him. Therefore, Reb
Zeidel, if you want honor, you must embrace their faith. And don’t
worry about God. To One so mighty and sublime the earth and its
inhabitants are no more than a swarm of gnats. He doesn’t care
whether men pray to Him in a synagogue or a church [literally, a
house of abomination], fast from Sabbath to Sabbath or bloat
themselves with pork. He is too exalted to notice these puny
creatures who delude themselves thinking that they are the crown
of Creation.”
“Does that mean God did not give the Torah to Moses?” Zeidel asked.
“ What? God open His heart to a man born of woman?”
“And Jesus was not His son?”
“Jesus was a bastard from Nazareth.”
“Is there no reward or punishment?”
“No.”
“Then what is there?” Zeidel asked me, fearful and confused.
“There is something that exists, but it has no existence,” I answered in the manner
of the philosophers. (Singer 2004: 481; emended)
Speaking to a fellow scholar, the Evil Inclination sets up six binary oppositions between Them and Us that follow like a syllogism from the root heresy
of Christianity: the divine in human form. Thus the road to worldly fame and
fortune must lead to apostasy. Anticipating Zeydl’s objection — that converting to Christianity would incur the wrath of God — the Evil Spirit argues for a
Maimonidean God, utterly removed from the affairs of men, going so far as
to deny revelation and special providence. At the same time, he gains Zeidel’s
confidence by using the comical (and blatantly anthropomorphic) phrase
“ligt im in der linker peye,” “[the whole matter] lies in His left sidelock” —
God doesn’t give a hoot — one of the several folksy expressions that Singer
(1989 [1943]: 8) considered incompatible with American Yiddish speech and
uses precisely for this reason. And while he is at it, in the same breath, the devil
throws in a pejorative word, tifle (church), from the fiercely polemical lexicon
of Hebrew phrases in Yiddish that are anti-Christian. This is a throwback to
early Ashkenaz, when the purpose of maintaining a separate language was
to achieve insulation from Christianity, to negotiate, as Weinreich (2008,
1:177 – 78) puts it, “between yes and no,” and back to such ethical tracts as
Seyfer lev tov (The Good Heart; 1620), whose original, uncensored version was
extremely anti-Christian, even by medieval standards (Rubin 2013: 250 – 60).
Operating in sovereign freedom, the devil can dispense with the delicate
balancing act “between yes and no.” By consistently substituting sacrilege
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for Christian sancta, devilspeak marshals the resources of the Yiddish
language to express utter disdain and disapproval of Christianity, even
while Zeidel, the addressee, makes the fatal decision to defy the manifold
opposition between Them and Us and enters the church (Roskies 1995: 285 –
88; Seidman 2006: 267).
Singer never completed The Evil Inclination’s Diary, of which “Zeidlus the
Pope” was to form a part (Shmeruk 1975: xvi – xvii). But in 1945 he wrote
“Gimpel the Fool” as a companion piece to “Zeidlus the Pope,” introducing
the man of simple faith as opposed to the Talmudic scholar, who lives by
reason alone (Roskies 2008: 338 – 39). “Gimpel the Fool” was a monologue in
four dialects of Yiddish — communal, learned, shrewish, and devilish — combined into one (ibid.: 330 – 37). As a stand-alone monologue, and as brilliantly
translated by Saul Bellow in 1953 (Singer 2004: 5 – 19), “Gimpel the Fool”
bridged the distance between the speech communities of Yiddish and
English. Bellow made “shoulders are from God, and burdens too” sound
as ironically contrapuntal in English as the original expression “az got git
pleytses muz men shlepn dem pak” sounds in Yiddish. And when Gimpel’s
proverbial speech was too bound up with the sacred trappings of Jewish life,
Bellow reached for the next best paraphrase. Bellow’s generalized and
genderless “besides, you can’t pass through life unscathed, nor expect to”
replaced Gimpel’s “m’kon dokh nisht shtarbn in laybserdakl.” Since only
men are required by Jewish law to wear a fringed undergarment, which is
supposed to be a protection from harm, only of them can it be said, You don’t
die, after all, with your fringed garment on. The fatalism of folk speech comes
through loud and clear. What’s lost in translation is the intimate, sometimes
irreverent, inner-cultural dialogue (Roskies 2008: 322 – 30, 337 – 39).
If the future of Yiddish speech lay in its past, and if it was enough to have
one Jew speaking to bring alive a world entire, then women too deserved to
speak. Thus, in the same year as creating Gimpel (1945), Singer invented an
elderly matron named Matl to narrate her chilling tale “Der katlen: A bobemayse” (“The Wife Killer: A Folk Tale”; Singer 1975: 57 – 74, 2004: 37 – 50) to
a group of other shtetl women (Roskies 1995: 295 – 97). “Our mother tongue
has grown old,” Singer wrote in 1943. “The mother is already a grandmother. She wandered with us from Germany to Poland, Russia, Rumania.
Now she is in America, but in spirit she still lives in the old country — in her
memories” (Singer 1989 [1943]: 12). These memories were anything but
sentimental. While the Evil Inclination’s pithy style made his every sentence
sound like a wicked epigram, and Gimpel used proverbial expressions to cast
an ironic, self-deprecating light on his own life, women like Matl and the
nameless narrator of “Tseytl un Rikl” (“Zeitel and Rickel”; Singer 1975: 88 –
100, 2004: 623 – 34) used proverbial speech to imply a deeply fatalistic view of
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life. “S’shlimazl kon tsunoyffirn a vant mit a vant” (Singer 1975: 88)
(if the devil wants to, he can make two walls come together [Singer 2004:
623]), Matl says, quoting her grandmother. “If it is written that a rabbi will
fall off a roof, he will become a chimney sweep” (ibid.). (Sholem Aleichem’s
Sheyne-Sheyndl, by contrast, quoted her mother’s expressions because the
two of them were still living under the same roof.) Judging from this terse
quotation and citation (“if it is written . . . ”), grandma specialized in proverbs
that used “parody, irony, sharp contrast, [and] surprising comparisons”
(Silverman-Weinreich 1978: 12), a notable category of Yiddish proverbs,
and they in turn brought to mind, in the speech of her more worldly granddaughter, a parallel, intercultural source: “The Gentiles have a proverb: ‘Kto
ma wisieć nie utonie; He who must hang will not drown’ ” (Singer 1975: 88).
The proverbial speech of women, from Sholem Aleichem to Singer, could be
counted on to preserve an intergenerational and intercultural dialogue.
One Jew speaking was sufficient to signify the loss of a world entire. But
how? By speaking in the American Yiddish dialect that Singer (1989 [1943]:
9) derided as “vulgarized . . . language, mixing in hundreds of English and
Anglicized words and expressions, and creating a gibberish which no selfrespecting Yiddish writer could use in good conscience.” This is the voice
that we hear in Aaron Zeitlin’s (1898 – 1973) “Monolog in pleynem yidish”
(“Monologue in Plain Yiddish”; 1947 [1945]) that originally appeared in
the same Passover supplement to the Labor Zionist Yidisher kemfer for 1945
that featured the deathbed confession of “Gimpel the Fool.” The poet, playwright, novelist, and critic Zeitlin had not forgotten that, back in 1915, a selfrespecting Yiddish writer named Sholem Aleichem had violated Singer’s rule
when he was approached by a certain Mr. Green on the streets of New York’s
Lower East Side (as first noted in Dynes 2008: 80n130). Mr. Green’s potato
Yiddish was at the comic end of the spectrum, because the ranks of Yiddishspeaking immigrants were still growing. But now, in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, “plain Yiddish” was the only way a longtime citizen of the United
States could hope to communicate with a fellow Jew from Warsaw, a latecomer to America.
Shur bin ikh a landsman, mister Zaytlin . . .
Mayndzhu, az kh’farges a mol dos pleyne dzhuish
Ken ikh nokh biz atsinder
Derlangen s’emese varshever loshn,
halevay af ale yidishe kinder . . .
Tsi ikh gedenk
Dem ets mitn enk?
Eyn kleynikayt! Bot mit mayn mises —
Mir yuzn a dzhuish a hinedikn, yu no, a pleynem,
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Un bisayds redt men inglish, yu no
bikoz ov di biznes un bikoz ov di kinder.
(Zeitlin 1947 [1945]: 88)
Sure I’m a landsman, Mister Zeitlin . . .
Mind you, sometimes when I forget plain Jewish
I can, to this day,
Speak the real Warsaw dialect,
Our kids should only be so lucky . . .
Do I remember the “ets” and the “enk”?
You bet! But I and my missus
We use a local kind of Jewish, you know, plain,
And besides, we speak English, you know,
Because of the business and because of the children.5
Our landsman is proud of the fact that he still remembers the “ets” and “enk”
for “you” and “yours,” the hallmark of the “real Warsaw dialect,” but he has
long since replaced them, and it, with a plain, “local kind of Jewish.” These
two Jews, the Americanized speaker and the recently arrived Yiddish writer,
do not, in fact, speak the same language, and the best the latter can do is to
celebrate in rhyme the authentic Yiddish words atsinder (now, to this day) with
kinder (children) and gedenk with enk (yours). The one thing they do share is a
total incomprehension in the face of the annihilation of East European Jewry
(Dynes 2008: 71 – 80):
Alts farbrent?
Take pleyn un simpl farbrent?
Ir farshteyt dos, landsman?
Not mi!
Ay simpli kent anderstend!
(Zeitlin 1947 [1945]: 92)
Everything burned?
Like plain and simple burned?
Do you understand this, landsman?
Not me!
I simply can’t understand!
The vocal strain in modern Yiddish writing began with Ettinger’s campaign
for Jews to communicate in a plain, down-to-earth Yiddish, unencumbered
by the dead weight of the past. It ends with Zeitlin’s monologue-into-the-void
in “plain Yiddish,” to which there is no possible rejoinder.
5. Underlining denotes Anglicized words that appear in the Yiddish original; emphasis in the
original.
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9. Yiddish in Solo Performance
This was the parting of the ways between those Jews in America who still
inhabited the lost and found worlds of the postwar Yiddish monologue and
those who did not. For the remaining few, the main preservers of the vocal
strain were a handful of professional actors, who conducted a thorough
search for the written-as-spoken Yiddish word and took their repertoire on
the road. Chief among them were Joseph Buloff (1899 – 1985), Grossbard
(1892 – 1994), Noah Nachbush (1888 – 1970), and Chaim Ostrowsky (1894 –
1985). The most dedicated to the stagecraft of the vortkontsert, the “solo reading,” was Grossbard, whose career spanned most of the twentieth century.
Grossbard performed on a bare stage, seated at a small table, with a reading
lamp and no microphone. Among his most famous numbers were the
“improvisations” of the American Yiddish poet A. Lutzky (Grossbard n.d.:
LP album 7605), the fables of Shteynbarg (ibid.: LP albums 7605, 7769, 7770),
humoresques by Nadir (ibid.: LP albums 7640, 7769), Peretz’s mock-epic
poem “Monish” (ibid.: LP album 7565), Manger’s ballads and his cycle
Velvl Zbarzher Writes Letters to Malkele the Beautiful (ibid.: LP albums
7535, 7738), Glatstein’s “The Braslaver to His Scribe” (ibid.: LP album 7535),
and Zeitlin’s “Monologue in Plain Yiddish” (ibid.: LP album 7590) (see Dynes
2008: 81). Because his career spanned the great divide between Before/After,
before and after the destruction of Ashkenazi Jewry, his role changed accordingly from being a purveyor of the most innovative Yiddish voices — Halpern,
Moyshe Kulbak, Lutzky, Manger, Shteynbarg, and his beloved Nadir (see
Nadir 1973) — to a preserver of the rescuable repertoire for an aging, griefstricken audience. That is why Grossbard never performed anything from
the “Red” phase in Halpern’s and Nadir’s poetry (cf. Harshav and Harshav
2006: 277 – 320, 566 – 84) or, for that matter, from Singer’s tales of seduction
and betrayal. Grossbard’s repertoire, which invites a detailed analysis, was
a demanding curriculum, however. Among Sholem Aleichem’s monologues
(Grossbard n.d.: LP album 7666), he performed not only the ever-popular
“If I Were Rothschild,” a sound bite in length, but also “Der nisref ” (“Burned
Out”), one of the longest and darkest monologues. In brief, this is what
his repertoire, contained in ten long-playing discs (not yet digitized), has to
teach us:
(1) The vocal strain in Yiddish literature expressed itself in a relatively
small number of speech genres — “monologue, dialogue, mass miseen-scène, fanciful fable and Chassidic tale” — and covered a determinate range of modalities; “exercise in naiveté, nostalgic poem, parody,
satire” (Klein 1987 [1952]: 82). It took itself perhaps a little too
seriously. Only in disc 8, comprised of “fables, poems and allegorical
Published by Duke University Press
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(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
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tales written for children” but “exciting listening for adults as well,” did
Grossbard (LP album 7770) perform a retenish-maysele, a “riddle tale,”
taken from Yiddish folklore.
The vocal strain was double voiced and dialogic. Grossbard brought
multiple worldviews and emotional registers to life in one and the
same discourse. “One hears him again reciting, intoning, whispering,
sneering between the hyphens, weeping, almost-weeping, thundering,
chiding, even neighing,” wrote Klein (ibid.). To compensate for the
self-imposed limitation of performing solo, moreover, Grossbard built
his repertoire on dramatic situations, whether it was Shteynbarg’s fabulous talking animals and inanimate objects tempting, cajoling, and
debating with one another; or the lovesick Galician Yiddish folk
bard Zbarzher-Ehrenkrantz writing letters to his beloved in distant
Constantinople; or the deeply contemplative Hasidic master Nahman
sharing his joie de vivre with a trusted scribe.
By creating a highbrow repertoire, Grossbard completed the cultural
project of turning the old orality into the new begun by the generation
of Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz.
In so doing, he trained his audience to really listen for taglines, parody,
code switching, and language treason; to reinforce one’s aesthetic
sensibilities by listening for rhymes, ellipses, aphorisms, and puns;
and to reimagine a Yiddish-speaking polity by attending to differences
of gender, age, social position, worldview, and species (human or animal? wind instrument or percussion?).
The medium was the message. Just as the orthography, the publishing
venue, and the packaging were of significance in the printed medium,
so was the ascetic demeanor of Grossbard, sitting up there on a bare
stage and bringing Ashkenaz to life by means of the spoken word alone.
Once Ashkenaz was no more, Yiddish entered a fourth and final phase.
Professional actors, responding to a yearning for speech among their dwindling audience, turned the written-as-spoken classics of modern Yiddish
literature into performance art. Grossbard, foremost among them, systematically recorded his wide-ranging performances in order to memorialize the
orality of Yiddish and recapture its expressive range, thereby circumventing
the written strain completely. The records were even produced without liner
notes.
From the moment that Mendele the Book Peddler turned to his readers
and said, “Hert oys libe yidn” (Hear me out, dear Jews), or that Peretz’s Reb
Yoykhenen the teacher proclaimed to his students, “ What a reward there is
for studying the Torah!,” and that a chain-smoking stationer from Kasrilevke
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Poetics Today 35:3
turned to his traveling companion, the famous writer Sholem Aleichem,
and said, “Did I hear you say absentminded?,” the vocal strain in Yiddish
literature became more than an occasional exercise in replacing one form of
orality with another. It became Jewspeak: an essential expression of the onceliving folk.
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