|
| |
Elevating a "Lowly" Language: Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish Literary Tradition
From: Columbia University
| By:
Jeremy Dauber |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916) is the most popular writer in the Yiddish literary tradition. With such tales as the Railroad Stories and Menakhem-Mendel, the author left an enduring portrait of the people and customs of Jewish Eastern Europe. Sholem Aleichem's work Tevye the Dairyman found new popularity in the 1960s as the inspiration for the Broadway musical "Fiddler on the Roof." In this Fathom interview, Jeremy Dauber (above), a professor of Yiddish studies at Columbia University, talks about Sholem Aleichem's career as a Yiddish author. |
Fathom: Who was Sholem Aleichem? |
 | |
| Jeremy Dauber talks about Yiddish literature before Sholem Aleichem. | |
Jeremy Dauber: That's a much more complicated question than you might think, because Sholem Aleichem's name wasn't really Sholem Aleichem. A lot of times people come up to me and they say, "Oh, I love Aleichem." You can't actually say that. Sholem Aleichem is a pseudonym; it comes from a Yiddish phrase meaning, basically, "Hello there," or "How do you do?" Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish readers would have been very amused; they would have said, "Oh, look, Mr. How Do You Do has a new story in the Yiddish press," or something similar. |
Sholem Aleichem's real name was Sholem Naumovitch Rabinovitch. The use of the Russian patronymic--Sholem son of Nachum--is indicative of the way in which the actual man viewed himself as a real member of Russia, a real Russian intellectual. Though he was raised in a traditional environment, he did go to a Russian high school, a gymnasia, where he won certificates of excellence for his mastery of Russian grammar and Russian literature. He served as a Russian tutor to a wealthy Jewish household. In short, before he began writing and before he became the folk voice of Yiddish literature, he had really mastered a lot of the skills and the disciplines to make him into a Russian cultural figure. In fact, as an adult, he spoke Russian at home. |
Growing up, he received the traditional Jewish education, then moved on to Russian schools, then served as a tutor to Olga Loyeff, the daughter of a very wealthy Jewish magnate and landowner. In the best romantic fashion, tutor and student fell in love. They married, and on the death of old Loyeff, Sholem Aleichem became a very wealthy man. This is a fairly rare turn of events, as you can imagine, for a Jewish writer. Jewish literature--and Yiddish literature, specifically--of this time focuses on people who are tremendously poor, often intellectuals who are eking out a meager living, living on the kindness of other people, and here was Sholem Rabinovitch, who had more money than almost anybody else in Jewish Eastern Europe. |
He did two things with this money. One thing he did was to try and make more of it, and so he speculated on the Kiev Stock Exchange. The other thing was to use it to support not only his own literary habit--and I think the addictive metaphor is not wrong here; he loved to write--but also that of others. And he began to become a very successful and important publisher in the field of Yiddish literature. In fact, in many ways he was one of the figures most responsible for the flourishing of Yiddish literature, in that he encouraged a number of writers who would not have written Yiddish literature ordinarily to try their hands at Yiddish literature. |
Fathom: Why was it so uncommon at the time for people to write in Yiddish? |
Dauber: Yiddish, despite the fact that everyone spoke the language, despite the fact that it was the language of everyday communication and business and of people's love and life, was simply not seen as the language of literature. If you wanted to be a serious writer, you wrote in Hebrew. As a result, before Sholem Aleichem, almost everybody who wrote in Yiddish didn't publish their work; they tended to circulate it privately among themselves, because often they were embarrassed, and they didn't want to be seen as writing in this sort of "lowly" language. When they did publish their Yiddish work, they often began with excuses and explanations that they were only doing it to enlighten the masses, since Yiddish was the only language they knew. |
Sholem Aleichem changed all that. He offered a tremendous amount of money for stories of an artistic nature, as opposed to what was called shund, the "trashy" popular literature that was around at the time, stories of princes and princesses and miraculous wonder-workers and things like that. Sholem Aleichem was offering top dollar for artistic literature written in Yiddish. And this meant that a number of people who would never have thought of writing in Yiddish beforehand started to publish in Yiddish. One of the most eminent examples was a man named I.L. Peretz, who is considered to be the third of the great triumvirate of Yiddish writers, the first being a man named Mendele Moykher Sforim (Mendele the book peddler), a pseudonym for a man named S.Y. Abromovitch, and the second being Sholem Aleichem himself. |
So Sholem Aleichem spent much of his money on publishing. He once said that he lost 30,000 rubles because he took away time from his business to write a novel--and that was when 30,000 rubles was a lot of money. Unfortunately, Sholem Aleichem was, by all accounts, not the world's best businessman. He eventually lost all the money he had inherited from his father-in-law on the stock exchange. This boom-and-bust cycle is reflected in a lot of his fiction: characters come into a tremendous amount of money and then, through various devices, often because of their trust in other people, they lose all of that money and are no better off than they were at the beginning. This happens in his most famous cycle of stories, the tales of Tevye the Dairyman, the series of stories that the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" was based on. It also happens in a series of stories called Menakhem-Mendel, an epistolary novel that consists of a series of letters between a speculator, Menakhem-Mendel, and his wife, Sheyne-Sheyndel. Menakhem-Mendel is always having get-rich-quick schemes, which inevitably come to naught. |
Fathom: What did the author do once he'd lost all his money? |
Dauber: For the rest of his life, he was forced to rely on his pen in order to make a living. One would think this would not be a problem, given that Sholem Aleichem was by far the most popular Yiddish writer in the Yiddish-speaking world. Unfortunately, Sholem Aleichem trusted people a bit too much, and he wasn't a great businessman. He'd often let the copyrights on his materials go for far less than they were worth, and the lack of firm international copyright law meant that there were a lot of unauthorized publications as well. Other people made quite a bit of money on Sholem Aleichem's work, but the author himself didn't. |
As a result, he was forced to rely on a fairly grueling series of public readings and travels in order to supplement the very meager income from his own writing. The rigorous schedule was almost certainly partially responsible for his contracting tuberculosis, and he spent much of the last decade of his life at various European resorts, on the Italian Riviera and in Switzerland, trying to recover from the disease. Eventually he moved to the United States, where he spent the last years of his life. |
Fathom: How was Sholem Aleichem received in the US? |
Dauber: When Sholem Aleichem originally set out for the States, he was very optimistic. He knew how popular his stories were throughout the Yiddish-speaking world, and that there was a big market in America, thanks particularly to the burgeoning Yiddish theater there. It seemed to him that people were actually making a good bit of money in the Yiddish theater. In Eastern Europe, he had been taken advantage of, but he figured that in America, "the golden country," he'd write a couple of plays, they'd play in a number of the Yiddish theaters, he'd get a percentage of the receipts and he'd live happily ever after. |
Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way he thought they would. Everything started out promisingly enough. He arrived by steamship, and there was a huge reception, thousands of people turned out to the dock to welcome him. And he simply couldn't believe this. In fact, he sent a telegram to his daughter almost literally from the dock, saying, "I can't believe this is happening. This is wonderful. It's everything I ever dreamed of." But things didn't turn out so well for him there. It seems that on the night of one of his premieres he made a speech that, intentionally or not, insulted one of the most powerful forces in New York Yiddish theater at the time, Jacob Gordin, and so there was an essential boycott of some of Aleichem's materials by the pro-Gordin forces. Sholem Aleichem didn't end up making much money in the Yiddish theater. In fact, he had to return to Europe and go back to the grueling readings. |
So, in fact, his first trip to America ended up being very disappointing to him, and I think that a lot of the subsequent stories that he wrote about America are much less optimistic as a result. Originally, America was really a dream for him; it was this golden land where anything could happen. But afterward, I think, he realized there was this darker side to the American dream. |
|
| |
