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Horrific Uncertain Circumstances: Sholem Aleichem and the History of Jewish Eastern Europe
From: Columbia University
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Jeremy Dauber |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitch, 1859-1916) was the most popular writer of Yiddish literature a century ago. In such works as the Railroad Stories, Menakhem-Mendel and Tevye the Dairyman, the Russian-born author delighted readers with his depictions of the people and customs of Jewish Eastern Europe. In an interview with Fathom, Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish studies at Columbia University, says that Sholem Aleichem's writings also reveal a great deal about the history and politics of the times. |
Jeremy Dauber: The years when Sholem Aleichem wrote, from 1883 to his death, in 1916, were a great period of change for all of Europe, but certainly for the Jewish community. Generally speaking, before the middle half of the nineteenth century traditional Jewry had remained, if not completely static, very similar for centuries. At this point, though, the forces of modernity had begun to make their way into the communities of Eastern Europe. Traditional ways of life were being shattered. One of the most important examples apparent in Sholem Aleichem's early fiction is the question of who will marry whom. The traditional marriages, arranged marriages, which had been a staple of Jewish life for centuries, where the bride and the groom had often literally never met the people they were going to spend the rest of their life with, were completely upended. This changing idea--the notion that romantic love was an important component of marriage--becomes part of Sholem Aleichem's work, as it does in the work of so many other Yiddish writers of the period. |
Fathom: What about the ideological changes sweeping through Jewish Eastern Europe in this era? |
Dauber: One of the most important Jewish movements of the time, and one that played a large role in Sholem Aleichem's work, was socialism. During Sholem Aleichem's career, and particularly during the 1880s, the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, the socialist movement was beginning to make important inroads in Jewish Eastern Europe. Each shtetl, every little Jewish town had its own small socialist contingent, some of whom might wear the Gorky black shirt in sympathy with the workers' cause. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this was also during a time of great anti-socialist repression by the czar. Sholem Aleichem's stories are filled with both explicit and oblique references to people who are jailed and sent to Siberia because they joined in anti-czarist or pro-socialist movements. One of the most famous examples is Tevye the dairyman's second daughter's husband, Perchik, or Peppercorn, who is sent to Siberia for his political activity. It's not stated explicitly in the story, but anyone reading at the time would certainly have known that that's what was going on. |
Another important movement in Jewish Eastern Europe was Zionism, of course, and Sholem Aleichem was interested in that as well. The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel in 1897, but Sholem Aleichem had been interested in Zionism years before that, and wrote a series of pamphlets and papers on the subject around the turn of the century. He himself was very acutely aware of this move toward an activist love of Israel. But he never moved there himself. |
He did, however, move to America, which brings us to yet another massive change that was taking place in the 1880s, 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century: immigration. These waves of immigration, of literally millions of Jews, were the result of the passage of new anti-Semitic laws in the czarist empire and also because of an economic downturn in the 1880s and 1890s. Sholem Aleichem himself ended up being one of those émigrés, as I said; he moved to the United States, and that's where he died, in New York, in 1916. A number of his characters went through this process with him. One of his most famous characters, Motl Peysi the cantor's son, emigrates to America through the course of the novel that bears his name. A good half of the book is about his travails through the emigration process--crossing borders, living temporarily in
strange European cities, his shipboard experiences--and his struggles, once he's in the country, to become an American. |
Fathom: Are these social observations also present in his other works? |
Dauber: Most readers tend to focus on what I'd call the "big three" works: the Tevye stories, the Menakhem-Mendel letters and Motl Peysi the Cantor's Son, plus a smattering of short stories that have been heavily anthologized. But Sholem Aleichem wrote far, far more than that, and many of these other, lesser-known works are the ones that really re-create Jewish Eastern Europe. Sholem Aleichem puts a lot of satirical effort into pinpointing different kinds of social activities and social classes in great detail. For example, he skewers the nouveau riche Jews who went to take the waters in Marienbad, in his novel by the same title. |
One of his favorite satirical methods was to use the city he created, the fictional shtetl Kasrilevke. Some of Sholem Aleichem's most satirical stories and novellas are ones in which the narrator returns to Kasrilevke after some time away and comments on many changes that have taken place in his absence. This technique obviously allowed him to reflect on all of the different movements taking place in Jewish Eastern Europe. One phenomenon he singles out is the growth of the Yiddish press--not surprising, I suppose, since that's where so much of his work first appeared. In these stories, he describes one very religious newspaper, which he calls the Skullcap, and one more secular paper, which he calls the Bowler Hat, and how the Bowler Hat and the Skullcap are always at war with one another. I'm sure that, given the difficulties he had in earning his living by writing in the Yiddish press, there was some pent-up frustration there. |
Fathom: How do Sholem Aleichem's works chronicle anti-Semitic violence and the policies restricting Jewish residency in czarist Russia? |
Dauber: Sholem Aleichem was a great humorist, and humorists have an eye for life's absurdity. Many of the changes in czarist Russian laws concerning the Jews would be passed very suddenly and take effect immediately--certainly that's what it seemed like to the Jews, anyway. The new policies would often overturn previous laws, which sometimes led to confusing and unlikely situations. And certainly Sholem Aleichem, the humorist and satirist, missed no opportunity to expand and tease those out and make them even more absurd than they may already have been. |
One example worth talking about at length a bit is military service. At the time Sholem Aleichem was writing, no Jew wanted to serve the czar. It's true that in certain places in Western Europe military service was seen as a means to demonstrate emancipation and Jewish desire for social and political equality. That wasn't the case in Russia. Jews had long memories of the regime of Nicholas I, between 1825 and 1855, where Jewish boys were called up as early as 11 and 12 years of age to serve for periods as long as 25 years. During that time, it was believed, tremendous pressure was put upon them to convert. And after 25 years in the czarist army, these soldiers returned, and they hardly remembered they were Jews, much less that they had any substantive commitment to Jewish culture. |
It's hardly surprising, then, that Jews resorted to a whole number of means to get themselves and their sons out of military service. One of the most effective ways, perhaps unsurprisingly, was to pay somebody off. This meant that, as in so many other cases throughout world history, the poor people went to war and the rich didn't. And this class struggle quite literally tore apart the Eastern European Jewish community in the nineteenth century. |
But there were other ways of getting out of the draft, too, one of these being demonstrable physical infirmity. If you could prove that, in the words of Sholem Aleichem, "you had what it takes to not have what it takes," you'd get the invaluable ticket--a white card officially stating that you were unfit for military service in the czarist regime. One of Sholem Aleichem's stories is a monologue related by a man whose son is trying to escape conscription. Originally, it seems this shouldn't be a problem. For one thing, he's not in particularly good shape; in fact, he's in very bad shape. Plus, he's an only child, and even the czarist regime did not take only children to war. |
Unfortunately, despite this man's best efforts to get his son a white card, the son keeps on getting called up, one time after another. And each time, sweating blood, the father gets the son out of it again. And again. And again. By the time the story ends, the father is the possessor of not one but three different white cards saying that the son is exempt from military service. So the absurdity of the Jewish position in the face of non-Jewish bureaucratic hostility and confusion is pretty clear. |
One of the most powerful examples of this relationship is in the classic Tevye stories. In one of the later Tevye stories, a group of Tevye's non-Jewish co-villagers come to him and say, "Tevye, we need to have a pogrom." And he says, "Why? We've always gotten along. Have I ever done anything to you?" They say, "No. You know, we don't really want to, but the word has come down that we have to have a pogrom, and if we don't, you know, we're going to look bad. So what do you think we should do?" And here they're asking Tevye, they're asking the Jew, how they're supposed to go about making a pogrom. The absurdism is quite clear. And Sholem Aleichem is able to take these clearly horrific, absurd circumstances and shift them into a key where, oddly enough, they get exploded into laughter. And that's obviously one of his greatest gifts. |
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