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"The Jewish Mark Twain": Sholem Aleichem's Use of Folklore and Dialect
From: Columbia University
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Jeremy Dauber |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
A century ago, the Russian-born writer Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitch, 1859-1916) became the world's most popular author of Yiddish literature. In such works as the Railroad Stories and Tevye the Dairyman, Sholem Aleichem delighted readers with his depictions of the people and customs of Jewish Eastern Europe. Columbia University Yiddish-studies professor Jeremy Dauber says two central elements of Sholem Aleichem's works are his use of folklore and his uncanny ear for the dialects of Yiddish. |
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 hat's so wonderful about Sholem Aleichem is that he has a tremendously complex approach to traditional religious culture and folk culture. He started out, as so many of the Yiddish writers did, imitating the model of the Enlightenment, as someone who was trying to reform traditional culture, as someone trying to modernize. As a bit of a Russian intellectual himself, he was someone who, at the beginning of his career, might have been happy if the Eastern European Jewish community as a whole had been just a little bit more modern. As he developed as a writer, however, his great gifts as a satirist and as a humorist, as an observer of human nature, also developed, and once you get a satirist or a humorist started, they can't be in the service of one particular ideology--their eye falls on everything. And so it was with Sholem Aleichem. By the end of his career, you could say that his approach to Jewish culture and society consisted of looking at all of it through an ironic and wry eye, but a loving eye as well. He certainly loved Jews, he loved the Jewish culture; even when he thought that it was at times absurd or a little bit silly or even self-destructive, he still loved it and was able to write about it with a compassionate eye. |
I think that that's something that's often overlooked in studies of Sholem Aleichem. People often think of his work as a simple, loving homage to Eastern European Jewish culture. But like any true love story, it's much more complicated than that. It's not simple adoration. Sholem Aleichem truly understood all of the difficult and sharp parts of Eastern European Jewish culture, and he incorporated all those parts into his loving and yet humorous picture of it. And that's what makes him a great humorist. If he were just the Sholem Aleichem who appears, for example, through the lens of Fiddler on the Roof, he wouldn't be such a great writer. He'd just be an ethnographer saying, "Look how wonderful all of this was; what a shame that this is passing." And of course, that's not what he did. He was dealing with a vibrant Jewish culture, one that he had a very strong personal reaction to, and he was relating to it in his own idiosyncratic way. |
Sholem Aleichem's use of folk speech
One of the things that made Sholem Aleichem particularly beloved to his readers was his uncanny ability to master the different dialects of Yiddish and the different levels and strata of folk speech, to duplicate the varying levels of social interaction. Sholem Aleichem traveled a lot to do readings, and he went to all sorts of Yiddish-speaking regions in Europe and the United States. There are numerous accounts--probably slightly exaggerated, but still significant--of his listening to locals for a couple of hours and then being able to mimic their dialect himself--so well, in fact, that people thought that he must have come from that particular region. In his own memoirs, Sholem Aleichem says he was a preternaturally gifted mimic as a child, and I think that comes out very clearly in his work. |
In this sense, I think, the common phrase referring to him as the "Jewish Mark Twain" is well deserved. Mark Twain was also someone who worked with dialects and dialect humor, and a lot of the great humor of Sholem Aleichem involves different ways of speaking. The author displays this technique most famously in his monologues. He was a master of the literary monologue. Many of his most successful stories involve people of all different social classes, just telling their stories to a sympathetic, or sometimes not so sympathetic, protagonist. And the range and versatility that Sholem Aleichem displays of knowing and getting inside the characters of different people, whether it's a middle-aged Jewish housewife from a small town or a con man and a cheat who travels the railways, is truly remarkable. He always manages to render distinct personalities, as opposed to some of the authors who preceded him in Yiddish literature. Mendele the book peddler, for example, Abramovitch, is a wonderful satirist, but he didn't come close to Sholem Aleichem's skill at developing these different character types, and certainly not these different voices. In Sholem Aleichem's works, you can hear, particularly in the original Yiddish, of course, the real tones, the real rhythms of speech. |
Recent scholarship has made much of Sholem Aleichem's debt to the Russian style of monologue known as skaz, and if you read certain parts of Gogol and Chekhov, both of whom Sholem Aleichem admired very much, you can also see a clear influence. But I think that the linguistic connection with his readers is probably the most interesting stylistic feature of Sholem Aleichem, and it's one of the reasons they loved him so much. At the same time that the audience knew that he was poking fun--though gentle fun, to be sure--he was still uncannily rendering their voices. They felt they were being represented; they weren't, in their minds, being talked down to but, rather, in some way, being elevated, being made the subject of literature. |
When Sholem Aleichem the protagonist meets Tevye the dairyman, Tevye initially insists on his anonymity. But then, every time they meet up, Tevye wants to tell another chapter in his life story. I think Sholem Aleichem was tapping into a deep sentiment on the part of the Jewish audience to have their voices be heard, to have their stories told. |
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