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Nov. 22, 2013
Sholem Aleichem’s tradition
New biography offers an analysis of the writer’s works and life.
CURT LEVIANT
This first full-length biography of the world’s most famous and beloved Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), by Jeremy Dauber, offers a thorough analysis of Aleichem’s major works in conjunction with the story of his life.
The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Nextbook/Schocken, 2013) takes us from the Yiddish humorist’s early beginnings through the creation of his famous characters, the hapless Menakhem-Mendl and the multi-nuanced Tevye the dairyman. Tevye, it turns out, is based on a real dairyman named Tevye, whom Aleichem got to know in 1894, during his annual vacation in the countryside near Kiev. And more, this Tevye was still active in the small town of Boyarka, in 1924, when a visiting troupe of Yiddish actors from Moscow found him and gave him a new cart and tools for dairy production.
But to read Aleichem and write about him, Yiddish is not enough, for Yiddish contains 17-20 percent Hebrew. (In Chaim Grade’s famous novel The Yeshiva, the rabbis speak a Yiddish that is 90 percent Hebrew.) And so, to properly understand and analyze Aleichem’s work, a biographer/critic must also be able to penetrate the Hebrew of the Jewish tradition embedded within Yiddish, i.e., Yiddishkeit.
Even published translators miss the thoroughly Jewish aspects of the Hebrew. A classic example: Frances Butwin, the first post-Second World War translator of Aleichem (The Old Country, 1946), had evidently never heard of the seventh day of Sukkot, Hoshana Rabba, and mistakenly transliterated the key word in Aleichem’s story “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabba” as Hashono [the year] Rabba. Egregious and embarrassing errors like this are scattered in various translations from Yiddish literature. But if there is anyone who can master both disciplines, Yiddish and Yiddishkeit (which, in Yiddish, is actually one seamless entity) with authority and ease it is Dauber.
The table of contents suggests his approach. Almost tongue in cheek – as if pantomiming his twinkly-eyed subject – Dauber presents Aleichem’s story in five acts that span the author’s life. In 28 chapters (does Dauber purposely choose that number as a nod to the 28-volume Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem?), each chapter is titled with the mock-serious “In Which Our Hero ...,” again mimicking the 19th-century mode of storytelling. Two such telling chapters are: “In Which Our Hero Reads the Newspapers in Yiddish and Becomes a Media Star (1899-1903)” and “In Which Our Hero Makes His Farewells to His Vanished World and Feels the Pain of Children (1914-1916).”
The life of Aleichem cannot be separated from his writing and Dauber felicitously fuses the two. He shows us the writer’s early years in the small towns wherein he grew up, his beginnings as a humorist, his large inheritance that made him a rich man overnight, his career as a publisher (where to everyone’s surprise he paid generous honoraria, and in advance, too), itinerant reader of his stories and eventually a world-famous Jew. We see the Yiddish writer through the tensions between Yiddish and Hebrew, the period of pogroms, the rise of Zionism, the Dreyfus trial, his departure from Russia, a brief residence in Europe and his final stop, New York. His death was a front-page New York Times news story and more than 150,000 people attended his funeral, the biggest that city had ever seen.
Wherever Aleichem went there were reception committees, dinners, speeches and crowds waiting to see him. After one public reading, admirers carried him on their shoulders to his carriage, unhitched the horses and brought him to his hotel. But adulation never translated into cash. Having lost the fortune he had inherited from his wealthy father-in-law on the Kiev stock exchange, for the rest of his life, Aleichem was beset by a longing for money to pay his bills. (Only in the Yiddish literary world can one be renowned and constantly broke.) Alas, his hoped-for windfall from his plays that eluded him during his lifetime came to his family less than half a century after his death to the tune of Fiddler on the Roof in 1964.
After the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1904, Aleichem published a volume that included stories by then famous Yiddish and Hebrew writers, all of whose proceeds would go to help the victims’ families. He even got the iconic Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, known for their sympathies toward Jews, to contribute stories, which he himself translated into Yiddish.
Aleichem himself is full of contradictions and ironies. As a Yiddish writer, he fought valiantly to make “jargon” a respectable vehicle for creativity and was a tireless fighter for the elevation of Yiddish, even when supporters of the Haskalah and Zionism sought the primacy of Hebrew. Yet, most of his letters to his children were in Russian. And I remember his youngest daughter, Marie (1892-1985), telling me that, at home, Aleichem spoke Russian. This fact was echoed by his granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, last May, at the annual Sholem Aleichem yahrzeit gathering in New York. At 102, Kaufman is the only person left on earth who knew Sholem Aleichem. She spoke movingly for 15 minutes, sharing memories of her zeyde, and at the reception afterwards, she repeated to me what her Aunt Marie had said.
Yiddishkeit, Jewishness, suffuses his stories; yet he did not give his children a traditional Jewish education. Despite Dauber’s overly generous phrase that the writer “didn’t keep a strictly observant household,” we know that Aleichem’s children ate ham at home. In fact, they clamored for it – but out of respect for their traditional grandmother, they ate it on paper plates. A longtime secularist, removed for decades from his father’s traditional observance, Aleichem nevertheless went to shul in the Bronx to say Kaddish for his son who had died in Denmark in 1915. And he wrote a famous ethical will that concludes with the wish that “God help his children, Amen.” His funeral was a traditional one, with his good friend Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt chanting “El Moleh Rachamim” and his son reciting the graveside Kaddish. Yet, while Aleichem has stories for every major Jewish festival, even minor ones like Lag b’Omer, as far as I can recall there is not one story whose focus is the Sabbath.
Dauber’s book is all-encompassing and sprightly written, dotted with stories that illuminate his subject; the biography elegantly combines the facts of Aleichem’s life with his life work. The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem will no doubt inspire readers to further explore the master humorist’s oeuvre.
Curt Leviant’s most recent book is the short story collection Zix Zexy Ztories.
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