The Modern Jewish Canon

A Journey Through Language and Culture

Ruth R. Wisse

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743205771
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Jüdische Literaturkritik

What makes a great Jewish book? What makes a book "Jewish" in the first place? Ruth R. Wisse, one of the leading scholars in the field of Jewish literature, sets out to answer these questions in The Modern Jewish Canon. Wisse takes us on an exhilarating journey through language and culture, penetrating the complexities of Jewish life as they are expressed in the greatest Jewish novels of the twentieth century, from Isaac Babel to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Elie Wiesel to Cynthia Ozick. The modern Jewish canon Wisse proposes comprises those books that convey an experience of Jewish actuality, those in which "the authors or characters know and let the reader know that they are Jews, " for better or worse.
Wisse is not content merely to evaluate the great books of Jewish literature; she also links the works together to present a new kind of Jewish history, as it has been told through the literature of the past hundred years. She tells the story of a multilingual, multinational people, one that has experienced an often turbulent relationship with Hebrew (the liturgical and scriptural language) and Yiddish (the commonplace vernacular tongue), as well as with the numerous languages spoken by Jews around the world. Wisse insists that language informs the essential meaning of a Jewish work, creating and ratifying political and religious alliances, historical and cultural circumstance, and methods of interpretation.
Drawing from a broad sweep of twentieth-century Jewish fiction, Wisse reintroduces us to the deeper side of much-beloved books that remain touchstones of Jewish identity. Through her eyes we reencounter old friends, including:

• Tevye the Dairyman from Sholem Aleichem's landmark Yiddish stories, the character on whom Fiddler on the Roof is based
  
• Joseph K. of Kafka's The Trial, who "without having done anything wrong" was famously "arrested one fine morning"
  
• Anne Frank, whose poignant diary has shaped the way we think about the Holocaust
  
• Nathan Zuckerman, the enigmatic narrator of numerous Philip Roth novels
  

Destined to be a classic in its own right, one that reshapes the way we think about some of the classic works of the modern age, The Modern Jewish Canon is a book for every Jewish reader and for every reader of great fiction.

1

THE COMEDY OF ENDURANCE

SHOLEMALEICHEM

Such a one is a natural philosopher.

SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It

LITERARY HEROISM IMPLIES the possibility of meaningful action, action that can determine the outcome of personal or national destiny. Nineteenth-century European literature had already pronounced its skepticism about such possibilities when Jewish literature was just beginning its search for them: as Fabrice del Dongo roams the Napoleonic battlefield in Charterhouse of Parma (1839) determined to prove himself a real soldier, the narrator lets us know that he “could not understand in the least what was happening.” Raskolnikov (1867) decides to test his philosophy of exceptionalism by murdering a useless old woman and ends by confessing his crime to the police and to God. Yet creators of the failed or anti-hero still enjoy the benefits of the tradition they depose. These bids for heroism may be unmasked by their authors as comically and tragically misguided, but the young men still go into battle, still wield their axes. The narratives remain charged with tension and dramatic action that feed off the inherited models of heroism.

Writers of the Yiddish and Hebrew renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century inherited no such tradition of literature. The politically dependent Jews found it difficult to acclaim the man of action as their authentic Jewish hero. Most Jewish writers had not spent their youth in political action like Stendhal or in the political opposition like Dostoyevsky but rather breaking out of yeshivas to gain a secular education. The man of learning, who defined the Jewish image of masculinity, was not the best candidate for literary heroism. There were Jews who mastered the culture of the Gentiles and made their mark as intellectuals in Western Europe. But here language and cultural orientation became a problem: what kind of hero could Moses Mendelssohn or Heinrich Heine be to the writer in a Jewish language, whose culture was predicated on the perpetuation of Jewish civilization? Writers of Jewish pulp fiction created improbable saviors of damsels in danger, but their adventures and even their costumes lacked credibility. It seemed that the more Jewish the main character was, the less heroic he appeared to be and the more heroic, the less Jewish.

Sholem Aleichem was the first to break through this impasse. The anchoring work of the modern Jewish canon—Tevye the Dairyman—is the transcribed repertoire of the first Jewish stand-up comedian who was also in the process of creating his audience. The comic hero is something of a compromise, to be sure: his words speak louder than his actions. Still, let us not fail to note that he manages to assist women in distress.

Tevye the Dairyman: The Making of a Comic Hero

In 1894, when he was thirty-five years old, Sholem Aleichem created a character named Tevye, a village Jew with a number of unmarried daughters, as in the Yiddish proverb “Zibn tekhter iz nisht kayn gelekhter [seven daughters are no laughing matter].” The maxim makes fun of what it says is no laughing matter, and on that same contradictory premise Tevye would turn the problems of his life into humor. Sholem Aleichem had just returned to Kiev from his customary summer vacation in nearby Boyarka, and as he wrote to his good friend Mordecai Spector, he intended to convey some of that holiday experience in the forthcoming volume of Spector’s Hoyzfraynd [Home Companion]:

The story will be called Tevye der milkhiker, composed in Boyarka, that is to say, I heard the story from Tevye himself as he stood in front of my dacha with his horse and cart, weighing out our butter and cheese. The story is interesting, but Tevye himself a thousand times more interesting! I convey the story in his own words, and am spared the effort of describing him since he describes himself.¹

Like an impresario who knows that he has just landed his meal ticket, Sholem Aleichem negotiated with Spector over every detail of spelling, layout, typeset, and the quality of paper on which the Tevye story was to be printed.² Before long, everyone was in on the game. Members of Sholem Aleichem’s family and critics familiar with the region confirmed that there was, indeed, such a Jew named Tevye, and when a local dairyman protested that he did not have any daughters, it seemed only to reinforce the notion that a new literary talent had been discovered.³

YIDDISH LITERATURE was still young and untried when Sholem Aleichem began writing. Just as Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe used “discovered” diaries and letters, pseudobiography, editorial footnotes, and other such authenticating artifices to win the trust of new English readers by insisting that their books delivered other people’s words, so too did Sholem Aleichem often present himself as the intermediary between his characters and his readers to attest to the actuality of his creations. A decade earlier, after he had begun to publish in the Di yidishe folksblat [The Jewish People’s Paper], then the only Yiddish newspaper in the Russian empire, he had turned his name into the most common greeting in the language. That is, by keeping his first name, Sholem, and changing his patronymic, Rabinovitch, he formed the phrase one might address to an old friend when meeting him in the street: “Sholem Aleichem [how are you doing]?” Behind this friendly pseudonym—really only half a disguise, since the fictive author shared the vital statistics of his creator—Sholem Aleichem gave the impression of being one of the people, intermingling with his fellow Jews wherever they happened to be.⁴

In this he had adapted the practice of the man he called zeyde, the “grandfather” or shaping genius of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, who assumed the literary disguise of Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the book peddler) when he began to write Yiddish fiction in 1864. Mendele Moykher-Sforim took on such an independent reality as the agent and publisher of the stories he brought to the public that he eclipsed his creator and became known as the author of his works. The Mendele narrator seemed not only to unite but virtually to create a community of readers as he traveled through the Jewish Pale of Settlement, between cities, towns, and villages, among the learned and the simple Jews, bringing fresh reading material to men and women, old and young. By carrying both religious and secular material—amulets to ward off the evil eye and the new kind of novels—he implicitly appealed to a modern audience that included old-fashioned Jews. Rabinovitch’s Sholem Aleichem was even more peripatetic and democratic than Mendele in that he figured as the listener or the amanuensis of a people, providing what many assumed was “the life of the people in its authentic form.”⁵ Tevye, whom the critic Meir Viner called Mendele’s younger brother, was homier still. Both characters enjoy quoting Jewish sources, but undereducated Tevye feels freer to play around with them, inviting perpetual uncertainty over how much of his humor is involuntary and how much is willed. Both peddlers offer merchandise to the public, but Mendele retains the rights to everything he brings to market and has to persuade his potential customers of the value of each new book. A creature of the Jewish Enlightenment, Mendele assumes that literature must prove its worth by bettering the life of its readers. Tevye offers food and entertainment, and according to Sholem Aleichem, the very best of both. His merchandise purports to be just good, not good for you. And unlike Mendele, who kept mum about his private life, Tevye enjoys sharing confidences about himself and the family.

At first Sholem Aleichem went to elaborate lengths to establish the distance between Tevye and himself, the implied author of the work. In the first installment that appeared in Hoyzfraynd he describes a big-boned, hirsute Jew, one of those healthy village specimens who eats dumplings with cheese “and spends his ninety years on earth without the help of glasses, false teeth, hemorrhoids, and other such Jewish pains and troubles.”⁶ In a letter to the author, Tevye declares himself flattered by the attention of the author from Yehupetz (Sholem Aleichem’s fictional rendition of Kiev) who now promises to bring his story to the reading public. Citing Genesis 32:11, Tevye protests, “Kotoynti [I am not worthy]!”—echoing Jacob’s exclamation (“I am not worthy of all the mercies and of all the truth, which Thou has shown Thy servant”) as he flees his vengeful brother Esau.* Jacob is reminding God of their special relationship while admitting that he does not deserve His help, and with the same mixture of humility and chutzpa Tevye tells Sholem Aleichem where to send the money he is owed, presumably for royalties. But by the time Tevye reappeared in a second chapter a few years later, he was brought on stage without preamble, like a performer so famous he needs no introduction.⁷ Sholem Aleichem realized that he had discovered in Tevye the Jew through whom he could tell the story of his time, and he brought him back again and again over the next twenty years at critical moments in his own and the nation’s life.

^*Author’s note: Transliterated Hebrew phrases with translations are in italics within quotation marks. That part of the phrase that appears in roman type and square brackets is the fuller expansion of the text in which the translated phrase is embedded.

The first monologue, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” is exceptionally cheerful. Nine or ten years after the events in question (time enough for the narrative to have ripened), he recalls how once on his way home from Boiberik (the fictional Boyarka) after a long day of hauling logs, having earned not nearly enough to feed his abundant family, he was startled out of his late afternoon prayers by the sudden appearance of two creatures in the woods. First he fears robbers, then, seeing that they are female, demons. They turn out to be simply a Jewish mother and daughter who had lost their way in the woods that morning. Tevye is slow to understand his heroic potential in guiding these women out of the forest, and they are mildly contemptuous of the schlimazl, the hapless bumbler, who has to serve as their savior. But at their urging, he agrees to turn his horse and wagon around and to transport them back to their dacha in Boiberik. There he is rewarded beyond his wildest fantasies. For bringing the women home, the head of the family, a traditional Jew like himself, showers Tevye with more money than he has the temerity to ask for and invites all the other members of the family to contribute something from their own pockets as well. The bounty Tevye receives that day allows him and his wife to set up a home dairy, producing cheese and butter products they had never before been able to afford.

Tevye tells this story at his leisure in Boiberik, the charming summer retreat. The literary scholar Frank Kermode argues that Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare were attracted by the pastoral genre at a time of exceptionally poignant social transformation in England: when London was developing a “distinctively metropolitan ethos” and traditionally rural citizens had to adjust to the new social standing of the commercial classes and the growth of wealth based on new values.⁸ Using Nature as its background, Elizabethan drama reestablished a common humanity among people otherwise estranged. Similarly, Sholem Aleichem conjured up the perpetually summery Boiberik-Boyarka in a period of significant upheaval among Russian Jews. The infamous May Laws, imposed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, had prohibited Jews from settling or buying property outside their towns, or shtetlakh, and forbade them to open their markets to peasants on Sundays and Christian holidays. “Poor!” I. L. Peretz had exclaimed in a story of the previous year. “It’s hard to imagine how poor! Ten grain dealers throw themselves on every measure of rye that a peasant brings . . . one hundred tailors for one pair of overalls, fifty shoemakers for one small repair.”⁹

The government not only failed to protect its Jewish subjects from the violence of pogroms but conducted what the historian Simon Dubnow called “legislative pogroms” through its policies of economic harassment.¹⁰ Such solidarity as might have been created among Jews in reaction to these punitive measures was undermined by a policy of exceptions that allowed certain categories of Jewish merchants, professionals, artists, students, and craftsmen to live in cities outside the Pale. By distinguishing between wealthy and poor Jews, educated and ignorant Jews, the Russian government drove a wedge into the Jewish body politic, rewarding those who were able to distance themselves from the masses. Sholem Aleichem’s readers would have known that while the summer vacationers enjoyed the privilege of residence in Yehupetz, a Jew like Tevye could not legally stay in the city overnight.

Anti-tsarism contributed to the problem. Opposed to the government’s oppressive policies in all other respects, Jewish nihilists shared the tsar’s interest in exacerbating the tension between richer and poorer Jews in order to replace Jewish loyalties by loyalties to class. Already in the 1870s, Jews in the revolutionary movement had repudiated national allegiance in favor of class solidarity. “You know very well that I detest Judaism just as I hate all other . . . isms,” wrote Aaron Lieberman, the founder of the first Jewish socialist organization, who claimed to fight only for the oppressed Jews, “the suffering masses among them and those who intend to join us.”¹¹ While only a minority of revolutionaries actually welcomed the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881 as a preparatory stage for the revolt of the masses, socialism substituted the brotherhood of class for the communal discipline of the Jews and encouraged Jews to express the kind of hostility toward the rich that could never be openly voiced against the goyim (people of other religions and nationalities).

Against this background of repression and divisiveness, Tevye tells of bridging the extremes of poverty and wealth. The chapter title “Dos groyse gevins [The Big Win]” refers literally to winning the lottery, but had Tevye won such a jackpot, the miracle would have been his alone, insulating one more Jew from his impoverished coreligionists. Instead, Tevye’s windfall is the result of a Jewish exchange of services very much like the interaction between him and the author in the frame of the story. Just as Tevye makes a living off Sholem Aleichem, so the vacationing author intends to milk the milkman, turning Tevye’s stories into literature and then bringing them to market. Neither commercial exploitation nor charity, theirs is a mutually beneficial transaction. As such, Tevye earns his reward from the rich man’s family through his own generous act, just as he earns his author’s gratitude for his humor and his cheese.

Tevye’s narrative is set at the beginning of summer—the high season of literary comedy. He is returning from a long day’s work and, in the way that an epic narrator might call upon his muse, is reciting the shimenesre (Eighteen Benedictions of the afternoon service) when his horse suddenly breaks away on a “pleasure jaunt”:

In a word, there I was running behind the wagon and singing the shimenesre, forgive the comparison, like a cantor at the pulpit: Mekhalkeyl khayim bekhesed, Who provideth life with His bounty, Umekayeym emunosoy lisheyney ofor, Who keepeth faith with them who slumber in earth—even with those who already lie in the ground baking bagels. With my troubles I was six feet underground already! Oh, do we suffer! Not like those rich Yehupetz Jews sitting all summer long in their dachas in Boiberik, eating and drinking and swimming in luxury! Master of the Universe, what have I done to deserve all this? Am I or am I not a Jew like any other? Help! . . . Re’ey-no be’onyeynu, See us in our affliction—take a good look at us poor folk slaving away and do something about it, because if You don’t, just who do You think will?¹²

Running away with texts is as much a part of Jewish tradition as prayer itself, but the dialectical tension of Tevye’s argument is new. The reader trained in paradox may note that Tevye’s prayer triggers the revolt against it: praising the Lord for Hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also By
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.
• 6.
• 7.
• 8.
• 9.
• 10.
• Author’s Postscript
• Notes
• Suggested Reading from the Modern Jewish Canon
• Index