Haaretz
Kislev 29, 5765
In the story "The Man
from Buenos Aires" from Shalom Aleichem's train stories, a stranger tells
the tale of how he became wealthy to his neighbor in a train compartment,
who is the first-person narrator. At the end of the story the narrator
asks the traveler what business he is in. The man from Buenos Aires, who
has accumulated a great deal of wealth from trafficking in women - a
detail that the reader has already figured out for himself even though it
has not been stated explicitly - tells the naive narrator, who is perhaps
only pretending to be naive: "Not citrons, my friend, not
citrons."
The reply of the man from Buenos Aires to his fellow
traveler on the train, who prefers only to see the explicit and to turn
his gaze away from the cover, expresses the basic problematic aspect of
the Hebrew reader's attitude toward Yiddish literature: Whereas Hebrew
literature has acquired the status of a high, national literature, a
literature that stood at the cradle of the Zionist project, Yiddish
literature has been perceived as one that operates by virtue of a popular,
inferior tradition that is written in the formulas of the servants' novel,
the schund, written by Meir Shaikevitch and other authors in the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th.
In his new book, "The Dark
Side of Shalom Aleichem," Dan Miron, one of the most important literary
scholars in Israel, shows that Yiddish literature does not only concern
itself with citrons, not only with nonthreatening appearances and not only
with the comic and the sentimental - but also with the dark, underground
forces that impel great literature as such.
In this book Miron
brings together a selection of essays in the area of Yiddish that were
written beginning in 1982, among them the essay "Between Two Homes" on the
split, Yiddish-Hebrew world of Zalman Schneour, which was originally
appended to the Yiddish novel "The People of Shklov"; the essay "Fears of
All the Days of the Year" on Yehoshua Perla's "Everyday Jews"; and the
essay "The Peeling of the Soft Pit," on the "Yash" novels of Jacob
Glattstein.
In the only essay that has been published for the first
time in this book, the title essay, Miron completes the processes of the
revision that has occurred in his perception of the place of Yiddish
literature within Jewish literature as a whole, a perception whose
beginnings can be found in some of the other texts in the
book.
According to Miron, Shalom Aleichem embodies the diametric
opposite of the popular image that has clung to him, the image of a
good-natured comedian, "a living bone from the people, a kind of essence
from the people," as Y.H. Brenner wrote in his article eulogizing the
great Yiddish writer. Shalom Aleichem's artistic world, as presented by
Miron in the essay, is a world in which the motivating forces seem to be
Dostoyevskian (or, alternatively, Freudian): a boy who rejoices in his
father's death and the anarchy that prevails after the destruction of the
old world in "Motl the Son of Peysi the Cantor," or a father who with his
own hands leads his daughter to commit suicide in "Tevye the Milkman,"
whose character, as Miron analyzes it in the new essay, is so very
different from the one played by, among others, Chaim Topol in the film
adaptation of "A Fiddler on the Roof" - a kind of harmless, Yiddish Salah
Shabati or Everyman.
In order to understand the depth of the
change in Miron's perception of Shalom Aleichem, it is necessary to see
how he presents the figure of Tevye in 1970, in his book "Shalom Aleichem
- Essays." There, Tevye is presented as someone who "though he had taken a
heavy beating from the disasters that have befallen him, has repelled the
blows as though they had not penetrated to some internal entity inside
him, in accordance with which, for the most part, his identity is embodied
for us as a comic hero, despite everything." At that time, Miron did not
come out explicitly against the perception of Shalom Aleichem that
prevailed in Hebrew culture. Just as the disasters that befell Tevye did
not succeed in penetrating the inner entity within him, they, it would
seem, did not succeed in exploding some inner essence in the Hebrew reader
who could see Tevye the Milkman only as a popular, amusing and
good-hearted character.
Now Miron is attempting to take apart that
"inner entity" inside Tevye and put it back together again, just as he
does for other of Shalom Aleichem's characters as well. Miron shows the
obverse side of Tevye, who in "The Dark Side of Shalom Aleichem's
Laughter" is not a comic hero at all. Miron's fascinating analysis shows
Tevye as a person who has destructive urges, for whom the character of the
popular fool is just a masquerade. To a large extent, in the same way, the
character of the popular storyteller is no more than a disguise to tease
the reader.
In effect, it seems that Miron is trying to take from
Shalom Aleichem the mantle of the simple Jewish storyteller, in which the
latter so loved to deck himself. In the short poem "Inscription on My
Tombstone," which is appended to the translation of his autobiographical
novel "Fun'm yarid" ("The Great Fair"), Shalom Aleichem described himself
as a "a simple Jew who wrote Jewish to delight." Miron shows not only that
Shalom Aleichem was not a simple Jew at all, but also that "Jewish" -
Yiddish - was not destined only to delight.
But diverting attention
to the dark side in the works of Shalom Aleichem serves Miron as only part
of a broader process, which attempts to re-examine the role of Yiddish and
its culture within Jewish culture. Not as a language that was destined to
give birth from within to a new Hebrew literature, as Dov Sadan argued in
"Avnei Bedek," one of the cornerstones of literary criticism in Hebrew,
but rather as a language destined to make the voice of a culture heard,
and which was considered inferior as compared to the elitist Hebrew
culture, the national language that had taken on flesh and sinew. In this,
Miron in effect carries on a trend that began in the previous decade in
the study of Hebrew literature, which examines the subversive potential of
writing in Yiddish.
This potential has been examined in various
ways by Chana Kronfeld in 1993 in "On the Margins of Modernism:
Decentering Literary Dynamics" and Iris Parush who, in her 2001 book
"Nashim korot; Yitronah shel shuliut" ("Reading Jewish Women"), presented
the phenomenon of the reading of popular novels in Yiddish as a
subversive-feminist act that shaped a Yiddish-female world as an
alternative to the Hebrew-male world.
Through his attention to
Shalom Aleichem, who perhaps more than any other writer symbolizes Yiddish
culture and its literature, Dan Miron attempts to expand this discussion,
and it is not by chance that he turns to Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Miron proposes a kind of development of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of
minor literature, i.e., literature in a language that is placed in an
inferior position within the minority to which it belongs. Thus the oeuvre
of Shalom Aleichem, which is written in Yiddish, can challenge the way the
world is run, as well as the institutions of Jewish society, both
traditional and national.
At the beginning of the book Miron writes
in a quasi-confessional mode of his love for Shalom Aleichem: "In my
eyes," writes Miron, he "is the greatest of Jewish writers alongside Franz
Kafka, and the one who has succeeded more than any other Jewish writer not
only in exploiting the comic gap between the modern Jew and the simple
Eastern European Jew, but also to eradicate it."
Beyond the fact
that the mention of Kafka on the same level as Shalom Aleichem seems
almost inevitable, in light of Miron's invocation of Deleuze and Guattari,
consideration must be given to another matter that is implied by this. As
the greatest Jewish writer in addition to Kafka, in Miron's opinion Shalom
Aleichem is greater than any other writer whose works he has researched -
greater than S. Yizhar, greater than Gnessin, greater than Mendele and
greater even than S.Y. Agnon.
Miron's statement - in which there
appears to be something of a display of modesty ("In my eyes") or apology
that is directed to his reader, the Hebrew reader - necessitates to a
large extent the examination of this essay in a broader context. In other
words, it is impossible to read this essay only as an essay on the world
of Shalom Aleichem. It has to be read as an essay by Dan Miron on the
world of Shalom Aleichem, in which he re-evaluates the status of Shalom
Aleichem in Jewish literature. That is, it is necessary to examine in what
way the new essay connects with the totality of Miron's historiography.
The interpretation that Miron gives of the artistic world of
Shalom Aleichem, a world of anarchy, the breaking of preconceptions and
the shattering of taboos, necessarily places this world in juxtaposition
to the world of Hebrew literature. And the world of Hebrew literature
within the totality of the 50 years of Miron's study of Hebrew literature,
and in particular as it emerges from in his monumental 1983 study "When
Loners Come Together," is quite different from the nihilist and anarchic
world presented in "The Dark Side of Shalom Aleichem." Yiddish literature,
as it is represented by Shalom Aleichem, undermined the pillars of
society, whereas Hebrew literature, especially as it emerges from "When
Loners Come Together," is a literature that established a
national-historical social order and narrative.
It is impossible to
describe the social climate of the Jewish world at the turn of the last
century without discussing the place of Yiddish. However, within Hebrew
culture, Yiddish and its culture are perceived, for the most part, as a
language and a literature that have remained outside the national camp,
never mind outside the boundaries of the literature that accompanies the
project of the national revival. Therefore Yiddish literature did not have
a place within the borders of the Hebrew literary republic, as Miron
defined it in "When Loners Come Together."
Now it appears that
Miron is undertaking a revision of the definition of the borders of the
Hebrew literary public, to the shaping of which he himself had
contributed. As noted, he has been dealing with Yiddish literature for
several decades now. However, it seems to me that this placement of it as
a minor and subversive literature is what expands the boundaries of the
Hebrew literary republic. Moreover, it redefines its realm: a major Hebrew
mainstream and working against it the minor stream (with Deleuze and
Guattari's determination that a great literature can only be a minor
literature reverberating in the background) of Yiddish literature, lead by
Shalom Rabinowitz - Shalom Aleichem - who, according to Miron, is the
greatest Jewish writer, alongside Kafka.
And one final
observation: Miron dedicates the essay to Benjamin Harshav with the words
"il migli or fabbro," with which T.S. Eliot dedicated "The Wasteland" to
Ezra Pound, and which mean "the most skilled artisan." Both Harshav and
Miron, who are among the greatest researchers of Hebrew literature, are
now at universities in America, the former at Yale and the latter at
Columbia. Both of them devote a considerable portion of their research and
publications to Yiddish literature no less than to Hebrew literature. It
seems to me that this is more than a coincidence. It is possible that it
is in America that the ground is riper for bilingual, Yiddish-Hebrew
research - or perhaps it is Harshav and Miron who are taking care, despite
everything, that Yiddish will not trespass on Hebrew.
Matan
Hermoni is writing a master's thesis in the literature department at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.