But what is Tevye to Sholem Aleichem? For one thing, Sholem Aleichem does what any writer worth his salt would do: he sticks by his informant, the one who delivers first-rate stories. Sholem Aleichem also identifies with Tevye, with his pain and needs — he is himself a flawed person who seeks redemption in art, having squandered his in-laws’ estate and doomed a large family to a life of permanent financial difficulty. Most important, the persona Sholem Aleichem, as an artist and a thinker (who cogitates through narration, characters, and situations), accepts the impotence of the protagonists, their passivity, and their ability to hold on to life only through sheer endurance, inertia, and garrulity. These are to him the people who experience the human condition authentically. Suspending judgment, eschewing ideological fiats, and allowing his protagonists to advocate for themselves, Sholem Aleichem embraces the kind of people other writers satirize. He is never offended by their lies or self-delusions, which are to him as precious as any truth, being, under the circumstances, the only truths they can afford. Never demanding from them heroics of any kind, he suffers them to bombard their own consciousness and that of everybody around them with words. He accepts their bavardage as their talisman, their sole means of avoiding mental breakdown, and he makes brilliant artistic use of it — nowhere more brilliantly than in Tevye der milkhiker, where he first discovers this winning formula.
And what about us, the readers? We, too, in our capacity as consumers of the aesthetic, embrace Tevye, suspending our judgment and abiding by artistic rather than moral or practical criteria. Were we to live with a Tevye-like person, we would reject him as impossible. Had he tried, as he must, to impress us with his stories and clever quibbling, we would flee him as a pest. Who would want to listen to a Tevye? Fortunately, we do not have to endure Tevye in real life. That’s why we can love and look up to him — he is safely ensconced in a book. The same loquacity that in real life would turn us off acquires in the book the enticing quality of flowing honey, of which we cannot have enough. We are even willing to be hoodwinked by Tevye and say and write rather unwise things about the qualities he does not possess, for most of us still refuse to see where the greatness of Sholem Aleichem’s chief creation lies.
In Tevye der milkhiker Sholem Aleichem wrote the most audacious critique of the heroic humanist ethos that dominated modern, secular, and particularly nationalist Jewish culture — and that he himself, as a run-of-the-mill Jewish intellectual (and Zionist) of the turn of the nineteenth century, swore by in his many moments of mediocrity. But once he emerged as the genial artist who blazed paths into a new kind of Jewish culture, he started undermining this ethos, burrowing underneath it. Modern secular Jewish culture reprimanded traditional Jews; criticized them for being weak, passive, unrealistic, and tardy; and urged them both by positive exhortation and by biting satirical jabs to wake up, seize history by its horns, and replace texts and words with deeds and actions. Sholem Aleichem, however, in his moments of true greatness embraced passivity, weakness, wordiness, inertia, and minority — everything that almost everybody else rejected. In depth, originality, and authenticity, his acceptance of Jewish passivity was equal to that of S. J. Agnon and was surpassed only by that of Franz Kafka. In fact, the best introduction to Tevye der milkhiker can be found not in the misguided interpretations of the work as the epitome of Jewish spiritual fortitude, but rather in Agnon’s stories about passive Jews and even more in Kafka’s haunting explorations of Jewish weakness, texts such as Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Where Sholem Aleichem approximated the depth of Kafka’s parables, there the modern Jewish literary imagination celebrated, by exercising a negative capability, its greatest triumphs.
THE BLESSINGS OF ORPHANHOOD
Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl the Cantor’s Son) is one of the two major works that Sholem Aleichem wrote in the last decade of his life (1906-16), the other being his exquisite Railway Stories (1909-10). Working throughout this hectic decade on many large-scale projects — long, panoramic novels, a multivolume autobiography — he nevertheless broke new ground and approximated the artistic level of his earlier masterpieces in these two somewhat less ambitious works. Conceived and started in 1906, during the author’s disappointing — indeed, humiliating — stay in the United States, Motl was written intermittently in 1907 (the “European” part) and then in 1915-16 (the unfinished “American” part). It represents a revolutionary breakthrough and is perhaps the most subversive and unconventional of Sholem Aleichem’s extended fictions, although cloaked in the innocent comic narration of a lively child protagonist.
Initially the Motl tales were not perceived as innovative, either thematically or technically. On the contrary, at a time when novelty in Yiddish fiction meant individualism, these stories seemed to move in an opposite direction, toward collectivism (as a further treatment of the shtetl theme, which contemporary Yiddish fiction had already sucked dry) and social tragicomedy. In Motl Sholem Aleichem seemed to be projecting through a comic perspective — that of a child who hardly grasped what was taking place before his eyes — a dark panorama of eastern European Jewish traditional society as it succumbed to unstoppable historical forces. The author, it seemed, was up to his usual tricks.
But Motl was innovative neither in its social content nor in its method of narration. The two interconnected themes of Motl—the rapid disintegration of traditional eastern European shtetl society due to economic dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and sheer physical vulnerability, and the resulting mass emigration to the West, which at the time assumed the dimensions of a veritable Völkerwanderung—were among the most prominent in Yiddish fiction of the time. That the author chose to present this theme through the perspective of the shtetl’s middle class and its culture agents (the so-called kli-koydesh, or holy vessels: rabbis, ritual slaughterers, cantors), rather than that of the poorer and less educated members of the community, was also reflective of the era. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was mainly the poorer members of traditional Jewish society who were affected by the decline of shtetl life, but as conditions worsened at the beginning of the twentieth, even the more stable and culturally entrenched members found reason to emigrate. As for themes of proletarianization; industrial exploitation; loss of human dignity (through numbing, underpaid labor, prostitution, labor-caused sickness, penury, and devastation); and the advent of Jewish trade unionism, socialist and anarchist agitation, and the like, which were to be treated in the “American” part of the story, they too were hardly new; this entire complex had been explored for almost two decades by both the poets and fiction writers of the so-called American Yiddish “shop” literature, from the first wave of eastern European Jewish influx into the United States.
Nor was there much novelty in child narrators. Sholem Aleichem, among many others, had repeatedly employed them since the publication in 1886 of his short story “Dos messerl” (The Penknife). In the tradition of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Mark Twain, he focused on children as the most vulnerable and oppressed, but also the most rebellious, members of the traditional Jewish community. He saw in the lives of Jewish children, exposed to the traditional educational system, the clash between the “natural” man, still relatively untamed, and the broken-in, “socialized” Jew. In the many stories he wrote about children, instinctual, libidinal, and aesthetic urges are pitted against a harsh and restrictive social and educational order, whose members, embittered by weakness, poverty, and harassment, scapegoat those who are even weaker than themselves. Encounters between children and adults offered many opportunities for comic, even hilarious narration. They would usually make for stories constructed as episodes replete with pranks — the satisfying of sinful appetites and wishes — but ending with a comic catastrophe, which started children in the process of internalizing the norms of their civilization and the limitations of the world they lived in. The same structural principle controls many of the Motl stories, rendering them stories of socialization and growth, albeit under the special circumstances of emigration and acculturation. In this way some critics saw Motl as father of the man. He would become, one said, a latter-day Tevye.6