 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Books: Leaving the Shtetl Behind
Philip Graubart
318pp; $24.99
New translations of two of Sholem Aleichem�s greatest works remind us that the satirist wasn�t dealing so much in nostalgia as he was in the disintegration of tradition
Sholem Aleichem created three supremely fascinating characters, all from Kasrilevke, the author�s mythical shtetl. Tevye the Dairyman has become a cultural icon, but very few English readers are familiar with the other two: Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl, the Cantor�s Son. Thanks to Hillel Halkin�s new translation in a single volume of the adventures of both, these two cockeyed Kasrilevkans may finally reach the wider audience they deserve.
"The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Shendl" is an epistolary novel made up of the correspondence between the protagonist and his young wife, Sheyne. Menakhem-Mendl, we quickly learn, has absconded with Sheyne�s savings and fled the shtetl for the big city, where he hopes to make a quick fortune, then send for his wife and children. His letters narrate the rise and fall of his various get-rich-quick schemes, from stocks and bonds, to currency trading, to agricultural futures, and finally to writing, matchmaking and selling insurance. Sheyne�s replies alternate between befuddlement and rage, spiced with a little Kasrilevke gossip. She insists that her husband return home so she can kill him.
"Motl, the Cantor�s Son" tells the story of a precocious and fatherless boy, journeying from Kasrilevke through the great European cities, across the Atlantic, to America and the Lower East Side. Along the way, Motl and his family stumble through the awful roadblocks of modern Jewish history: pogroms, poverty, exile, a confounding, Kafkaesque, European bureaucracy, a harrowing ocean voyage and heartless Ellis Island officials.
Both books tell dark stories, but being a humorist, Sholem Aleichem deftly locates the comedy in both heroes� predicaments. Most of the jokes come from the juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional. Menakhem-Mendl, for example, strains to explain the seemingly incorporeal commerce of the Warsaw stock exchange. He tells Sheyne he�s dealing in "Londons," meaning English currency. Sheyne wonders how one can trade an entire city. She thinks stocks are chicken stockades; and corporate boards are bundles of lumber. After enduring several confused, jargon-filled explanations, Sheyne begs her husband to "write like a human being!"
Motl and his family also play the rubes, gallivanting through the mystifying big city. It takes them awhile to understand that there are languages other than Russian and Yiddish. They think Ellis Island is owned by a woman named "Ella."
Of course, these jokes only work if the reader is more sophisticated than the bumbling, confused shtetlers. Today, we�ve forgotten that Sholem Aleichem�s audience consisted primarily of city Jews, for whom the shtetl had already become anachronistic. His great subject was not the shtetl itself, but the disintegration of the shtetl, and the traditional life that nourished it.
It is economic instability that Sholem Aleichem uses to symbolize the shtetl�s collapse. Menakhem-Mendl escapes Kasrilevke because the new possibilities suddenly facing Jews fire his imagination. He makes millions, then loses them, in dizzying succession, until he finally gives up on Europe and escapes again, this time to America. Motl and his brother, before fleeing Kasrilevke, also catch the get-rich-quick bug, succeeding and then failing, in spectacular fashion, in beer, ink and pest removal. Behind the humor, though, lie the unstable economic forces that drive Jewish families away from traditional life.
Motl and Menakhem-Mendl�s greatness as characters lies in how optimistically and flexibly they face the wrenching dislocations of their time and place. Both demonstrate an inspiring capacity to reinvent themselves. Motl, less a joke than Menakhem-Mendl, displays real courage in his cockeyed optimism. The plight of Goldele, a young female denied an entrance visa to America because of eye disease, moves him temporarily to tears. But, on his way to the boat, he promises to make enough money in America to cure her eyes.
For most of Sholem Aleichem�s characters, Jewish reinventions gain momentum and then finally resolve themselves in America. Motl�s schemes succeed beyond his wildest dreams in New York, where the family operates a series of increasingly successful businesses and finally settles down in a spacious, American apartment. In one of the most darkly poignant scenes in all of Sholem Aleichem�s work, Motl, still just a boy, casually changes his name to the more American Max. He slowly learns English, drops Yiddish, and drinks lemonade on Yom Kippur.
It�s in these New York scenes that we encounter the cost for this boisterous reinvention. By the end of the unfinished novel, the shtetl-dwelling cantor�s son has become an English-speaking, bourgeois American. As Hillel Halkin points out in the introduction, if Motl were real, when he grew up, he wouldn�t even be able to read the stories of his creator in the original Yiddish.
But thanks to Halkin, we, at least, can read them now, in an excellent, fluid translation. As we Jews continue to reinvent ourselves, we can study the fictional lives of two masters of the art. Ironically, our reinventions can now move in the opposite direction, from the New World to the Old. Motl and Menakhem-Mendl, these two escape artists, bring us back to the place of their youth, back to the shtetl, a world they thought they�d abandoned for good.
Philip Graubart is rabbi of Congregation Beth El in La Jolla, California. His latest novel is "My Mother�s Song."
Books
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |