Sholom Aleichem

by Sholom Rabinowitz

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Stories for Jewish Children

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SOURCE: "Stories for Jewish Children," in Sholom Aleichem: A Non-Critical Introduction, Mouton, 1974, pp. 143-60.

[In the following essay, Gittleman examines Aleichem's portrayals of Jewish mothers and sons in his short fiction and finds similarities in Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint.]

"If only you realize what we're doing for you. Do him a favor and he doesn't appreciate it. Don't jump, don't run. Walk like a human being."

—Mother to her child in "The Ruined Passover"

1. PORTNOY IN KASRILEVKE

It may seem somewhat strained . . . to make reference to a rather sensational bestseller in America which appeared in 1969, but, for better or worse, there is no denying that Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint1 has a certain attraction to the student of Sholom Aleichem who has had the opportunity to consider the image of the Jewish child, particularly the son, in the collected works. Roth's now infamous hero, Alexander Portnoy, is the ne plus ultra of Jewish sons, or at least that is his own opinion of his situation. In the novel, Portnoy is going through analysis with a psychiatrist, in an effort to explain his particular neurosis. He has all sorts of problems, some sexual, some social, but all, he claims, have their roots in the same source: his mother. Portnoy (and Roth) analyse what he considers to be the trauma of being the son of a Jewish mother. Now, it would be a self-defeating effort if we were to take a detour and consider the merits of Roth's novel as literature. What is of some interest to us is the nature of the characterization of Mrs. Portnoy, her son's relationship to her, and the extent to which Roth's novel is a statement which has its inspiration from the same taproot which Sholom Aleichem drew upon in creating characters remarkably similar to Mrs. Portnoy.

Roth, in effect, attempts to describe what it is like to be a Jewish child in America. Of the hundreds of stories which Sholom Aleichem wrote, the largest proportion were tales about children, and most interestly, the majority of these were narrated in 'Portnoy fashion', by an adult seemingly unburdening himself of a particularly important incident in his early life which he only much later comes to recount. Two volumes were entitled Stories for Jewish Children (Mayses far yidishe kinder), but it is more accurate to say that the majority are stories about Jewish children. Sholom Aleichem goes into considerable detail to analyse what it was like to be a Jewish child, and particularly a Jewish child who happened to be a son, bor n and raised in the shtetl atmosphere of Czarist Russia. The Jewish male child of the shtetl represented "the family's opportunity to be as good as anybody—our chance to win honor and respect".2 In theological terms, each male child was a potential Messiah, and was treated accordingly. The upbringing, cultural education, and general welfare of this potentially important little creature was naturally enough the responsibility primarily of his mother. It is at this point, remarkably, that a gap of a chronological century and a thousand years of civilized progress appear to be insignificant, as Roth and Sholom Aleichem converge on a strikingly similar characterized stereotype—or archetype—in the Jewish mother.

The mothers in Sholom Aleichem's stories are variations on a theme, differing in degree, never in kind. Some are brutal, others extraordinarily kind and self-sacrificing, none are indifferent to their children's needs; but all of them are alike in the total belief in the infallability of their techniques of child-rearing, as well as their possession of an instinct which was to guarantee no resistance whatsoever from the young men who were their subjects. It is rare to find such a consistent delineation of character in any one writer's corpus as one does of the mother-matriarch in Sholom Aleichem's writings. She displays a singlemindedness and dedication to her task—producing the perfect child—which quite obviously impressed the author. Perfection in the child meant, in terms of the Jewish communal structure, honor for the family, for the parents, and the only certain way, even for the impoverished, of gaining status in the community. It was in terms of the methodology employed to attain this status that Sholom Aleichem makes his criticism.

"'Look at that pair of hands!' And she slapped me smartly across my wrists to make me drop them. 'When you sit at Uncle Hertz's table remember to keep your hands down, do you hear me? And don't let your face get as red as Yadwocha the peasant girl's. And don't roll your eyes like a tomcat. Do you hear what I'm telling you? And sit up like a human being. And the main thing is—your nose. Oh that nose of yours. Come here, let me put your nose in order.'" Throughout this story, "The Purim Feast", a young boy is shoved, pushed, and generally abused by a mother who is "trying to make a mentsh out of him".3 Clearly the author is in a way attempting a subtle characterization. He presents a selfish, domineering, coarse, and thoroughly unsympathetic picture devoid of even a hint of genuine materaal instincts. The boy is abused during preparations for the family Purim festival, at which the young man is to shine, in order to impress Uncle Hertz, the nogid of the family circle, and in doing so will shed honor and glory on his mother and father, as well as on himself. Thus, when the party ends in disaster (he was overcome by a fit of uncontrollable laughter and beaten black and blue by his mother for this behavior), he is made to feel an assortment of guilts, having betrayed the larger family, his parents, and himself. Years later, when he discusses the event (the occasion for the story itself), we can sense the extraordinary humiliation which he must have felt on that occasion, as well as the guilt which no doubt marked him for life: "That night I cursed my own bones and I cursed Purim and the Purim feast . . . and more than anyone else I cursed Uncle Hertz, may he forgive me, for he has long since passed on to his reward. On his grave stands a tombstone, the most imposing tombstone on the whole cemetery, and on it in gold letters are engraved the virtues in which he excelled during his life . . . "

There is one other dimension to this particular type of hard-driving Jewish mother, and that is her relationship with her husband. Before the big event, he asks his wife if Uncle Hertz, who is her brother, has arrived yet from out-of-town:

"'Well, what's the news? Has your Hertz arrived yet?' And she gave him such a fare-thee-well that my father didn't know whether to stand up or to sit down. 'What do you mean by my Hertz? What sort of expression!' 'Whose is he if not yours? Is he mine?' said my father trying to do better. But he didn't advance far . . . My mother attacked him on all sides at once. 'Well, if he is mine, what of it? You don't like it? His ancestry isn't good enough for you? You had to divide your father's inheritance with him, is that it? You never got any favors from him, is that it?' 'Who says I didn't' my father offered in a milder tone, ready to surrender himself. But it didn't do any good. My mother wasn't ready to make a truce yet. 'You have better brothers than I have? Is that it? Finer men, more important, more prosperous, more respectable ones, is that it? 'Quiet now. Let there be an end to this. Leave me alone', said my father, pulling his cap over his eyes and running out of the house. My father lost the battle and my mother remained the victor. She is always the victor."

Sholom Aleichem is obviously dealing with a situation he finds abnormal, that of a family of emotionally emasculated males, dominated by a female force which is, to the writer, unacceptable within the structure of the Jewish family, with its strict sense of role-playing. In terms of the female liberationists, Jewish family life played into the hands of male chauvinism. Perhaps sensing the fundamental frustrations of the female, Sholom Aleichem created a whole range of basically unhappy Jewish women whose sole gratification derives from the success of their child-rearing. Perhaps this accounts in part for the extraordinary amount of energy which his mother figures generate toward this end.

What is also noteworthy about Sholom Aleichem's matriarchs is that they are almost totally lacking in the sensibility to understand the individual emotional needs and problems of their children. There is never any of the modern psychological rhetoric about inhibitions, fixations, sensitivity, and never any understanding of these issues by the mother, although Sholom Aleichem makes it quite clear that the lack of this understanding has caused the narrator—rarely himself in these children's stories—abundant mental stress. The characteristic which Sholom Aleichem finds particularly distressing is the regular use of the device of maternal self-sacrifice in order to create guilt feelings in the young child and a sense of dedication to fulfilling the program which the family has in mind. In "The Dreydl" there is no physical punishment inflicted upon the young child, and the mother is utterly kind-hearted and warmly affectionate. The story, like so many others, is in the form of a reminiscence.

The young boy in this case was an orphan, which in the shtetl social structure meant without both parents, or also solely without a father. In that case, the education of the child was taken over by a committee of elders, for above all, regardless of status, a Jewish male had to be educated in the Law. Everything was done to stimulate a boy's interest in the Talmud; no single idea dominated the family as much. To have a talmid khokhem, a prodigiously bright young scholar, was the ultimate goal of every shtetl family. And for an widowed mother, the mandate was the same, the responsibility even greater, perhaps. This explains in part the description of the mother taking her son to kheder—elementary school—in "The Dreydl": "'Remember now, study diligently', Mama said, standing by the door. She turned to look at me with a feeling of mingled joy, love, and compassion. I understand Mama's look quite well. She was happy that I was studying in the company of respectable children, but her heart ached that she had to part with me."4 Yet soon, the narrator detected a pressure which left him as a child puzzled, but which as an adult he has come to understand: "I couldn't understand why Mama always complained that she barely made enough to pay for the store rent and for the kheder tuition. Why did she single out tuition? What about food, clothing, shoes, etc? All she thought about was tuition." The psychological offensive by the mother here is non-violent, but very effective. There is no more than the innuendo of self-sacrifice on her part and endurance of hardship, in order that he might get an education. When summer came, our young student had a difficult time concentrating:

Who could even think of praying or studying then? But had you spoken to Mama, she would have told you that her husband, may he rest in peace, was not like that. He was a different sort of person. May he forgive me for saying this, but I don't know what sort of person he was. I only know that Mama constantly badgered and reminded me that I had had a father, threw up to me a dozen times a day that she was paying kheder tuition for me, and asked only two things of me: to put my mind to studies and my heart to prayers.

The mother's prime means of motivating the boy is by underlining strongly what she is willing to give up for him, and the effect on the mind of the seven- or eight-year-old boy is predictable, even in retrospect: "She froze, she went hungry, never had sufficient sleep or enough to eat. She suffered all this for my sake. Only for me. Why? Didn't she deserve to have a little pleasure, too? Everyone has his own criterion for joy. For my mother there was no greater pleasure in the world than my chanting the Sabbath and holiday Kiddush over the wine for her, or my conducting the Passover Seder, or lighting the Hanuka candles for her." The young man's reaction to his mother's total dedication to her goals is, within the framework of the shtetl world, understandable. As an adult he is now puzzled by his guilt feelings, but not particularly resentful or defensive. In terms of the communal structure, his mother's techniques, if we may call them that, have been developed over perhaps centuries, and the young man's cultural memory, within the traditions of the Jewish family and its ritual of child-rearing, allows for a highly developed sense of guilt toward the sacrificing matriarch to have a positive effect on the infant, child, adolescent, and man. The guilt feelings are put to good use, the Jewish child was generally highly motivated towards those goals established by his parents; down through the centuries of the shtetl, stability became the keynote of Jewish family life. The son did not rebel against his parents, and it was not until the shtetl itself was undermined that these tried and true methods of guilt attachment began to cause real emotional problems. The further the disintegration of the secure shtetl world proceeds, the more neurotic becomes the reaction of maternal attachment on the part of the child.

The most bizarre, and perhaps ridiculous, expression of this is in Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Since we only experience Portnoy's mother through his own distorted view, we can only be certain of the effect that she has had on the young man, not of what she was really like as a person. What we have here is a shtetl mother attempting to use her instinctive equipment for child-rearing, on a young man who no longer has the shtetl security to wrap himself in. Alexander Portnoy is no longer a Kasrilevkite. He is two generations removed from Eastern Europe, and his reaction to a mother almost entirely identical to the mother of Sholom Aleichem's "The Dreydl" is to become a neurotic, with a wildly exaggerated mother fixation.

In other Sholom Aleichem stories the lack of psychological compassion takes on an almost unreal dimension. In "Pity for Living Creatures" one is astonished (as is clearly Sholom Aleichem himself) at the adult reaction to what must have been a relatively standard problem: the reaction of a young child to the religious ritual of animal slaughter as proscribed by Jewish Law. A young boy observes a fish swimming in the family bathtub, a carp which is intended for the Friday night Sabbath feast: "The poor thing desperately wanted to return to the river . . . 'It's a pity', I told Mama, 'a pity for living creatures.'" The mother and cook discover that this compassion comes from discussions with the rabbi, whereupon she bursts out laughing and dismisses her son: "You're a fool, but your rabbi is a bigger one. Just keep grating the horseradish."5 Later he observes a shokhet slitting the throats of chickens and weeps. When he admonishes the cook for beating a cat who stole, she thinks, from the kitchen, she throws him out: "Get out of here, of I'll smack your face. God almighty, where do such foolish children come from?" He is beaten by two gentile boys when he interferes with their killing of fallen birds; then he is beaten by his father for being with gentiles. He is the only person in the village who cares for a terribly ill and deformed little child, who soon dies. Whenever the child's mother sees him, she thinks of her child and weeps "Then Mama chased me away. 'If you wouldn't be underfoot and go where you're not supposed to go, then people wouldn't remember things they ought not to remember.'" Whenever he thinks of the little child, he cries, and his mother replies with laughter: "Did the horseradish get into your eyes? Wipe your eyes, you foolish boy . . . Wipe your nose, too." In a day and age when we are accustomed to trying to understand the nature of a child's emotional needs and responses, the adult reacton to this young boy's particular fixation—the suffering of animals—seems cruel and unjust. However, there was no room for sentiment and sensitivity which did not conform to the normal, acceptable standards of the shtetl, and children—boys in particular—who manifested such feelings received no consideration and, as in the case of our young friend in "Pity for Living Creatures", beatings and scoldings.

If anyone has suffered under the delusion that all of Sholom Aleichem's stories are filled with gentle humor, the few we have so far considered in this [essay] should give cause for reconsideration. Clearly, there are aspects of the Jewish "Mutter Gestalt" which Sholom Aleichem did not find appealing. These few stories, and another dozen like them, are not funny, specifically because of an all-consuming mother. Yet, there are others which project the same mother figure, but emphasize the positive rather than the negative. "Gitl Purishkevitch" is the name of one such delightful mother, who is no less forceful in her domination of her son: "He's a good boy, sound as an apple, handsome and plain as can be. He's got all the virtues, but learning he didn't like. What am I saying—didn't like? Beat him, smash him to smithereens, but still he refused to study. 'What's going to be with you, Moishe,' says I, 'if you say no to reading, writing, and praying? You'll only be fit to be a dogcatcher!'" The widowed Gitl does everything she can to give her son respectability, and is fairly satisfied with her efforts. She is a door-to-door shtetl saleswomen for Wissotsky's Tea. This hard-working, every-day mentsh is given the added positive touch by Sholom Aleichem by being placed in a frame much like that which gave Tevye his opportunity to shine: a meeting with the author: "They told me that there's a writer chap here named Sholom Ilikem. Is that you himself, the Sholom Ilikem that writes?" Old Gitl then relates her tale of woe, which turns out to be a paean for motherhood, and a perfectly convincing one, at that. One day, she suddenly finds her son threatened by the draft. In terms of shtetl life, the Jew's relationship to military service was always traumatic. There was no way which could satisfy the Jew's particular needs of daily life and his obligation to serve a government which was openly anti-Semitic. As a result, the Jews did everything they could to avoid military life, and numerous Sholom Aleichem stories deal with this theme, as well as with the theme of Jewish patriotism and bravery in combat for Czarist Russia.6 In Gitl's case, however, a rank injustice was about to be done:

Draft? What draft? He's a one-and-only child, an only son to his widowed mother that owes everything she is to God and then Wissotsky. Has such a thing ever been heard of? Is there no God? Where's your sense of justice? But when the cards say trouble, you can go knock your head against the wall! It turned out that my Moishe was the exact same age as the three sons of our rich man's three daughters, may three well-placed boils prevent them from being able to stand, lie and sit.

Gitl's son is about to become the scapegoat for the nogid's grandsons. Sholom Aleichem, always on the look-out for treacherous negidim, now moralizes on how the rich keep their progenies out of the armed forces, while the poor are forced to serve. In Sholom Aleichem's Kasrilevke, there is always a doctor ready to certify a bad back, or a fever which is undiagnosible. She appeals to the draft board and is thrown out. She goes to the regional governor and is thrown out. Then, as she describes it, "she straight off sold everything she had and set out to seek the truth right in Petersburg itself . . . and if I had to get hold of the Czar himself, don't you think I could have found him? When it comes to the truth I could even reach God himself." What it has come to is her son, Moishe, and Gitl will not give him up, not even to the army. She enters the chambers of the Duma, Russia's parliament, to hear the debate on the draft laws, which turn out to be strongly anti-Jewish, but worse still, discriminatory against the poor. It is suggested that Jews be permitted to buy their way out of the army, all of which is too much for Gitl: "Expect me to keep still? So I called out from the gallery and screamed loud enough for the entire Duma to hear: 'What about Moishe?' The police throw her out, but a sympathetic deputy hears her case, and miracle of miracles, Moishe is released from his military obligation, which, by the way, he was enjoying.

In this story, a mother's dogged determination to find justice and her belief in a righteous cause finally triumph. Ironically, Sholom Aleichem subtly suggests that perhaps the young man would have been better off had he accepted military duty. Still, he revels in Gitl's victory and does not harshly undermine the triumph of motherhood.

Sholom Aleichem had a particular spot of affection for the widowed woman who, like Gitl, sacrifices and saves for her son. "The Little Pot", like "Gitl Purishkevitch", is in the form of a Chekhovian monologue in which the central character is permitted to reveal herself in her own words, in this case, to her rabbi. Yenta the Poultrywoman is one of Sholom Aleichem's most stereotyped and yet most extraordinary character. She embodies almost all the clichés which have been associated with, in a larger sense, motherhood in general even in America. She is the type of caricatured matriarch favored by mass media humorists: doting, kind but singleminded, and inevitably associated with chicken soup:

So every day I make him a chicken soup out of a quarter of a chicken, and every night when he comes home from cheder he eats it. And I sit across the table from him with some work in my hands and rejoice at the sight. I pray to God that He should help me so that tomorrow I should be able to make him another soup out of another quarter of a chicken. 'Mother', he asks me, 'why don't you eat with me?' 'Eat', I said, 'eat all you want. I ate already.' 'What did you eat?' 'What did I eat? What difference does it make what I ate, as long as 1 ate?' And when he is through reading or studying, I take a couple of baked potatoes out of the oven, or rub a slice of bread with onion and make myself a feast. And I swear to you by all that is holy, that I get more enjoyment and satisfaction out of that onion than I would out of the finest roast or the richest soup, because I remember that my Dovidl, may the evil eye spare him, had some chicken soup and that tomorrow he will have chicken soup again.7

In the above passage one senses a balanced harmony, an understanding between mother and son which has a heritage as old as the shtetl There is a distinct ritualization to the mother-son relationship which in the Old World provided a framework which proved to be acceptable to all parties. However, the structure proved to be non-adaptable. The very same mother, with the same expectations and hopes, when transferred to a suburb of Newark, New Jersey and doting over a son with an Ivy League education, becomes, at least in the eyes of this son, a figure who totally dominates his existence and inculcates such extraordinary guilt feelings that only psychoanalysis can relieve the oppression from his psyche. This is the problem of Alexander Portnoy, who represents in every respect the traditional Jewish son, but now lacking one major and totally determining factor: the cultural memory of the shtetl Along with Portnoy's emancipation came the loss of a certain part of his Jewish identity which permitted the male youth to accept somewhat benignly the feelings of total immersion in the matriarchal will which Sholom Aleichem's male children somehow accept, with more or less resignation. The mother of Alexander Portnoy is no different from the mother of the young man in "The Little Pot". Her reactions, her instincts are exactly the same as her shtetl antecedent. What has changed is the world in which she had operated over the centuries, the world of the accepted norms of mother-son relationships within the tight confines of the Jewish family.

Yet, Portnoy cannot break loose cleanly, without a residue. Although he has moved to suburbia and appears totally Americanized, there lingers in him this five-hundred-year-old accumulation of Jewish consciousness, a faint remembrance, a reflex action which unfortunately manifests itself as an abnormality of behavior which fixates him. He is a typical Sholom Aleichem character, but living in another time and in another world.

2. THE BRUTALIZATION OF THE CHILD

One extremely unexpected aspect of the child in Sholom Aleichem—and by extrapolation in the shtetl itself—is his brutalization by parents, peers, and particularly teachers. The young man of the story "The Flag" experiences general mockery and physical punishment because of a speech impediment: "Everyone under the sun thought it a good deed to beat me: my father, my mother, my sisters, my teacher, my classmates. They all tried to get me to talk properly."8 Furthermore, it was the birthright of the rich child to beat up the poor or orphaned child.9 Any young boy could expect a whipping if he expressed interest in an occupation or activity which was not in keeping with the yikhus, the status of his parents.10

But in general, the great sadism was demonstrated by the elementary school teachers. Study for the Jewish child began at age three, when he was carried off by the belfer, the teaching assistant, to the dardeki melamed, the elementary teacher, who enjoyed absolutely no status in the community, because he "lives by selling what he should be giving."11 Goaded by this lack of respect from his peers, the teacher traditionally lashed out at his young pupils, who were, moreover, the victims of some of the most antiquated teaching methods conceived of by men. Three-year-old children were forced to memorize the Hebrew letters, then by rote learn passages of the Bible, which were recited endlessly, while the melamed marched up and down the aisles, with whip in hand.

In Sholom Aleichem's writings, these teachers are without exception misfits and failures who vent their frustration by "beating, flogging, and crippling Jewish children".12 None is more devastating than "Boaz the Teacher".13 The narrator remembers "the day Mama took me by the hand and brought me to Boaz's cheder for the first time; I felt like a young chicken on its way to the shokhet. It flutters with fright, poor thing—not comprehending, but sensing that the future isn't all chicken feed." The teacher himself is as demonic as the child had sensed and as the adult could reflect on: the only pedagogic device was the whip. "A child must fear—God, the rebbi, his parents, sins, and evil thoughts. In order for a child to be imbued with the correct amount of fear, he must be laid down properly, with pants lowered, and given two dozen lashes." Sholom Aleichem underscores a sense of genuine perversion beyond this apparent morality of abuse: "He was never in a rage when he dispensed the whippings. Boaz was not the sort to get angry . . . He considered laughing something terrible. Boaz had never laughed in his life and hated to see others laughing . . . Sometimes we got a whipping just for the fun of it. 'Let's see how a little boy lets himself be whipped.'" Nowhere is there justice, nowhere reason. In "Robbers!" the teacher Mazeppa, a small, thin tyrant, "hated lengthy chitchats. Even for the slightest incident—whether you were guilty or not—he ordered you to lie down for a whipping. 'Rebbi, Yosl-Yakov hit me.' 'Lie down.' 'Rebbi, that's a lie. He kicked me first.' 'Lie down.' 'Rebbi, Chaim-Berl stuck his tongue out at me.' 'Lie down.' 'Rebbi, that's a downright lie. It was he who thumbed his nose at me.' 'Lie down . . .' '' Everyone was whipped, the poor more than the rich, the small more than the big. It was no wonder that the children themselves turned brutal to one another and to other things. In "Methuseleh, a Jewish Horse", Ruvele, a ruthless, cynical Jewish youth, gets his pleasure out of tormenting a horse. Sholom Aleichem, in an effort to justify this distorted vision of a Jewish boy, informs us that Ruvele himself was beaten by his parents because he had the temerity to want to be a violinist.

Although the poor suffered more than the rich, the nogid's son did not escape. In the Purim story "Visiting with King Ahasuerus", Sholom Aleichem plays with the prince and the pauper theme. The rich lad, who tells the story, is the traditional have-not: He cannot participate in the Purim play "because I came from a rich and prominent family".14 The object of his regret is the poorest child of the village: "But most of all I was jealous of Feivel the orphan who would don a red shirt and masquerade as Joseph the Righteousness for the troupe's performance of The Sale of Joseph" But he was the grandson of Reb Meir, the richest man in town and has "his own personal Angel of Death" to guard over his morality: Reb Itzi, his tutor. For a moment he escapes the family's net and joins the troupe of actors, until his Angel of Death catches him and turns him over to his father:

Once outside, my father stopped, took one look at me, and briskly slapped me twice. 'That's just a prelude. Once we get home, your tutor will really give it to you. Now listen here, Reb Itzi, I'm turning him over to you, and I want you to whip the daylights out of him. Til he's black and blue. A boy going on nine! Let him remember what it is to run off with the Purim players, those low-down, low-class, third-rate clowns, those down-at-the-heel tramps. Let him remember what it means to ruin everyone's holiday.

Clearly nothing outraged Sholom Aleichem so much as this brutalization of children. He dedicated the two volumes of children's stories to them, while hoping that the adults might at least become enlightened as to their responsibilities as parents. Yet in spite of the apparent hopelessness of the plight of these children, they somehow manage to survive. After all, they all narrate their own stories, and these narrations take on a quality of reminiscence which is strangely devoid of bitterness or resentment. In fact, although he clearly marks 'the good guys and the bad guys' in these children's stories, Sholom Aleichem at least tacitly stresses the durability of the Jewish child 'to make it' while growing up in what normally might be described as a psychologically debilitating environment. And as if to re-assure us completely, he permits us to follow the history of one of these children from his earliest years until young manhood (in that world, somewhere around twelve!), and shows him triumphant in spite of every possible disruption and lack of consideration. It is only fitting that Sholom Aleichem's most durable, even most honest creation should be such a child, Mottel, the orphaned son of an impoverished cantor.

3. "HOORAH, I'M AN ORPHAN"

For Sholom Aleichem, Mottel was someone special. A draft of a Mottel-story was on the table next to his deathbed, and over a period of almost twenty-five years spanning two continents, Mottel remained at the center of Sholom Aleichem's thoughts. More than Tevye, more than Menachem-Mendel, he represents the Jewish spirit as Sholom Aleichem saw it, both in Europe and in America. Of his three major characters, only Mottel is described in The New World. He belongs in America, and is as much at home on the East Side of New York as he was back in Kasrilevke. Fortunate for us, Mottel is an excellent observer of his surroundings, for he tells his own story, a Jewish picaro who gets himself involved in every enterprise of his family, grows up through the forced feeding of events which shook Europe, travels across half the world, and comes out underneath the Delancey Street Bridge as stable as one could hope for.15

Mottel's adventures constitute thirty-nine interrelated chapters, a perpetual serialization in episodic form which involves, besides Mottel, his widowed mother ("She's doing what she always does—she's crying"); his brother Eli, a serious, responsible young man who inherits the role of head of the family and who invests in a series of outrageously funny business enterprises; his wife, pock-marked Brocha with the bass voice; Eli's best friend Pinney, always with a cuff rolled up, or a sock falling down, Pinney with the long, skinny body, a schlimazl who somehow manages in a world not made for schlimazls. The adventures of Mottel present the most comprehensive chronicle of Jewish life at the turn of the century. After experiencing little success in a variety of legal and illegal business ventures, the group, a sort of Jewish commune at that point, decides that they have had enough of Europe, and that the land of the future is America. So, amidst total confusion and mother's wailing over the grave of her husband, the families (there are Eli's and Pinney's) head for an illegal border crossing at the frontier of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Confrontations with Austrians, Germans, Jews of all descriptions telling hair-raising stories ("If you compare her bad luck with my bad luck, you'll realize that she's lucky!"). As they travel closer and closer to the western coast of Europe for the hoped-for trip to America, their problems become more complex and Mottel's mother's tears more copious, until her crying becomes a cause for serious concern: it could keep them out of the United States, if she develops trachoma from crying. When she hears this, of course she bursts out crying. In Antwerp they wait for mother's condition to improve, and pass the time observing the German Jews who also are waiting for the boat: "All Jews on 'the other side' hate Yiddish, and love German. Even beggars talk German. They're ready to die of starvation, as long as they do it in German." Finally, they manage to get to London, and Brocha, who hates the city, wails from one end of town to the other: "London, why don't you burn?"

But by far the most exciting part of their exodus involves the trip across the ocean and their arrival in New York. There is a most moving description of the Yom Kippur services on the high seas, as the elegant Jews of first class come down to steerage to mourn and to worship with the common Jews. Ad for Mottel's mother, on the saddest of all the days of the Jewish year, "Mother is happy—this is her day!"

Everything comes to a near disaster on Ellis Island, as the travellers wait to go through the immigration process. Sholom Aleichem's description of the situation is perhaps the most definitive statement ever made in literature on the subject of Ellis Island, now a relic of history and a permanent part of the Age of Immigration. Pinney, who is a rabid pro-American throughout the book, is crushed by "Elie's Island" and its inhumanity. Families are permanently separated, people are locked up, deported, there are pitiful scenes of desperate peasants, unable to communicate in English, making futile efforts to join their loved ones. Sholom Aleichem in a rare departure includes peoples from all lands in these Ellis Island scenes and condemns the whole system out of hand.

But in spite of these vicissitudes, they finally plant themselves on the piers of New York, and Pinney turns to Europe for the extraordinary speech which was quoted earlier, addressed to a decadent Old World which will someday regret the loss of its Jews. Not everywhere is the image of America so overwhelmingly positive as it is in Pinney's speech on the banks of the Hudson River, and certainly Sholom Aleichem's own experiences had a great deal to do with this mixed reaction.16 But Pinney's message ("You murderers, we have to thank you for having reached this haven, this refuge, this great and blessed land") is clear; for the proste Yidn of Kasrilevke, for the Jewish down-and-outers, America was indeed the land of the free.

America works wonders on 'the gang'. Feivel soon becomes Philip; Mendel is called Mike, and everybody is 'making a living'. Furthermore, they are not even strangers in a strange land, for soon after their departure, Kasrilevke burned to the ground, and the survivors came to America. Former negidim now find themselves working on pushcarts on Second Avenue. Others work in factories, take part in workers' rallies, go out on strike, and participate in the tremendous excitement of life on the Lower East Side of New York around the turn of the century.17 All of this is seen through the eyes of a delightfully realistic young boy growing up in the midst of a world teeming with new experiences. At this point, with Mottel's life still before him and an unfinished story on his bed table, Sholom Aleichem died.

The direction he would have taken, had he lived to continue Mottel's adventures, was clear. He had a definite problem in mind for future stories: how would the Jew face Americanization, the threat of assimilation in a land which gave the Jew relative freedom of choice. Although he himself did not live to confront this challenge, Sholom Aleichem left a rich enough heritage, so that others, some far removed from Kasrilevke, were able to continue. But clearly, Sholom Aleichem the realist recognized the way of the future for the Jew. Kasrilevke was no more. Sholom Aleichem, the town's architect, benefactor, and major citizen, burned it to the ground in a symbolic gesture of finality. It is somewhat foreboding to note how, almost twenty years before Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Sholom Aleichem signaled the end of European Jewry.

Notes

1 (New York: Random House, 1969).

2Portnoy's Complaint, 5.

3 In The Tevye Stories and Others, 111-117.

4 In Some Laughter Some Tears, 65-82.

5 In Some Laughter Some Tears, 101-106.

6 See, for example, "The First Passover Night of the War", in Old Country Tales, 259-265. A Jewish soldier says the following: "Just three things are enough to make me happy. That a Jew like me is equal to everyone else; that a Jew like me is one of the Czar's men; that a Jew like me can show his loyalty to the entire world. Let our enemies see that a Jew too can serve faithfully and well, and that a Jew also can hold his head high with honor of the land where his ancestors' bones lie buried, and where his bones too will lie." "Gitl Perushkevitch", is to be found in Old Country Tales, 139-148.

7 "The Little Pot", in Tevye's Daughters, 180-191.

8 "The Flag", in Old Country Tales, 73-84.

9 See "The Esrog" in Some Laughter Some Tears, 26-36.

10 See "Methuseleh, A Jewish Horse", in Old Country Tales, 87-97; and "From the Riviera", in Stories and Satires, 303-307; also, "The Fiddle", in Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, 307-323.

11 Zborowski and Herzog, 89.

12 "The Little Redheaded Jews", in Some Laughter Some Tears, 191-230. This is one of Sholom Aleichem's hardest-hitting satires on Jewish obstinacy in accepting Zionism.

13 "Boaz the Teacher", in Some Laughter Some Tears, 161-168.

14 In Old Country Tales, 51-64.

15 The English title is Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son,translated by Tamara Kahana (New York: Collier Books, 1961). The original Yiddish mentions Mottel's father in the title: Motl Peyse dem khazns, in two volumes of the Ale verk twenty-eight volumes of 1917-25 (vols. 17 and 18).

16 Besides being a haven where the Menachem-Mendels flee to, America is the setting for several non-Mottel stories, with a definite bias on the part of the author evident. See "Mr. Green has a Job" in Some Laughter Some Tears, 233-236; and the devastating "Story of a Greenhorn", 243-248 in the same volume.

17 See, most notably, Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto, Paperback edition (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

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