mount of the musesâ¦. Tragic in his poetry, his life, his loves, his suffering, his pathos, his thought, his ridicule, his cynicism, his sanctity, his pain, and his death.â 29 In this reappraisal of Heineâs comic writing, one can sense the catastrophic impact of the First World War on Jewish sensibilities, but perhaps also something of the difference between Yiddish and German Jewish humor.
By the lights of Yiddish humorâour next subjectâHeineâs humor was tragic.
2
Yiddish Heartland
A skeleton is shown into the doctorâs office.
The doctor says: â Now you come to me?â
âHeard from Yosl Bergner, in Yiddish, Tel Aviv, 2012
The Yiddish humor of the East European Jew, or Ostjude , was as different from the German Judenwitz as aleph and kometz-aleph are from alpha and omega. In brief, Yiddish humorists peered out from inside Jewish life rather than, like Heineâs narrator in âThe Baths of Lucca,â from outside in. This made their mockery not necessarily kinder but certainly more intricate and better informed. While the German language developed the stereotype of the ârootless cosmopolitanââthe Jew who is nervously trying to fit in while everywhere displacedâYiddish conjured up a stuck-in-the-mud Jewish nation that was only belatedly lifting up its head.
One homely example of the distinction is the noseâthe same nose that stigmatizes the Jew in the German writings of Heine, but that makes a very different sort of appearance in the 1905 story âTwo Anti-Semitesâ by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.
In this story, the telltale protuberance appears on the face of a traveling salesman, Max Berliant (not quite âBrilliantâ).Max has lately begun to sample the forbidden pleasures of the surrounding Gentile world. Travel through Russia, though a mere baby step on the road to assimilation as portrayed by Heine, nevertheless affords Max the chance to shed some of his Jewishness while evading the opprobrium of a watchful community. He is therefore annoyed by the intimate insinuations that his nose evokes from fellow Jews who squeeze into his share of a train compartment.
By the time of the story, though, Max has something even bigger to worry about: the 1903 killing spree in Kishinevâa vicious mass attack on Jews that had occurred in the same territory he is about to traverse:
It must surely have happened to you while sitting on a train that you passed the place where some great catastrophe has occurred. You know in your heart that you are safe because lightning doesnât strike twice in the same spot. Yet you canât help remembering that not so long ago trains were derailed at this very point, and carloads of people spilled over the embankment. You canât help knowing that here people were thrown out head first, over there bones were crushed, blood flowed, brains were splattered. You canât help feeling glad that youâre alive; itâs only human to take secret pleasure in it. 1
In this passage, Sholem Aleichem is deploying the Aesopian strategy that writers in Russia adopted to avoid czarist censorship, transposing a hypothetical railway accident for the brutal images of Kishinev: the first pogrom of the twentieth century and the first whose images of butchered bodies were disseminatedby newspapers. The narrator invites us to experience Maxâs anxiety and reliefâ there, but for the grace of God, lies my ravaged corpse âwhile noting his hubris in trying to separate himself from the Jewish communityâa serious taboo in traditional Judaismâduring a time of national danger. Max is clever. As the train penetrates the region of peril, he gets off at a station and buys a copy of the Bessarabian , a regional anti-Semitic paper said to have incited local pogroms. Once back in the compartment, he stretches out on the bench, and drawing the newspaper over his face, reckons that he is safe
By the lights of Yiddish humorâour next subjectâHeineâs humor was tragic.
2
Yiddish Heartland
A skeleton is shown into the doctorâs office.
The doctor says: â Now you come to me?â
âHeard from Yosl Bergner, in Yiddish, Tel Aviv, 2012
The Yiddish humor of the East European Jew, or Ostjude , was as different from the German Judenwitz as aleph and kometz-aleph are from alpha and omega. In brief, Yiddish humorists peered out from inside Jewish life rather than, like Heineâs narrator in âThe Baths of Lucca,â from outside in. This made their mockery not necessarily kinder but certainly more intricate and better informed. While the German language developed the stereotype of the ârootless cosmopolitanââthe Jew who is nervously trying to fit in while everywhere displacedâYiddish conjured up a stuck-in-the-mud Jewish nation that was only belatedly lifting up its head.
One homely example of the distinction is the noseâthe same nose that stigmatizes the Jew in the German writings of Heine, but that makes a very different sort of appearance in the 1905 story âTwo Anti-Semitesâ by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.
In this story, the telltale protuberance appears on the face of a traveling salesman, Max Berliant (not quite âBrilliantâ).Max has lately begun to sample the forbidden pleasures of the surrounding Gentile world. Travel through Russia, though a mere baby step on the road to assimilation as portrayed by Heine, nevertheless affords Max the chance to shed some of his Jewishness while evading the opprobrium of a watchful community. He is therefore annoyed by the intimate insinuations that his nose evokes from fellow Jews who squeeze into his share of a train compartment.
By the time of the story, though, Max has something even bigger to worry about: the 1903 killing spree in Kishinevâa vicious mass attack on Jews that had occurred in the same territory he is about to traverse:
It must surely have happened to you while sitting on a train that you passed the place where some great catastrophe has occurred. You know in your heart that you are safe because lightning doesnât strike twice in the same spot. Yet you canât help remembering that not so long ago trains were derailed at this very point, and carloads of people spilled over the embankment. You canât help knowing that here people were thrown out head first, over there bones were crushed, blood flowed, brains were splattered. You canât help feeling glad that youâre alive; itâs only human to take secret pleasure in it. 1
In this passage, Sholem Aleichem is deploying the Aesopian strategy that writers in Russia adopted to avoid czarist censorship, transposing a hypothetical railway accident for the brutal images of Kishinev: the first pogrom of the twentieth century and the first whose images of butchered bodies were disseminatedby newspapers. The narrator invites us to experience Maxâs anxiety and reliefâ there, but for the grace of God, lies my ravaged corpse âwhile noting his hubris in trying to separate himself from the Jewish communityâa serious taboo in traditional Judaismâduring a time of national danger. Max is clever. As the train penetrates the region of peril, he gets off at a station and buys a copy of the Bessarabian , a regional anti-Semitic paper said to have incited local pogroms. Once back in the compartment, he stretches out on the bench, and drawing the newspaper over his face, reckons that he is safe
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