No Joke (12 page)

There are many iterations of this joke in which, as Freud puts it, “primitive nature breaks through all the layers of education,” but this one adds the absurdity of trying to conceal what has just been revealed.
²²

Given the dependence of Yiddish on Jewishness, it is not surprising that Sholem Aleichem, the master of Yiddish humor, should have aimed his deadliest barbs at such defectors from the tribe. Almost everyone in his repertoire is accorded a measure of sympathy—the pimp from Buenos Aires, the hustling cardsharp, and an “emissary from the Land of Israel” who graces a Passover seder before making off with the maid and family silver. But no sympathy at all is extended to the Jew who refuses to join a prayer quorum. In one of these stories, Jewish passengers in a railway car are seeking a tenth man to complete a minyan so that a father can recite kaddish on the anniversary of the death of his son. The son had been hanged as a revolutionary after a trial that the father swears was rigged,
and his mother had died of grief. A bereaved version of Patti, the father has eyes of the kind that “once you've seen you'll never ever forget: half-laughing and half-crying they were, or half-crying and half-laughing … if only he would unburden himself and let the tears out! But no, he insisted on being the very soul of gaiety.” Like the song that reestablishes Jewish harmony in the story of “Two Anti-Semites,” gathering a minyan for the recitation of the mourner's prayer will confirm that a besieged community is still holding its own in hostile terrain:

In fact, there was a tenth person there. We just couldn't make up our minds if he was a Jew or a Christian. An uncommunicative individual with a gold pince-nez, a freckled face, and no beard. A Jewish nose but an oddly twirled, un-Jewish mustache…. From the start he had kept his distance from us. Most of the time he just looked out the window and whistled. Naturally, he was hatless, and a Russian newspaper lay across his knees.

The story's problem is simple: Can this young man be persuaded to join the minyan, helping to compensate—however partially—for the Jewish son who has been eliminated? Apparently not. He says: “Count me out!”
²³

Through the grieving father, Sholem Aleichem mounts his revenge as a dish served cold. Rather than pleading or ranting, the father tells the young man that he deserves a gold medal and, like Hershele in the joke about the outhouse, promises an explanation if he will join the minyan. The mourner himself then leads an afternoon service “that could have moved a stone,” and afterward spins a chain of apparently disconnected
stories—the first about a coachman who, because he turns out to be a Jew, makes possible a circumcision ceremony in a remote village, the second about a Gentile who prevents a fire on the sabbath because he happens
not
to be a Jew, and the third about a rabbi's son exempted from the military draft because he has open sores on his head. “And now tell me, my dear young friend,” the mourner concludes, “do you understand your true worth? You were born a Jew, you'll soon be a goy, and you're already a running sore.” The story's tagline is almost redundant: “At the very next station our tenth man slipped away.”
²⁴

When all is said and done, the “very soul of gaiety” cannot maintain his sanguinity. The bereaved father speaks for the author, who knows that the young man who counts himself out of a prayer quorum is also destroying the community of Jewish joking. Unlike Heine, Börne, Kraus, and other German wits, Yiddish wits are not usually converts themselves but instead are forever anxious that their children might be. Hence, in collections of Yiddish wit, the many entries under the category of apostates,
meshumodim
:

Four converts trade stories about why they converted. The first explains that he was the victim of a false accusation and converted to escape the harsh sentence he would otherwise have had to serve. The second confesses that his parents drove him wild with complaints about his lax Jewish observance, so he converted to spite them. The third gives a rambling account of falling in love with a Christian girl, a model of loveliness: he converted in order
to marry her. The fourth pipes up: “Unlike the rest of you, I converted out of firm conviction that Christianity is a religion of a higher order …”

“Oh, please!” the others interrupt him—“Save that for your goyishe friends!”
²⁵

Transvaluation of values is the minority's means of reasserting its agency; in Yiddish joking, the only inauthentic motive for conversion is the one that claims to be authentic. “Of course, I converted out of conviction,” said the famed real-life scholar Daniel Abramovitch Chwolson, “the conviction that it is better to be Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of St. Petersburg than a
heder
teacher in Berdichev.”
²⁶
Jewish humor is never more anti-Gentile than when it confirms the reality of Jews turning Christian and never more nationalistic than when it admits Jewish infirmity.

Tempting as it is to represent Yiddish humor exclusively through Sholem Aleichem, his dominance did not prevent the rise of a generation of new comic writers. I will briefly introduce four.

Itsik Manger (1901–69) was born in Galicia into a family of tailors, made his reputation in Warsaw between the world wars, escaped the continent to spend World War II in England, and settled in Israel in 1958.

Moshe Nadir (1885–1943; né Isaac Reiss) arrived in New York from his native Galicia at age thirteen and could easily have made his reputation in English. For many years a mainstay of the Yiddish Communist daily
Freiheit
, he “repented”
of his affiliation after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Nadir's widow, Genia, married Manger in 1951 and bequeathed both of their archives to the National Library in Jerusalem.

Moshe Kulbak (1896–1937) remained closest to his birthplace in Smorgon (Smarhon), a small town in today's Belarus about halfway between Vilna and Minsk. The political fate that divided those two cities between Poland and the Soviet Union in the period between the world wars also sealed Kulbak's destiny. Employed in the mid-1920s as a teacher in the Vilna Jewish Teacher's Seminary, Kulbak crossed the Polish border into the Soviet Union in 1928 to rejoin the larger part of his family and was executed there nine years later.

Among Yiddish writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer enjoyed the greatest international success, culminating in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature. Son of a small-town Polish rabbi and rabbi's daughter, and raised in Warsaw where he began working as a writer and translator, he arrived in the United States in 1935, but did not begin situating his stories in that country until the 1950s. The youngest of the four, he was raised the most traditionally, and drew from the richest fund of traditional lore, even as he was the most profane in its use.

Manger and Nadir made no secret of their indebtedness to Heine, the major influence from the sphere of German on all Yiddish writers, though each drew his own image of the “accursed poet”—Nadir in the United States affecting the high-mannered pose of a dandy, and Manger in the heartland of Yiddish assuming the persona of a troubadour-inebriate who expects to be forgiven his indelicacies as the by-product of his genius. For the first
Lexicon of Yiddish Literature
, Manger
falsely cited Berlin as his birthplace and Rainer Maria Rilke as his main influence, but his signature as “Itsik” rather than the formal Isidore (as in his birth record) belied this association with German culture. Attracted alike by Heine's melodic harmonies and comic subversion, Manger developed his own poetic mixture of the sweet and tart in lyrics and ballads that domesticated transgressive subjects like the sainted Jesus, elevated the humble, and punctured the pompous.

Manger's most productive years were spent in Warsaw, where three hundred thousand Jews comprising about a third of the city constituted the most vibrant audience any Yiddish writer or playwright would ever have. This island of Jewishness in a once-friendlier but increasingly xenophobic Poland inspired a series of mock-biblical poems—
Chumash lider
—that transpose stories of Genesis and the Book of Ruth into the language and experience of eastern European Jews. Anachronism was Manger's beloved comic device for filling in gaps in the action, elevating minor characters and trimming patriarchs down to size. When Sarah complains to her husband, Abraham, about the indignity of having Hagar's child in the house while she, the mistress, is not getting any younger, Manger tweaks the biblical account:

The Patriarch Abraham puffs at his pipe.
And waits, then he says with a smile,
“A broomstick, my dear, can be made to shoot
If the Lord thinks it's worthwhile.”
²⁷

Midrash had long since humanized and tried to interpret the enigmatic biblical text, but Manger's comic midrash in everyday
Yiddish idiom shifts the focus from the miraculous pregnancy of the aging wife to the husband who boasts of his no less astounding virility.

The Jewish festival of Purim, mandated by the Megillah, the Scroll or Book of Esther, is traditionally celebrated by spoofs and masquerade; in keeping with custom, Manger's 1936 verse rendition,
Songs of the Megillah
, purports to be mischief-making on the model of Purim players in every age. As part of the fun, he pretends to restore to the narrative the neglected figure of Fastrigossa, a journeyman tailor who romances Esther before she is taken up by King Ahasuerus. Although the biblical story of the villainous Haman who plots to exterminate the Jews already conveys the fragile political status of Jews in exile, Manger finds its happy resolution still too triumphal for the Jews of Poland in the mid-1930s, when the play was written and performed. So Fastrigossa fails in his attempt to assassinate the king and is punished by hanging. Haman has his son trumpet news of the failed assassination in the nationalist paper he edits in an attempt to stir up pogroms.

Yoking Persia to Prussia makes the story funnier and frighteningly actual. The only time I saw this musical performed onstage, the loudest laugh greeted Fastrigossa's serenade to the girl that will never be his:

Remember, remember that rainy night
At the gate when we clung together,
And I whispered a secret in your ear
And we did not mind the weather?
I whispered, “Esther, marry me,
Let's elope to Vienna.”
²⁸

Perhaps that allurement of Vienna reminded some audience members of similar fantasies they had nourished in their youth. The play concludes with a dirge sung by Fastrigossa's mother, accusing her son's former fiancée of having whored her way into royalty. Anachronism is at one and the same time Manger's means of bringing the story up to date—with references to contemporary anti-Semitism and class conflict—and rehearsing the comedy of a people overdetermined for tragedy.

Like Manger, Nadir cast himself as another maverick or “bad boy” of Yiddish, advertising his philosophical caprice.
Na dir
is Yiddish for “there you are,” a pen name that may signify either gift or fillip, and in Nadir's case more likely the latter. Along with his even more talented colleague, the poet Moishe Leyb Halpern, Nadir made his name translating and imitating Heine for the Yiddish humor magazines of the Lower East Side, and then developed his own gallery of immigrant misfits in humorous sketches that he published in the Yiddish daily press. His parodies of “getting rich in America” generated a new Americanese. In the much performed and anthologized humoresque “My First Deposit,” a worker tells of how he consigns twenty dollars to a bank, and then grows obsessive about its security to the point that he finally withdraws his money … and loses it to a pickpocket on the way home. Included in the dialogue between customer and bank teller are the words
detsol
,
itsenuf
, and
tsimposibl
, which thereby morph from mispronunciations of English into “literary” Yiddish. The public
loved Nadir for his humor, and fellow poets adored his contributions to the language.

While some Yiddish writers of the interwar generation experienced the dislocations caused by U.S. freedoms, their counterparts in Russia were trying to skirt the narrowing confines of Soviet censorship. Kulbak had come on the scene as a rural troubadour, rejecting the stereotypical Talmudic bench squeezer, peripatetic middleman, or tubercular artisan for a “healthier” kind of Jew. The heroes of his early poems take to the road like vagabonds, toil the livelong day like ordinary peasants, and seek out earthy pleasures among the haystacks. His humor ripened when he came under Soviet rule, and turning more to prose than poetry, introduced the ironies that such Jewish adjustments might actually require. The culminating work of his abbreviated life was the comic novel
Zelmenyaners
, describing a Jewish family's Sovietization during the same years that coincided with Kulbak's own resettlement in Minsk. I will return to this novel in
chapter 4
.