No Joke (22 page)

In the book's longest-running joke, Tsalel the transcriber of Zelmenyaner lore (who affects a forelock like the one that Kulbak himself sported) is forever committing suicide in unrequited love for his cousin Tonke, the most doctrinaire Marxist among the younger generation. The story's exuberance dissipates by the time Tsalel finally does commit suicide at the end of book 2. Tonke, by then a rising commissar, denounces her dead cousin for having wasted his spirit trying to preserve bits and pieces of a defunct civilization, and in a scene uncomfortably true to the Soviet culture of the 1930s, excoriates the family for wasting resources by uselessly occupying its inherited space.

Three years after the publication of this book, Kulbak was himself denounced, tried, and executed.

Kulbak's humor owed much to Sholem Aleichem, but though Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman often chases after his horse, the smell of the creature's excrement never invades the page. Tevye's companionship with a God to whom he matters helps him prevail over the loss of his daughters and offsets some of the humiliation he must endure. In contrast, the aroma of “something else” that identifies the Zelmenyaner family is Kulbak's apology for the lingering stench of Jewish tribalism in the fresh Soviet air. Every death of an elderly Zelmenyaner in the novel is accompanied by the author's conspiratorial wink. Tsalel is the only one of them whose burial elicits a hint of tenderness:

On a fence in a narrow street near the cemetery stood a bird without a name, though Tsalel had fought all his life to have it called
shperl
. While its tedious chirp was no substitute for Chopin's funeral march, the nameless bird was sufficiently educated to declaim from the fence several well-known lines from the collected works of Heine, Vol. I, p. 457:

A pair of drunken Jews performed Tsalel's last rites. No one tipped the gravediggers, though they stood by their shovels looking sharply at the mourners. It simply didn't occur to anyone.
²⁴

It was Kulbak himself who had tried to get
shperl
accepted as the Yiddish term for “sparrow” as part of his lifelong drive to provide his native language with a complete vocabulary for the natural world. He is also here to remind us that Jewish gravediggers had once made a living from charity, said to redeem from death—a custom now redundant, like all Jewish ritual. In tipping his hat to Heine, the greatest influence on modern Yiddish verse—the scholar intruding into the elegiac description—he reminds us of something else as well. Like Heine, who left his people without being accepted by another, Kulbak, too, realized that Communism had forced Jews to pay a “conversion” fee without granting them its promised rewards.

Still, even anticipating the worst, Kulbak could not have foreseen his arrest in 1937 at the start of Stalin's purges and the ignominy of the secret trial that sentenced him to execution on October 29 of that year. The circumstances of that execution were acknowledged only after the fall of the Soviet Union, many decades later, but meanwhile the novelist had written his obituary in his comic portrayal of the fate of a Jewish poet under Communism.

Only once in my adult life was I reduced to such laughter that I had to put down the book. It was a collection of short stories by the Russian Jewish writer Babel. The tale was “Di Grasso” (1937), one of Babel's many “initiation stories.” Though I quote its opening paragraph here in a clearer translation than the one I read, more than usual attention is required to get the gist:

I was fourteen years old. I belonged to the fearless battalion of theater ticket scalpers. My boss was a shark with an eye that always squinted and a large, silky mustache. His name was Kolya Shvarts. I fell in with him that dark year when the Italian Opera in Odessa went bust. The impresario, swayed by the theater critics, had not signed up Anselmi and Tito Ruffo as guest stars, concentrating instead on a strong ensemble. He was punished for this, went broke, and so did we [scalpers]. To set things right, we were promised Chaliapin, but Chaliapin wanted three thousand a performance. So Di Grasso, the Sicilian tragic actor, came with his troupe instead. They were taken to their hotel in carts loaded with children, cats, and cages in which Italian birds fluttered.

“We can't push this merchandise!” Kolya Shvarts said when he saw the motley procession rolling in.
²⁵

The narrator, speaking autobiographically as “Isaac Babel,” recalls a time about 1910 when he, a Jewish boy from a respectable family, stood at the perilous intersection of art and commerce—scalping tickets for opera and melodrama. At the center of the action is the performance of a Sicilian melodrama starring Di Grasso himself in the role of a village shepherd whose true love betrays him with Giovanni, the proverbial handsome man from town. Only about fifty people have shown up at the premiere, and until this point, the performance has been a dud. But then:

In the third act, Giovanni, the visitor from town, met his fate. The village barber was shaving Giovanni as he sat
with his powerful masculine legs sprawled out over the proscenium. The pleats of his vest shone beneath the Sicilian sun. The stage set portrayed a village fair. The shepherd stood in the far corner. He stood there silently, among the carefree crowd. He hung his head, then raised it, and under the weight of his burning, fixed gaze, Giovanni began to fidget and squirm in his chair. He jumped up and pushed the barber away. In a cracking voice Giovanni demanded that the policeman remove all shady and suspicious-looking people from the village square. The shepherd—played by Di Grasso—hesitated for a moment, then smiled, soared into the air, flew over the stage of the Odessa City Theater, alighted on Giovanni's shoulders, and sunk his teeth into his neck. Muttering and squinting at the audience, he sucked the blood from the wound.
²⁶

It was at this spot in my reading that my muscles gave way. That malevolent smile and catapult across the stage was funnier than anything I had expected. Behind the actor's lunge was the author's glee: he had drawn the bow and fired the shot that sank the poor villain, setting off the helpless reader. The irrepressible joy of that revenge was like the improbable reversal of superior jokes. In fact, at that point the whole story turns a corner. The troupe's next performances are sold out. The boy's precarious situation is resolved: he had lifted his father's watch and pawned it with his unreliable boss, Shvarts (Black), who will not return it until Shvarts's wife persuades him to do so. Relations between this Shvarts and this wife, “a woman as robust as a grenadier and as drawn out as a steppe, with a crinkled
, sleepy face peeking out at its borderland,” are as mysteriously passionate as those played out on the theater stage. This laughter-inducing art compresses the swoon of melodrama into the vise of wit and makes us feel, like the boy, that we are seeing life for the first time “as it really was.”
²⁷

Of course, had the audience laughed
in the story
, the performance would have bombed. Babel's artistic catapult corresponds to Di Grasso's leap but reverses the mood, so that a mortal injury onstage has a hilarious effect on those reading about it. The narrator is working at emotional cross-purposes to the subject, much in the same way that the cartoon mouse Jerry invites laughter when he wounds Tom the cat. Humor, a permissible form of aggression, can work at the expense of those being pummeled.

But there is more to it than that. In “Di Grasso” the author's relation to
his
enterprise and readership complicates the relation between the narrator and his subject. Babel the writer professes to be offering the same kind of merchandise as the scalpers—namely, salvaged seconds from Europe's finery that seem better suited to the flea market than to the Temple of Art. The dramatic tension of the story derives from a high-stakes gamble: that great art can beat all odds. The comedy exposes how much is at risk where you least expect it.

How much was at risk? At the time of writing, Babel was in danger of losing not his shirt in the way of the scalpers in the “dark year” of the story but rather his life in the Soviet Union purges that Stalin was then swinging into high gear.

Beginning in 1928, and with increasing severity, the Communist state apparatus had been enforcing Stalin's decree that
writers and artists serve its political purposes. Writers like Kulbak and Babel could hardly have anticipated the penalties for perceived deviation. In a 1934 speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers, published in
Pravda
, Babel flirted dangerously with Stalin's directives for art: “Respect for the reader. I am suffering from a hypertrophy of that feeling. I respect the reader so much that it makes me numb and I fall silent. And so I keep silence.”
²⁸
Babel's listeners laughed, yet his irony was suspect. “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” with satire or mockery emphatically included under the same rubric, had been made punishable under Article 58/10 of the Soviet criminal code.
²⁹
The man with the bushy mustache had Babel killed on January 27, 1940. I have no doubt that my knowledge of Babel's fate contributed to my tension and its release in reading the story, as though I felt, through Di Grasso's lunge, the author's joyous revenge on the man who stole away his sweet life.

Postwar Humor

The precarious function of humor under conditions of mortal threat is the subject of Jurek Becker's novel
Jacob the Liar
, published in Communist East Germany in 1969—the same year as
Portnoy's Complaint
in the United States. A contemporary of Roth, Becker (1937–97) was born in Poland, survived the war years in the Lodz Ghetto, and afterward remained in East Berlin, trying to earn his living as a writer in the German Democratic Republic for media that were as strictly controlled as under Stalin.

Becker's father, who had survived with him, urged his son to write a work extolling the heroism of a ghetto acquaintance who had kept a radio in defiance of Nazi decree. Becker instead produced a comic study of a man, Jacob, who
pretends
to have a concealed radio. Having once heard—during his interrogation in the German police station—a snippet of news of the advancing Red Army, Jacob uses its promise of liberation to dissuade his friend Kowalski from rushing toward certain death. Jacob is made the unwitting source of hope for a widening circle of those let in on the “secret,” based on Kowalski's assumption, that he owns a radio. He keeps supplying invented news, scoring an occasional miniature victory, as when he retrieves a scrap of newspaper from a German privy. Jacob dare not disabuse the ghetto inhabitants of their faith in his lies without puncturing the hope that his lies alone can supply. Deception becomes the ghetto's lifeline much as Becker's humorous inversions keep us enjoying a story about mass murder.

In fact, Becker found in the tale of
Jacob the Liar
a means of subverting Soviet-German censorship. Camouflaging the parabolic application of the novel to repressive East German rule, he compared it instead to the Jewish condition before the war. Jacob reflects: “Had I been born more intelligent or imaginative like Sholem Aleichem—what am I saying, even half as much would have been enough—I would be able to invent ten times more and better than those who write in the newspaper.”
³⁰
This suggests that both Jacob and the author are in the tradition of the Yiddish humorist whose comic “inventions” for the readers of their day were likewise meant to obscure reality.

But was this true? Whether or not Sholem Aleichem's humor encouraged Jewish self-deception, at a time when there were still alternatives to the European constraints that were hemming the Jews in, the function of much of the joking under Hitler and Stalin was rather the opposite—to free some truth from within a punishing system of lies. In the spirit of what Germans called
flusterwitze
(whispered jokes), it expressed otherwise-forbidden feelings and knowledge.