Translating Sholem Aleichem

Translating Sholem Aleichem
History, Politics and Art

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Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
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Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)
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Studies in Yiddish
Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture

and literature. The series regularly publishes the proceedings of the
International Mendel Friedman Conferences on Yiddish Studies, which
are convened every two years by the European Humanities Research
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published in this series

1. Yiddish in the Contemporary World
2. The Shtetl: Image and Reality
3. Yiddish and the Left
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
4. The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature, by Joseph Sherman
5. The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson
6. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
7. Yiddish in the Cold War, by Gennady Estraikh
8. Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture,
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
9. A Captive of the Dawn: The Life and Work of Peretz Markish (1895-1952),
ed. by Joseph Sherman, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, and David Shneer
legenda@mhra.org.uk
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History, Politics and Art
edited by
Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin,
Kerstin Hoge and Mikhail Krutikov
Studies in Yiddish 10
Modern Humanities Research Association and 3PVUMFEHF
2012
First published 2012
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CONTENTS
Y
Acknowledgements ix
List of Illustrations x
List of Contributors xi
Introduction 1
1 Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal
Yiddish Reader 6
olga litvak
2 Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator 25
alexander frenkel
3 Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish Literary Audience 47
eugenia prokop-janiec
4 Soviet Sholem Aleichem 62
gennady estraikh
5 ‘Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt’: The Sovietization and
Heroization of Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems 83
roland gruschka
6 A Writer for All Seasons: Translating Sholem Aleichem into Soviet
Ideological Idiom 98
mikhail krutikov
7 Four English Pots and the Evolving Translatability of Sholem Aleichem 113
gabriella safran
8 On (Un)translatability: Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad
Stories) in German Translation 134
sabine koller
9 Laughing Matters: Irony and Translation in ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ 150
alexandra hoffman
10 Lost in Marienbad: On the Literary Use of the Linguistic Openness of
Yiddish 165
kerstin hoge
11 Sholem Aleichem in Estonian: Creating a Tradition 182
anna verschik
12 Speaking Tevye der milkhiker in Translation: Performance, Humour, and
World Literature 199
jan schwarz
Index 215
Sholem Aleichem, sketched by Hersh Inger,
who illustratred many of Sholem Aleichem’s Soviet editions:
by kind permission of his Estate
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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The editors wish to thank the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages of
the University of Oxford and the Mendel Friedman Fund which supported the
publication of this volume. We offer warm thanks to Jack and Naomi Friedman for
their generous support of Yiddish studies and the conferences upon which many of
the volumes in this series are based. Our gratitude also extends to the Oxford Centre
for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for sponsoring The Oxford Conference on Yiddish
Studies, ‘Sholem Aleichem in Translation and the European Context’ (16–18 August
2010), as well as to the staff of the OCHJS who worked so hard to make the conference
a success. We are grateful to all of the participants in that conference, which formed
the inspiration for this volume. Grateful appreciation is also due to Graham Nelson
and the staff of Legenda and the Modern Humanities Research Association for their
great efforts to put out this volume and for their continued enthusiastic support of
the Studies in Yiddish series.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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The pictures on these preliminary pages are sketches by Hersh Inger (1910–95), who
illustrated many of Sholem Aleichem’s Soviet editions. They are included by kind
permission of his Estate.
Fig. 2.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Pereyaslav, the writer’s birthplace.
Photo by Alexander Frenkel, 1984
Fig. 2.2. Arn (Aron) Vorobeytshik. Courtesy of Marks Jofe, Riga. 1920
Fig. 3.1. Cover of Tales of a Commercial Traveller (1925)
Fig. 3.2. Cover of The Musician (1900)
Fig. 3.3. Cover of Millions: A Stock Novel in Letters (1903)
Fig. 4.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Moscow. Photo by Gennady Estraikh,
2011
Fig. 4.2. The cheesecake bar ‘Tevye the Dairyman’ and the 1959-61 Russian
collection of Sholem Aleichem’s works
Fig. 5.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Kiev. Photo by Andrei Markin, 2011
Fig. 6.1. Meir Wiener. Courtesy of Julia Wiener
Fig. 8.1. Cover of Railroad Stories (1995)
Fig. 12.1. Cover of Tevye the Daityman (2002)
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
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Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University

Jordan Finkin is Weinstock Visiting Lecturer in Jewish Studies at Harvard
University
Alexander Frenkel is Executive Director of Jewish Community Centre of
St Petersburg, Russia
Roland Gruschka is Professor of Jewish Literatures at the Hochschule für Jüdische
Studien, Heidelberg
Alexandra Hoffman is a Ph. D student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Kerstin Hoge is University Lecturer in German Linguistics at St Hilda’s College,
University of Oxford
Sabine Koller is a Dilthey-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung at the Institut für
Slavistik, University of Regensburg
Mikhail Krutikov is Associate Professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Olga Litvak is Associate Professor of history and the Leffell Chair in Modern
Jewish History at Clark University
Eugenia Prokop-Janiec is an Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Gabriella Safran is Professor of Slavic languages and Literatures and Eva Chernov
Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University
Jan Schwarz is Assistant Professor in Yiddish at Lund University
Anna Verschik is Professor of General Linguistics at Tallinn University
¡¦§¡¦¡§¡¥
INTRODUCTION
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For an author to canonize himself as Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitch) did

would be a startling act at any time. For that canonical status to have been relatively
soon and almost unanimously confirmed, and in every generation since reaffirmed,
is an astonishing feat indeed. Almost a century after his death on 13 May 1916,
Sholem Aleichem remains one of the most popular Yiddish authors. Only Isaac
Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, can lay claim to this
kind of celebrity as a Yiddish author.
At the same time, few contemporary readers are able to read Sholem Aleichem’s
works in the original. The Holocaust tragically eradicated the majority of the
Yiddish reading public, but the decline of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish readership had
begun as early as the 1920s, as even those who had grown up in Yiddish-speaking
households, both in Europe and America, became increasingly estranged from the
traditional world of the shtetl. While Yiddish was largely lost in the secular Jewish
world, it continues to serve as the language of daily communication in populous
ultra-orthodox communities, most notably in the United States, Israel, England,
and Belgium. Sholem Aleichem’s writings, however, remain excluded from their
reading diet. Apart from being (deservedly) deemed secular and culturally alien, his
stories and novels are linguistically difficult even for these f luent Yiddish speakers;
after all, the vernacular of contemporary ultra-orthodox Jews differs significantly
from Sholem Aleichem’s language, which is saturated with Slavic-derived vocabulary
and distinctive regionalisms. Without doubt, Sholem Aleichem’s works are known
to a wider international audience today only thanks to their numerous translations
into various languages, as well as film and theatre adaptations, most famously Fiddler
on the Roof. Tevye the dairyman is now the best-known literary character created
by Sholem Aleichem and has eclipsed Menakhem-Mendl and Motl the cantor’s son,
who used to be staples of Jewish recreational and educational reading.
This volume explores that rich treasury of Sholem Aleichem translations, focusing
primarily — though not exclusively — on the European context. The trans-
formations of his Jewish characters, their fortes and foibles, their inimitable humour
and poignant tragedies, are pursued here through their Polish, Russian, German,
Danish, English, and Estonian incarnations. How are his works understood in
such different cultural environments? What strategies are employed to render the
peculiarities and details of Yiddish civilization and Jewish culture? What challenges
do the stylistic and linguistic devices employed by Sholem Aleichem pose? Do his
readers in different languages laugh in the same places? These are but some of the
questions that inspired this volume and that the essays contained in it address.
As the subtitle of this volume suggests, the many-faceted issue of translating
2 Introduction
Sholem Aleichem can be considered from the different perspectives of history,

politics, and art; and the contributions that make up this volume roughly fall into
these thematic categories. Translation does not occur in an ideological vacuum but
has a historical and political context, which overtly and/or covertly informs the act of
translating as well as the reading and reception of the translated text. Documenting
the historical facts and changing political positions in relation to the translations of
Sholem Aleichem sheds light on the constructs of reader, author, and canon, and
contributes to the writing of Yiddish literary history. Fleshing out the historical and
political background and reading any text against such background constitutes an
interpretive process; and thus, considering the history and politics of the translations
of Sholem Aleichem intersects by necessity with an examination of the art of
these translations. It is when looking at the art of translation that the question of
translatability comes to the fore. As discussed by a number of contributors to this
volume, Sholem Aleichem — notwithstanding his ample presence in translation —
is often claimed to be untranslatable owing to the orality and multilingualism that
is inherent in his texts. Arguably, however, (un)translatability is not simply a quality
of certain authors or works but depends on the relation between source and target
languages and cultures, which in turn links the art of translation to the historical
and political context in which this art is practised. The three broad categories of
history, politics, and art, which describe the approach pursued in the contributions
in this volume, must therefore be seen as interrelated and f luid themes.
Olga Litvak (‘Found in Translation: Sholem Aleichem and the Myth of the Ideal
Yiddish Reader’) begins this volume by challenging the often-repeated claim that
Sholem Aleichem aimed to write for the broad Jewish masses. According to her
analysis, it was no coincidence that the writer achieved serious popularity largely
during the pre-First World War decade, when his works began to dominate the
Yiddish book market and the literary departments of mass-circulation Yiddish
dailies. By that time, Russia had a well-developed Yiddish press and publishing
industry, and thousands of relatively educated inhabitants of the Pale of Jewish
Settlement formed an audience for modern writers. Like Sholem Aleichem
himself, some of them spoke Russian at home and were well-versed readers of
world literature, but their Yiddish and Hebrew were nevertheless good enough to
appreciate his humour and imagery.
It is well known that Sholem Aleichem initially tried his hand at writing in
Hebrew and Russian. Using both archival and published material, Alexander
Frenkel (‘Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator’) reconstructs Sholem Aleichem’s
attempts to carve for himself a niche in Russian literature. Sholem Aleichem’s
Russian stories, published between 1883 and 1903 in St Petersburg and Odessa
Russian periodicals, remain largely forgotten. Although not devoid of artistic merit,
the stories show that the writer, notwithstanding his f luency in Russian, could not
find the right register for portraying Jewish life and rendering the idiomatic speech
of his characters. Ultimately, Sholem Aleichem entered Russian literature only
thanks to the talent of the Russian translators of his Yiddish writings.
While Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belorussian Jews formed the main
readership of Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre, he had readers also among other regional
Introduction 3
groups of Eastern European Jews. All the same, he was seen as a ‘Russian’ rather
than Polish author in Poland, and ranked below Y. L. Peretz in the hierarchy of
Jewish writers. Eugenia Prokop-Janiec (‘Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish
Literary Audience’) analyses the history of translations of Sholem Aleichem’s
writings in interbellum Poland, concluding that the majority of his readers were
children and youth. Sholem Aleichem’s adult readership, which numbered in the
tens of thousands, was largely made up of subscribers to Polish-Jewish periodicals,
in which both works by Sholem Aleichem and articles about him could be found.
Three chapters in this volume deal with aspects of the reception and
interpretation of Sholem Aleichem’s works in the Soviet Union. Gennady Estraikh
(‘Soviet Sholem Aleichem’) addresses the politics and ideology of the Russian
translations, considering both the Yiddish and the Russian cultural contexts. He
argues that ceremonial celebrations of literary anniversaries served not only to
raise the profile and visibility of the writers thus honoured but also to reinterpret
and re-evaluate their legacy in accordance with the officially approved ideological
positions at a particular time. Sholem Aleichem’s Soviet canonization began in
1926 with the tenth commemoration of his death and was completed in 1939 with
the grand celebration of his eightieth birthday. The next round of anniversaries, in
1956 and 1959, reminded the audiences within and outside the Soviet Union that
Sholem Aleichem was still part of the classical canon, and, what is more, signalled
the rehabilitation of Yiddish culture after the devastation during the last years of
Stalin’s rule.
Roland Gruschka (‘Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt’: The Sovietization
and Heroization of Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems’) focuses on the
representation of Sholem Aleichem and his works in numerous publications cele-
brating the occasion of his eightieth anniversary. In the high Stalinist style, Sholem
Aleichem was presented as a monumental figure belonging to both the tsarist past
and the Soviet present, as a sharp critic of the tsarist regime and a precursor of
socialist realism. The anniversary celebration, modelled on the 1937 centennial
commemoration of Pushkin’s death, secured Sholem Aleichem’s place as a minor
classical writer in the Soviet canon of world literature.
Mikhail Krutikov (‘A Writer for All Seasons: Translating Sholem Aleichem into
Soviet Ideological Idiom’) traces the evolution of how Sholem Aleichem’s legacy
was interpreted in Soviet Yiddish criticism from 1918 to 1940. He argues that critical
evaluation f luctuated greatly, depending on the general ideological situation. On the
one hand, Sholem Aleichem was celebrated as the creator of archetypical Jewish folk
characters, whose significance transcended the limits of concrete historical space
and time; on the other hand, he was read as a chronicler of the decline of the Jewish
petty bourgeoisie in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. The latter view
was prevalent until the early 1930s, when it was dismissed as ‘vulgar sociologism’
and replaced by the former, which ref lects a general shift from a discourse of class
struggle to one concerned with the ‘Soviet people’ in official Soviet ideology.
The following four chapters in this volume take a closer look at translations of
a particular text by Sholem Aleichem, with translatability emerging as a common
thread. Gabriella Safran (‘Four English Pots and the Evolving Translatability of
4 Introduction
Sholem Aleichem’) argues that translatability is dependent not only on the nature
of the source-language text but, crucially, also on the state of the target language
at the time of translation. Comparing the four extant English translations of ‘Dos
tepl’ (‘The Pot’), published between 1949 and 1998, she shows how ‘neutralizing’
translation strategies, which minimize the strangeness of the source language and
its speakers, give way to deliberately ‘foreignizing’ approaches, which present the
monologue not simply as ethnography or satire but embody the recognition that
Yiddish is a distinctive culture no longer accessible to modern English readers. Safran
suggests that greater tolerance for an ‘imperfect translation’ of Sholem Aleichem’s
works results at least in part from a changed conceptualization of Yiddish language
and culture, from something to be defended or modernized to something that is
simply an object for contemplation, as well as the insight that Yiddish speakers may
invest language with a spiritual power which is lacking for most English speakers.
‘Dos tepl’ may be seen as staging the conf lict between ‘powerful but seemingly
disorderly Yiddish speech [...] and the impotent ordering attempts of its would-be
interpreters’. In presenting us with problems of intralingual translation, the text
thus prefigures interlingual translation difficulties.
Sabine Koller (‘On (Un)Translatability: Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-geshikhtes
(Railroad Stories) in German Translation’) also investigates the question whether
Sholem Aleichem is translatable. She argues that textual polyphony and polyglossia
equate to an ‘aestheticized encounter’ between dominant (Russian) and minority
(Yiddish) cultures, in which the politically and legally inferior group emerges as
linguistically superior. Surveying the history of German translations of the Railroad
Stories, Koller finds evidence for an early ‘exclusive focus on content [which]
gave way to a practice that pays attention to both content and form in the source
language’. The failure to translate Sholem Aleichem’s linguistic heterogeneity is
shown to result in a loss of aesthetic tension and cultural critique.
Alexandra Hoffman (‘Laughing Matters: Translation and Irony in “Der glik-
lekhster in Kodne” ’) considers irony as a factor that both facilitates and impedes
translation. Hoffman explores the relation between irony and translation, and
adopts a view of irony as ‘engagement with hurt’, which can be relieved only by the
retelling of a story, with translation being one way in which a story can be retold.
Given that irony and translation are both acts of interpretation, they allow a wide
range of (potentially opposing) political and critical positions to be attached to the
text, and Hoffman examines Soviet and Western criticism and translation practice
as it applies to one of Sholem Aleichem’s Railroad Stories. Once again, difficulties
of interlingual translation, viz. the translation of irony, are seen to be mirrored in
intralingual translation, such as the decoding of irony that is required of readers of
the source-language text.
Sholem Aleichem’s epistolary novel Maryenbad (Marienbad) and its translations
into German and English are the focus of the chapter by Kerstin Hoge (‘Lost in
Marienbad: On the Literary Use of the Linguistic Openness of Yiddish’). She
argues that the Yiddish language fulfils a dual role in the novel, having both an
instrumental and a thematic use. In its instrumental use, it provides a stylistic means
to give distinct and readily identifiable voices to the characters in the novel, with
Introduction 5
Sholem Aleichem exploiting the conventionalized connotations of the different

languages that make up Yiddish societal multilingualism. In its thematic use, the
Yiddish language emerges as an object under threat since its defining characteristic
of linguistic openness towards its stock languages appears to be unavoidably lost
in the Jewish encounter with modernity, which demands a new linguistic code.
Marienbad may be read as an exploration of the loss of Yiddish linguistic polyphony
at a time of societal change, but Sholem Aleichem’s thematic use of language is
obfuscated in translation because source- and target-oriented translations alike
are ill-equipped to deal with Yiddish multilinguality. Like Safran, Hoge suggests
that Sholem Aleichem’s original text prefigures later problems of translation and
translatability.
The final two chapters in this volume are written by scholars who are also practi-
sing translators of Sholem Aleichem. Anna Verschik (‘Sholem Aleichem in Estonian:
Creating a Tradition’) outlines the nature of translations of Sholem Aleichem into
Estonian. There have been three Estonian translators of Sholem Aleichem, of whom
Verschik is one (though her essay focuses only on the work of the other two). What
her essay reveals is that the number of translators and translations can sometimes
be an important index of both what is in the text (the translator as mediator) and
what is put in the text (the translator as interpreter). The relationship of the context
of translation to the translation is always crucial, but when translating into smaller
languages it assumes heightened importance. In Estonian, for example, there are
only three translators of Sholem Aleichem, and such a situation places a heavier
analytic weight on the who/how/when/where of the translation itself.
Jan Schwarz, one of the translators of Sholem Aleichem into Danish, places
translation both in a local as well as a world-cultural context (‘Speaking Tevye der
milkhiger in Danish: Performance, Humour, and World Literature’). In his analysis,
the musical and the movie Fiddler on the Roof, for better or worse, brought the
work of Sholem Aleichem to the attention of an international non-Jewish audience
(which Schwarz dubs ‘the Fiddler phenomenon’). It is only, however, through the
appearance of a multiplicity of translations into different languages that Sholem
Aleichem’s work can truly receive a new lease on life. In each local context,
therefore, the translator has to mediate the needs and knowledge of his or her
audience, often purchased through such popularized representations (and misrepre-
sentations), with the realities of the text.
In many ways, it is the translation of Sholem Aleichem which led to the (in
Jeffrey Shandler’s terms) ‘postvernacular’ assumption that there is an essential
rather than incidental ‘untranslatable’ quality of Yiddish itself. The reason for the
discomfort among post-war translators of Yiddish is that, whatever the complexities
of linguistic untranslatability, the loss of the culture and civilization which was built
on the Yiddish language intensifies both the difficulty and the moral responsibility
of translating the literary hallmarks of that civilization accurately. Many of the
contemporary cases of Sholem Aleichem in translation allow us to ref lect on how
‘what must be left out’ is decided upon in different linguistic and cultural contexts,
whether consciously or unconsciously.
CHAPTER 1
Y
Found in Translation:
Sholem Aleichem and the
Myth of the Ideal Yiddish Reader
Olga Litvak
The Untranslatable Translated

Once called the ‘most untranslatable of writers’, Sholem Aleichem has, nevertheless,
been read by more people in more languages than had ever read him in the
original.1 Disclaimers about the difficulties in rendering his lexical gymnastics
intelligible, let alone appealing, to a non-native speaker of Yiddish, have become
conventional among his translators. Reading Sholem Aleichem ‘from left to right’
frequently calls forth elaborate ‘prefatory discussions of the rigors of the translation
process’ which ‘almost inevitably expand into an evaluation or appreciation of the
language, the culture, the “world” of Sholem Aleichem’.2 In his careful analysis of
Sholem Aleichem as a beloved ‘icon’ of old-world Jewish Eastern Europe, Jeffrey
Shandler positions this tendency to ‘identify’ Sholem Aleichem’s work with the
‘quintessence of Jewish linguistic folk art’ against the background of a dramatic
generational shift towards the idealization of a mythic Eastern European Jewish
past in response to feelings of guilt and bereavement.3 For Jews born into a foreign
(non-Jewish) language, ‘translating the untranslatable’, Shandler says, effectively
serves a doubly recuperative function.4 Statements about untranslatability testify
to a profound and irremediable sense of devastating loss of a living connection to
Jewish Eastern Europe; but the actual work of translation stands for the possibility
of ‘achieving continuity with a cultural “past” from which [ Jews] had been recently
and abruptly cut off ’.5 For Shandler, the notorious American-Jewish reduction of
Sholem Aleichem’s complexity to the dimensions of Fiddler on the Roof is a case
study in the therapeutic effect of commodification on post-Holocaust melancholia.
The desire to traduce the boundaries of an integral literary text, even to go so far
as to ‘recast the author’s writings into other media’, admits of the distance between
the real ‘world of Sholem Aleichem’ and its iconic representation.6 Yet, even as
‘that way of life has continued to grow more distant’, the dispersion of the original
promotes the ‘accruing [of ] a rich amalgam of values of cultural, spiritual and
intellectual “authenticity”’.7 The mass marketing of Sholem Aleichem reintroduces
the Jewish ‘vox populi’, ostensibly lost in translation from the language of Eastern
European Jewish folk culture, into post-Holocaust history.
Found in Translation 7
Shandler argues that the translator of Sholem Aleichem enters into the role of self-
appointed agent of Jewish continuity. Imbued with a sense of personal responsibility
for the preservation of Yiddishkayt against historical odds, interpreters of Sholem
Aleichem’s legacy are rather more frequently inclined to treat the cultural effects of
translation with ambivalence, and even a kind of moral suspicion. Among Sholem
Aleichem’s twentieth-century critics and translators — the same people who have
devoted their professional lives to bringing Yiddish literature before the attention of
a non-Yiddish speaking public — the reader of Sholem Aleichem ‘from left to right’
figures not merely as someone who speaks in another language, but as a stranger
to the Jewish tradition that speaks directly through Sholem Aleichem. Every new
translation from the Yiddish opens Sholem Aleichem’s work to a new audience even
as it registers the tragic diminution of Jewish culture. Addressing the adulatory
reception of Sholem Aleichem in the post-war West, Ruth Wisse and Irving
Howe diagnose the ‘impoverishment’ of his work in translation as a symptom of a
contemporary crisis of Jewish conscience — a paradoxical embarrassment of riches
—— rather than as a methodological problem implicit in any attempt at translation
from one language to another. Sholem Aleichem’s ‘jokes’ are not only on his
characters, Wisse and Howe assert, but on ‘us, readers who have lost or abandoned
the tradition’.8 For Wisse and Howe, the tension between the compulsion to translate
Sholem Aleichem and the impossibility of doing so embodies the false promise of
emancipation. In their monitory reading, the goal of ‘translatability’ is seductive but
ethically problematic and ultimately self-defeating. Intractable linguistic difference
signifies impassable social and political boundaries that sustain the fierce resistance
of Judaism to dilution in a cosmopolitan sea.
The debate about Sholem Aleichem’s ‘translatability’ implicates the reader in a
conservative discourse about cultural decline. Whether one views translation as a
political concession to modern Jewish alienation or, like Shandler, as a dialectical
response to the ravages of history, the notion that there is an unbridgeable gap
between Sholem Aleichem’s first readers in Jewish Eastern Europe and their successors
in the United States and elsewhere prevails. Let me be clear. The presumption of
an existential divide between the former and the latter has nothing to do with
an appreciation of the similarities and differences between the social and cultural
make-up of Sholem Aleichem’s contemporary Jewish readers in late imperial Russia
and those who read him in the various outposts of the Russian-Jewish diaspora. As a
matter of fact, identifying ‘who read what’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Eastern Europe has barely risen to the surface of scholarly scrutiny.9 Instead
of investigating Sholem Aleichem’s actual audience, critical discourse serves up an
imaginary vernacular Jewish reader who apparently understood Sholem Aleichem
as he himself intended to be understood. The fantasy of an unmediated, symbiotic
connection between author and audience provides a touchstone for interpretation
of his work, generally based on the untested and circular assumption that Sholem
Aleichem himself wrote with this kind of a reader in mind. In other words, so the
story goes, the author not only shared the spoken language of his readership but
the core body of texts, customs, and conventions that governed traditional Jewish
speech in Eastern Europe. Uniquely at one with a popular Jewish sensibility, Sholem
8 Olga Litvak
Aleichem found his true calling on the Jewish street, transmuting its idiosyncratic
polyglottism into a distinctive and highly sophisticated literary idiom which, today,
can only be recovered by professional readers of Jewish literature.
According to David Roskies, the multiple valences of Sholem Aleichem’s
vernacular expression, transparent to his original ‘Yiddish reader’, have served
to render his work opaque to those accustomed to reading him from left to
right. ‘What’s lost in translation’, repines Roskies in his treatment of the highly
sophisticated gem of the short story form, ‘On Account of a Hat’, is ‘not the plot
line or punch line, not the story’s manifold interpretive possibilities, from pious
to postmodern, each locatable within a different contextual-generic map, but
the story’s orality’, accessible only in its garrulous original.10 Roskies’s attempt to
replace the work of translation and analysis — an effort which he says privileges the
modern ‘solitary act of reading’ — with what he calls the ‘communal, cacophonous
art of listening’ once again begs the unsettling question of Sholem Aleichem’s
engagement with an actual ‘community’ of Russian-Jewish readers.11 If the iconic
image of Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Yiddish reader’ cannot even bear the weight of a
preliminary inquiry, like the one undertaken here, what then? In all likelihood, the
‘real’ Sholem Aleichem attained his credentials as the master of an ‘ideal Yiddish
folk-speech’ largely because of people who, like readers today, read him and wrote
about his work from left to right.12 To begin to figure out how and why this
happened, we need to locate Sholem Aleichem’s search for an audience within the
world of Jewish publishing in late imperial Russia.
The Russian Origins of Modern Yiddish

In the early 1880s, when Sholem Aleichem initially embarked on a career in modern
Jewish literature, the concept had little resonance among the vast majority of Eastern
European Jewish readers. To begin with, the lion’s share of the books published and
read by Jews in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe consisted of legal, exegetical,
and liturgical texts.13 Like their Hebrew counterparts, Yiddish books were by
and large religious in content and late medieval or early modern in provenance.
Starting in the 1840s and 1850s, Eastern European Jewish intellectuals began to cut
into the traditional Jewish book market; but in the thirty to forty years between
the modest beginnings of modern Jewish literature and Sholem Aleichem’s literary
debut, Hebrew and Yiddish belles-lettres were yet to find a mass audience. The first
readers of the thin trickle of modern Yiddish books that began to appear in Russia
during the 1860s originated among the graduates of the network of government-
funded Jewish schools that were created by the government of Nicholas I as part
of its effort to introduce ‘enlightenment’ into Jewish education. In 1868, Joachim
Tarnopol characterized the readership of modern Yiddish literature in a way that
would have surprised Sholem Aleichem’s twentieth-century translators:
In many towns of our fatherland, for instance, Warsaw, Vilna, Odessa, Mogilev,
Berdichev, and the like, there are whole groups of cultured and professional Jews
and there exists in these enlightened circles a special kind of literary entertainment:
people pass the time in reading aloud, in the common Polish–Yiddish jargon,
stories, dramatic scenes, whole pamphlets in verse and prose. In the course of
these readings, a variety of ridiculous customs, entrenched superstitions, and
false Hasidic beliefs are quite sharply mocked before the eyes of a curious and
deeply interested public.14
Tarnopol explicitly tied the ‘f lexibility and originality’ of Jewish ‘speech’ (Rus.
narechie) to ‘aesthetic principles’ and the cultivation of taste and propriety, values
associated principally with bourgeois self-improvement rather than traditional
Jewish culture. For Tarnopol, the special aesthetic potentialities of Yiddish, ‘so
profoundly lacking in the life of the folk’, were especially appealing to ‘enlightened’
urban Jews.
Secondly — in the absence of a sufficiently numerous, educated, and financially
solvent reading public prepared to sustain the production of secular Jewish literature
in any language, including the vernacular — the professional pursuit of belles-lettres
remained at best a marginal undertaking, made still more precarious by the absence
of precedent or prestige. No one, not even Isaac Meir Dik whose works reputedly
sold in the thousands, could make a living solely from writing anything in Yiddish,
especially prose and poetry. On the whole, Jewish literature remained a sideline
that often reduced rather than improved the personal circumstances of a writer and
marginalized him socially. No Jewish author focused exclusively on the production
of fiction, which continued to be heavily underrepresented in Jewish writing
throughout the nineteenth century. Finally, there was no institutional infrastructure
for the reception of modern Jewish literature — no forum for reviewing new work
and for bringing it to the attention of an interested reader, no critical establishment
dedicated expressly to the transmission of changing literary values, no rewards for
literary pursuits, few informal literary circles, no literary societies, virtually no
lending libraries (although private libraries were on the rise) or book clubs, and
no legal instruments for the protection of copyright.15 Throughout the nineteenth
century, the production of Jewish books was a conservative business, circumscribed
by censorship restrictions and limited to a small number of family owned firms
that jealously guarded their territory.16 Distribution depended largely on itinerant
book pedlars; only a few big cities, such as Moscow and Warsaw, an early centre of
modern Jewish publishing, had Jewish bookshops.
An additional complication involved the fact that Jewish high culture held the
consumption of belles-lettres in such low esteem. Rabbis and most Jewish intel-
lectuals were similarly inclined to associate fiction with the stimulation of illicit
desire and the spread of Hasidic ‘lies’. Novel-reading entered into Jewish discourse
as a metaphor for sexual arousal and the temptations of gentile culture.17 Charac-
teristically, nineteenth-century attempts at assessing the development of the new
Hebrew literature focused exclusively on questions of social utility rather than
aesthetic innovation or the pleasures of the text.18 Simon Dubnow’s Russian reviews
of Yiddish fiction, published in Voskhod (Dawn) during the 1880s, were exceptional
in their focus on style. In fact, the establishment of a Russian-language Jewish
press, exemplified by the eminently respectable Voskhod, which was published in
St Petersburg rather than in the provinces, proved instrumental in opening a new
era in the development of modern Hebrew and Yiddish. The rise of a Russian-
10 Olga Litvak
Jewish middle-class public, the same public that read Voskhod, determined Sholem
Aleichem in his decision to link his professional future to modern Yiddish.19
The Beginnings of a Career

In 1884, the Russian-Jewish press in the imperial capital marked the silver
anniversary of Sh. Y. Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) as Russia’s first
vernacular Jewish writer and folk-intellectual.20 Enabled and supported by Russian-
Jewish educated society in St Petersburg, the celebration elevated Abramovich’s
Yiddish work to unprecedented prominence. It was a decisive moment in the early
history of Jewish periodical literature in Russian, which began in the early 1870s,
with the appearance of the literary annual Evreiskaia biblioteka ( Jewish Library) under
the editorship of Adolf Landau.21 By the time Evreiskaia biblioteka expired in 1881,
it had lasted longer than any other Russian-Jewish periodical, except the Yiddish
weekly Kol mevaser (Voice of the Herald), which also held out for almost a decade,
and the two northern Hebrew weeklies, Hamagid (The Preacher) and Hakarmed
(The Vineyard), neither of which published fiction. Landau immediately went on
to found Voskhod, the most important and longest-lasting Russian-Jewish ‘thick
journal’, a prestigious monthly dedicated to Jewish literature, history, and criticism.
The success of Voskhod inspired imitators. Within a few years, Voskhod had a weekly
supplement; St Petersburg could also boast another Russian-Jewish weekly, called
Russkii evrei (Russian Jew), as well as a monthly called Evreiskoe obozrenie ( Jewish
Review), dedicated to ‘scholarship and literature’. These were the journals that
undertook to introduce Abramovich’s Yiddish work to a Russian-Jewish audience;
until 1884, his public standing as a respectable littérateur was by no means assured
or uncontested. Articles about Mendele, the ‘national writer’ and conscience of the
modern Russian Jew, explicitly put into shadow another claimant to that title —
the Hebrew poet J. L. Gordon, whose own anniversary had been celebrated in St
Petersburg just a few years before.
Abramovich had been a published author for twenty-five years, before middle-
class Russian Jews discovered his credentials as a ‘national writer’. Like Gordon,
Abramovich gained a literary reputation together with social prominence and
financial rewards. In 1881, he was appointed to direct the largest modern Talmud
Torah ( Jewish charity school) in Odessa and took up permanent residence in the
city. Odessa’s secular Jewish writers and intellectuals transformed Abramovich into
a kind of cultural institution in his own right. His home became a focal point for
the national Jewish revival, newly fashionable among middle-class, educated Jewish
professionals and ‘half-educated’ upwardly mobile children of Jewish entrepreneurs,
whose ideas about Jewish culture derived from contemporary Russian populism.
While Russia’s prosperous and diplomaed Jews were claiming Abramovich for their
own, few vernacular Jewish readers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century
even knew who ‘Mendele the Book-pedlar’ was; Kol mevaser, where Abramovich
had published his work during the 1860s, had only 250 subscribers and his attempt
to publish his collected works in 1879 had come to nothing. His public persona
shifted centre-stage in 1884 thanks to the Russian-language Jewish press, read in
St Petersburg, and possibly other big cities such as Kiev, Odessa, and Warsaw, but
nowhere else. By contrast, both Yudishes folksblat ( Jewish People’s Gazette), the
successor of Kol mevaser, and the empire’s Hebrew papers greeted Abramovich’s
anniversary with resounding silence. For the rest of the century, and probably long
afterward, Abramovich’s work, both in Yiddish and in Hebrew, appealed primarily
to the small minority of late nineteenth-century Russian Jews who had abandoned
ritual practice, regular synagogue attendance, Talmud study, and other confessional
markers of Jewish identity. In turn-of-the-century Odessa, where Abramovich
was a local celebrity, his readers were found chief ly among those Jews who were
inclined to read Jewish texts and to adopt Jewish customs as a cultural avocation
rather than as a religious obligation.22 These were also the consumers of a small but
significant stream of secular Jewish fiction in Russian, written by Osip Rabinovich,
Grigorii Bogrov, and Lev Levanda and serialized in Russian-Jewish periodicals and
in the Russian liberal press during the 1860s and 1870s.
For Solomon Rabinovich — a young man of prodigious ambition, a providential
faith in his own literary talent, and, most importantly, an acute sensitivity to
subtle f luctuations in contemporary cultural stock — the apotheosis of ‘Mendele’
provided a necessary push towards Yiddish and towards the invention of ‘Sholem
Aleichem’. Rabinovich had first broken into print in 1879, when he was just
shy of his twentieth birthday, with an indignant letter to the editor of Hatsefirah
(The Morning), a Hebrew weekly published in Warsaw. In 1881–82, Rabinovich
also published two editorials, dealing chief ly with education, in the competing
Hamelitz (The Advocate). In 1883, he began to contribute fiction to the Yudishes
folksblat, but his literary persona was by no means securely tied to Yiddish. His
upbringing, his education and his public position as a ‘crown rabbi’ prepared him
to produce reliable social and cultural commentary and led him more naturally
to Hebrew than to Yiddish. In 1883, Rabinovich was still writing under his own
name and under a variety of pseudonyms; he finally settled on ‘Sholem Aleichem’
the following year. As he was a provincial without a university degree or useful
connections, Rabinovich’s only tenuous link to St Petersburg lay with the Folksblat,
a concern with a dubious reputation. Originally owned by Alexander Tsederbaum,
the publisher of Hamelitz and Kol mevaser, the Folksblat changed hands in 1886. It
was now owned by Israel Levi, a man who was known for a variety of money-
making schemes and for his apparent lack of interest in Yiddish. Levi, a creditor
of Tsederbaum, received the paper in payment for a bad debt, and was interested
mainly in attracting regular middle-class subscribers. In fact, the middle-brow
Folksblat actually attracted a broader audience than the avowedly populist Kol
mevaser. Despite its minuscule print run, Tsederbaum persisted in describing Kol
mevaser as a paper enjoyed by ‘simple people [Yid. prostakes], old people, market
women, wagon drivers, and craftsmen’.23 By contrast, the Folksblat sold some 7,000
copies, a modest number that was still twenty-five times larger than the circulation
of the now-defunct Kol mevaser.24
Despite the lure of exposure, Sholem Aleichem would remain very touchy about
his ongoing association with Levi; the two bickered constantly, even though Levi
published virtually everything that Sholem Aleichem sent him. In fact, it was his
12 Olga Litvak
work in the Folksblat, consisting mostly of short novels, which brought Sholem
Aleichem to the attention of his first middle-class readers and Russian-Jewish
intellectuals, many of whom also published in the Folksblat.25 His acute self-
consciousness about the gap between his aspirations and his lack of social and cultural
credentials pushed Sholem Aleichem into print, several years before he had made
up his mind about a literary career. In the 1879 letter to Hatsefirah, he defended the
reputation of his native Pereyaslav from charges of backwardness casually levelled
by a contributor in an article of the previous year. The writer, having stayed with
the most distinguished Jewish residents of Pereyaslav, had concluded that there was
hardly a single person in the town who was capable of writing ‘two or three pages’
clearly. Hopelessly behind the times, provincial Jewish Pereyaslav was charged
with the absence of ‘European’ culture. Taking the critique personally, Rabinovich
(not yet Sholem Aleichem) went to the trouble of pointing out that the author had
only to look at the first-rank graduates of the district gymnasium, ‘some of whom
had already gone on the [ Jewish Teachers’] Institute in Zhitomir and some of
whom had taken lucrative positions in anticipation of great achievements’ to note
the prodigious intellectual accomplishments of his native city.26 This description
was subtly self-referential: Rabinovich had graduated from the gymnasium with
distinction. He immediately applied to the institute in Zhitomir but failed to get in
only because he did not have documentation of military exemption. In 1879, he was
working as a private teacher in the home of the wealthy estate manager Elimelekh
Loyev (his future father-in-law); obviously, the job was lucrative, but it was
essentially a dead end. When he wrote the letter to Hatsefirah, his future, despite a
brilliant showing at the gymnasium and his own great expectations, was uncertain.
The dismissal of Pereyaslav as obscure and provincial therefore touched off a raw
nerve. It is interesting, and highly indicative of the writer’s sensitivity to slights of
this kind, that Rabinovich nursed his injury for almost year before he wrote back to
the paper. This was not the end of the story (he never could put any story quite to
rest): Sholem Aleichem held on to the insult throughout his life and preserved the
letter in his personal archive under the heading ‘My first printed word’.
Psychologically revealing, Rabinovich’s ‘first printed word’ also sheds light on
the moment, in 1884, when he first fully entered into the life of his fictional persona.
The creative rebirth of Rabinovich — his second printed word, as it were — was
also bound up with a letter, an unsolicited missive congratulating Abramovich on
his anniversary. Once again, the writer implicated a stranger in his own project
of self-fashioning. Here, too, the urgent desire for public recognition mingled
with a grandiose sense of entitlement. Like the letter to Hatsefirah, the letter to
Abramovich exhibited the characteristic pathos of social striving. Here, for the first
time, the vernacular mask of ‘Sholem Aleichem’ emerged to advance the ambitions
of Solomon Rabinovich. As a suggestive statement of an ambiguous commitment
to Yiddish, the letter casts a new light on Sholem Aleichem’s determined lifelong
pursuit of an educated, Russian-Jewish reader:
Honourable celebrant and dear sir, Solomon Moiseevich!
I feel that this letter is late in coming; but really, I am not to blame. Perhaps,
among the mass of letters and congratulations, your attention might involuntarily
pause upon these lines which come to you from the distant provinces, from,
so to speak, the most profound depths of our Russian ghetto, from a young
but fervent admirer of your talent, an admirer who labours upon the ground
first sown by you, diligently and zealously following in the tracks so carefully
placed by you upon the field of our own vernacular literature. If until now,
I — after two years of literary work, with the Evreiskaia narodnaia gazeta [Yid.
Yudishes folksblat] and more recently in the magazine, Evreiskoe obozrenie (see the
story ‘Dreamers’, in the July issue, a pale ref lection of your own magnificent
Travels of Benjamin III) — I say, I myself, have not yet contributed anything of
note with my insignificant efforts, still what a magnificent future awaits me,
as a beginner, what a wide field awaits anyone who is prepared to dedicate his
leisure time to serving upon the altar of our national muse! But, having started
with a heartfelt greeting to the man of the hour, I now end up by piling heaps
of compliments upon my own head — surely a weakness of every beginner!
I did, however, feel compelled to direct your attention to the one writing these
lines, even at the risk of appearing less than praiseworthy. Indeed, I felt bound to
do this not in the name of my personal interests but in the interests that touch
those ‘masses’ who are even now celebrating your anniversary, as well as in the
interests of our own miserable, persecuted, and endlessly exploited vernacular
and, yes, mine, and perhaps even yours. At the risk of saying too much, I leave
the ‘business’ of this letter until I hear back from you. Meanwhile, having
expressed my deepest devotion, and having wished from the bottom of my
heart that the next twenty-five years may be blessed with similar success in this
honourable calling, I remain with the deepest respect, your humble servant,
S. Rabinovich 27
There are a number of things to note about this letter. First, there is the matter of
style. Written in schoolbook Russian, it deliberately mimics the f lorid, exorbitant
diction and syntax of the kinds of articles that had appeared in the Russian-Jewish
press about Abramovich. Secondly, the self-consciously apologetic ‘S. Rabinovich’
imagines a non-existent personal relationship with the ‘celebrant’ as if he is already
a literary presence to be reckoned with. Abramovich had never met the younger
man and could hardly have been expecting congratulations from him. This forced
amiability positions Rabinovich as the heir from nowhere, both to ‘Mendele’
and to his status as the authentic voice of the people speaking to Russian-Jewish
educated society. The casual mention of his own ‘modest’ Russian contribution to
Russkii evrei figures both as a tribute to Abramovich and an attempt to impress him.
Despite the perfunctory expression of hope that Abramovich might enjoy another
twenty-five years in harness, the general sense that the letter conveys is that the
celebration marks the passing of a torch. Sholem Aleichem considered Abramovich’s
anniversary as an ending of sorts; the letter anticipates that Abramovich will
give way to his self-appointed successor, the young genius. Thirdly, there is the
ambivalent positioning of Yiddish itself. The impression of intimacy highlights
a knowingness about the nature of Abramovich’s commitment to the ‘zhargon’.
The word ‘masses’ (carefully placed in quotation marks) winks at Abramovich’s
social distance from the folk in whose name he had so quickly and unexpectedly
gained a literary reputation. Finally, there is that ‘business’ of the letter — most
likely, Sholem Aleichem here referred to early plans for the establishment of his
own literary almanac, the Folksbibliotek (The Jewish Popular Library) and angling
14 Olga Litvak
for Abramovich’s contribution or perhaps sponsorship. The intriguing hint did not
do it, though. Abramovich was canny enough to see through Sholem Aleichem’s
self-serving performance. He would not, in fact, respond, until Sholem Aleichem,
in the capacity of editor, offered him the inducement of a substantial honorarium.
It was only at this point that Abramovich was prepared to play along with Sholem
Aleichem’s elaborate game of literary chicken and to enable the genealogical fiction
in which he was the ‘grandfather’ and Sholem Aleichem the naughty mischief-
making ‘grandson’ of the new Jewish literature. Himself competitive and jealous
of his intellectual monopoly on the vernacular, Abramovich could, at that point,
afford to ignore Sholem Aleichem’s challenge to his own status and reputation,
while taking his money. The letters between them show that in the late 1880s,
Abramovich barely even read what Sholem Aleichem wrote and didn’t take his
literary aspirations or his f lattery very seriously.
The letter to Abramovich helps to frame Sholem Aleichem’s investment in the
Folksbibliotek, and inaugurates the critical project that would distinguish respectable
Yiddish ‘literature’ from the kinds of vernacular writing that the ‘masses’ had
begun to consume but which Russian-Jewish intellectuals dismissed as ephemeral
and unworthy of notice. Between 1884 and 1890, Rabinovich distanced himself
from the latter and reinvented himself as the founder of the former. His persona
was, from the beginning, linked to the project of establishing the credentials of
Yiddish, the only language which promised both a wide Jewish audience and
now, after Abramovich, cultural legitimacy as well. Profoundly ambivalent about
the prospects of a truly popular readership, ‘S. Rabinovich’ defined ‘Sholem
Aleichem’ against the unprecedented contemporary success of N. M. Shaikevich,
the first modern Yiddish novelist whose work did reach the ordinary ‘Yiddish
reader’.28 Shaikevich, or Shomer as he was generally known, earned a respectable
living turning out bulky and titillating romances with impressive regularity. By
the last decade of the nineteenth century, Shomer was a wealthy man. Sholem
Aleichem understood Shaikevich’s allure; his 1889 pamphlet Shomer on Trial is a
very personal document that testifies to the writer’s own obsessive fascination with
popular entertainment.29 Sholem Aleichem’s own attempt to write romantic fiction
during the 1880s is an ironic tribute to Shomer’s spectacular success with this form.
Possibly, Sholem Aleichem conceived of the figure of the musician and would-be
seducer Stempenyu, the protagonist of the novel named after him, as an allusion
to Shomer. The ending, which sees Stempenyu disappointed in love, punished
with a disastrous marriage to a greedy virago, and the heroine happily married and
erotically satisfied by her ordinary Jewish husband, is Sholem Aleichem’s fantasy
resolution of his professional rivalry.
Both envious and disdainful of what it took to achieve the kind of financial
independence and mass appeal that Shaikevich began to enjoy in the 1880s, he
undertook to create an alternative literary genealogy for modern Yiddish literature
that deliberately excluded his only real contemporary competitor. In the process,
Sholem Aleichem effectively abandoned the ‘Yiddish reader’ to the likes of Shomer
in order to woo Russian-Jewish educated society. Indeed, Folksbibliotek borrowed
both its title and its cultural mission from Landau’s Evreskaia biblioteka. Sholem
Aleichem, recently enriched by the legacy of his father-in-law, wished to replicate or

even surpass the achievement of his predecessor. Indeed, he may have been thinking
about the fortuitous geographical symmetry of their respective careers. Landau,
who came from Vilna, the distinguished northern capital of Jewish intellectual
life, founded a Russian-Jewish ‘library’ in the northern, European capital of St
Petersburg. Sholem Aleichem was now engaged in the creation of its vernacular
counterpart in Kiev, the ‘southern’ capital of old Rus´ and the regional birthplace of
a new Jewish literature which would combine a robust appeal to authenticity with
a high level of European cultivation.30 As much as Sholem Aleichem was interested
in becoming a professional Yiddish writer, an ambition that was surely dependent
on courting as many readers as possible, he was still more interested in cultural
approbation and the critical acclaim — maybe even love — of notable Jewish
‘northerners’ like Landau and the historian and critic S. M. Dubnow, who reviewed
his ‘Penknife’ in Voskhod and thereby invited a friendship that Sholem Aleichem
came to value as much as his relationship with Abramovich. In his aggressive early
courtship of Russian-Jewish educated society, a process that he initiated with his
letter to Abramovich (a barrage of letters to Dubnow soon followed) — Sholem
Aleichem proved remarkably successful, if not downright prescient. These were the
readers whose appreciation mattered most to the young editor of the Folksbibliotek.
His early connections with them turned out to be decisive for the course that
his literary self-fashioning subsequently took.31 Both romantic and familial,
Sholem Aleichem’s relationships within the community of Russian-Jewish writers
anticipated his affectionate intimacy with his imaginary ‘Yiddish reader’.
In Happy Company
The Folksbibliotek collapsed in 1890, after just two issues, eloquently proving the
limitations of its appeal (Sholem Aleichem continued to insist that Levi deliberately
drove him out of business). In the same year, he went bankrupt. Forced to leave
Kiev to avoid his creditors, Sholem Aleichem spent several years living in Odessa
where his wife trained as a dentist; her earnings provided the main source of
income for the writer’s growing family. Sholem Aleichem returned to Kiev in 1893
and lived there until he left Russia in the wake of the revolutionary violence of
1905. However, the time spent among the ‘wise men of Odessa’, the writers who
spearheaded the Jewish national revival, deepened his connections to the authors
of secular Jewish culture. During this period, Sholem Aleichem’s main link to
the educated Russian-Jewish reader lay through Zionism. While he continued to
publish fiction, he also produced several Zionist pamphlets as well as an appreciative
biography of Herzl. However, such work did not exactly broaden his appeal. At
the turn of the century, Russian Zionism was hardly a mass movement; it attracted
mostly students, respectable merchants, and liberal professionals.32 Their cultural
orientation was towards Russia and Western Europe, but they were invested
in the development of Yiddish and Hebrew literature as a way of articulating
their attachment to Judaism. This combination of interests developed against the
background of Russian modernism, strongly f lavoured by nostalgic longing for
16 Olga Litvak
peoplehood. A populist aesthetic was characteristic of the work of such notable fin-
de-siècle figures as Shimon Frug, a poet and a Zionist who wrote lyrical national
ballads in Russian and in Yiddish, the Odessa journalist, M. Ya. Rabinovich (pseud.
Ben-Ami), who wrote stylized children’s tales in Russian and in Hebrew, the Kiev
lawyer and composer of Yiddish songs, Mark Varshavskii (with whom Sholem
Aleichem collaborated on a collection of Jewish folk-songs in 1901), and the lawyer
and historian S. M. Ginsburg who founded Der fraynd (The Friend), the empire’s
first Yiddish daily.
Several new publishing ventures of the Jewish renaissance were launched in the
1890s throughout the empire, not only in Hebrew but in Yiddish and Russian
as well. Thanks to his network of Odessa friends and contacts forged through
the Folksbibliotek, Sholem Aleichem had ties to most of them. For one, there was
Mordechai Spector, a friend from the early days who shared Sholem Aleichem’s
interest in Yiddish. Spector moved to Warsaw, which, along with Odessa, was
becoming an important centre of Jewish secular culture. In 1894, Spector founded
a Yiddish ‘thick journal’ called Hoyz-fraynd — Household Friend — where he
published Sholem Aleichem’s first Tevye story as well as early instalments of the
Menakhem-Mendl series. In 1899, Sholem Aleichem also began to publish in Der yud,
a bimonthly Yiddish journal founded by Y. Kh. Ravnitski, which lasted until 1902.
Ravnitski had first contacted Sholem Aleichem in 1886, for a contribution to Der
veker (The Tocsin), a Yiddish-language Zionist annual, edited by M. L. Lilienblum,
one of the founders of Hibat tsiyon (Lovers of Zion). Between 1890 and 1904, Sholem
Aleichem also contributed feuilletons to Hebrew and Russian periodicals, including
a progressive Zionist monthly, Budushchnost (Prospect), and to the liberal Russian
press in Kiev and Odessa. During Sholem Aleichem’s formative years as a Yiddish
writer, the years which saw the publication of Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl, he began
to cut a respectable public figure as a paterfamilias, and as a Russian intellectual and
Jewish publicist. But for the provincial vernacular reader, whose tastes ran mostly
to Shomer, Sholem Aleichem still remained a rare discovery. Y. D. Berkovich, who
idolized his father-in-law, described his initial encounter with Sholem Aleichem’s
work as an unexpected surprise and a subversive ‘hidden pleasure’. In 1899, just
after Berkovich celebrated his bar-mitzvah and entered the yeshivah in his native
town of Slutsk, he became an avid reader of Yiddish fiction. After Berkovich had
exhausted the work of Shomer, the local bookseller presented him with a volume
of the Folksbibliotek which he had held under lock and key, along with volumes
of Smolenskin’s Hashahar (The Dawn). These, he told the innocent consumer of
Shomer, Yitshak-Dov, were not meant to be swallowed whole and forgotten, but
savoured bit by bit. Like Shomer’s disposable novels, it too was ‘zhargon’, but of
an entirely different order, possessed of a rare and marvellous — imaginary —
taste of ‘bird’s milk’.33 Berkovich reconstructs the wonder that Sholem Aleichem’s
work represented at the turn of the century, but also its obscurity. It was obviously
more sophisticated, and special, different from the typically frivolous Yiddish fare
enjoyed by ‘housemaids’ on their days off. The injunction to read slowly, ‘drop by
drop’, speaks to the emergence of a new sensibility which celebrates the pleasures of
private reading instead of denigrating them at the expense of study. The discovery
of Sholem Aleichem, in other words, is here associated with the emergence of high
literary art. Berkovich’s romantic construction of his own introduction to Sholem
Aleichem is especially telling since his intervention subsequently shaped Sholem
Aleichem’s twentieth-century reputation as a writer for the Jewish masses.
By the turn of the century, Sholem Aleichem had become sufficiently ensconced
in Russian-Jewish liberal circles to spearhead a major publication project of his own,
the first after the debacle of the Folksbibliotek. Following the Kishinev pogrom, he
was instrumental in bringing out a literary anthology called Hilf (Help). Sales from
the proceeds went to aid impoverished survivors of the violence.34 The volume
gathered Russian and Jewish writers together on behalf of the suffering Jewish
people. Sholem Aleichem solicited contributions from friends and colleagues in
Odessa and translated several short stories by Tolstoy and Korolenko into Yiddish.
Like Folksbibliotek, Hilf was modelled on a Russian-language precedent, a 1901 St
Petersburg literary anthology called Pomoshch (Help).35 Dedicated to the memory
of the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, an outspoken humanitarian, deeply
sympathetic to the problem of Russian-Jewish poverty and legal persecution,
Pomoshch was published to raise money for Jewish victims of famine in Bessarabia
and Kherson. The book actually included a short story about a pogrom, by Maxim
Gorky, which may have given Sholem Aleichem the idea for Hilf. With Hilf,
Sholem Aleichem contributed to positioning Yiddish at the centre of modern
Russian-Jewish culture. Earlier that year, he had been solicited by S. M. Ginsburg
to contribute regularly — two feuilletons a week — to Der fraynd. This was his first
contract with a periodical that promised a stable source of income ‘in hard coin’ (as
he put the matter in a letter to Spector). The year 1904 also saw the publication of
his first Collected Works, in four volumes, as well as the first translation of his stories
into Hebrew, a conspicuous sign of literary longevity and respect. At the same
time, his command of Jewish speech genres was growing increasingly sophisticated;
between 1902 and 1904, Sholem Aleichem wrote some of his most psychologically
complex ‘monologues’, such as ‘Geese’ (1902), ‘The Exemption’ (1902), and ‘Advice’
(1904). Such work explicitly drew him closer to Russian-Jewish readers of Chekhov
than to a Jewish mass audience, accustomed to Yiddish chapbooks and the thrilling
potboilers of Shomer.
On the eve of Russia’s first revolution, Sholem Aleichem’s reputation rested
largely on his position as the in-house vernacular voice of Russian-Jewish educated
society. In his correspondence with other Jewish writers, conducted chief ly in
Russian, Yiddish functioned as a stylized performative language rather than an
unmarked medium of communication. In this respect, the correspondence served
as an extension of the art of colloquy that Sholem Aleichem perfected in his
fiction. The despised ‘zhargon’ of the Jewish masses acquired a new frisson as the
intimate ‘argot’ of the ‘freylekhe kompanye’ (happy company) of Russian-Jewish
writers that Sholem Aleichem collected around himself. His own irrepressible
ventriloquism designed to captivate the detached, serious reader was so contagious
that his correspondents within the Jewish republic of letters eventually succumbed
to his self-deprecating, folksy charm despite their own best intentions to remain
aloof. Sceptics like Landau and Frishman who sniffed at Yiddish were won over
18 Olga Litvak
by Sholem Aleichem long before his work began to appeal to masses of Jewish
readers. However, the persistent confusion between ‘S. Rabinovich’ and ‘Sholem
Aleichem’ that had effectively turned the production of modern Yiddish literature
into an extended family affair also undermined Sholem Aleichem’s reputation for
seriousness, particularly since the social-democratic movement and the Bund had
begun to claim Yiddish as the language of the Jewish revolution and steadily gained
new recruits. Among the followers of Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem’s humour was
considered little more than petty-bourgeois pandering without redeeming social
value. The post-1905 image of Sholem Aleichem as a folk-writer was promoted
chief ly by Berkovich, early Yiddish critics such as Bal Makhshoves, and Sholem
Aleichem’s admirers within the fraternity of Jewish writers. Faced with dismissal
by Jewish radicals, they had to account for Sholem Aleichem’s ambiguous and
ironic appropriation of the Jewish ‘folk-idiom’. Bal Makhshoves, for instance,
mythologized Sholem Aleichem’s appeal to the masses, but depicted him as an
intimate stranger, a ‘sorcerer’ charged with transmuting the ‘historical, everlasting
transgressions that defile our souls with greasy stains [...] all our mistakes and
experiences, all the repressions we suffer, all the evils we perpetrate on others and
that others perpetrate upon us’ into the ‘dream’ of literary art.36 This, as far as I
know, is the first time in the history of Jewish literary criticism that the depiction of
human baseness and folly is explicitly celebrated as a diversion and an almost sensual
delight; instead of being morally and politically engaged, the reader is enchanted
and seduced. Beneath all of the bonhomie of a writer whose work Bal Makhshoves
compared to a ‘glass of wine and a piece of cake’ lurked an awareness that writing
about the ‘little people’ was not quite the same thing as writing for them. In private,
Bal Makhshoves confessed to Berkovich:
I can’t make him [Sholem Aleichem] out. Who is he? A major writer or a minor
one? At times, he writes like one of the great European artists; but at other
times, he is like one of his own creations, a Kasrilevker [a Jewish provincial],
petty and narrow-minded.37
Sholem Aleichem’s popularity among the Yiddish-speaking masses was supposed
to clinch an argument that he was a beloved institution of the folk and therefore
important, whatever the critical debate about the political virtues of his work; for
this reason, it was best not to inquire too closely into the writer’s relationship with
the historical counterparts of the people that he depicted.
The Jewish Writer as Institution

Sholem Aleichem began to attract a mass Jewish readership only after the revolution
of 1905. But the dominant position in the making of modern Yiddish literature
that he eventually came to occupy both in Russia and in the United States was
neither self-evident nor predestined. When he first left Kiev for New York in
1906, Sholem Aleichem could not count on being known for his writing. Rather,
he banked on the unexpected success of his comedy Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt (Scattered
and Separated) among amateur acting companies in Krakow and Warsaw, where
it was performed not only in Yiddish but in Polish as well.38 The play was staged
in New York in 1904, which brought Sholem Aleichem to the attention of Jacob
Adler and Boris Tomashevsky; their patronage shaped Sholem Aleichem’s initial
reception in America. At first, the American-Yiddish press ‘championed him
as the heir to Avraham Goldfaden, the founder of Yiddish theater’.39 When his
plays failed, it became clear that the image of a ‘Jewish Mark Twain’, promoted
in the papers, had been profoundly misleading. Indeed, the embrace of Sholem
Aleichem’s literary work did not originate in spontaneous popular recognition.
The comparison with Goldfaden, who did find wealth and acclaim on the Yiddish
stage, misfired. Twentieth-century literary fame followed, rather than anticipated,
Sholem Aleichem’s warm reception among a tiny community of Yiddish readers
that had begun crystallizing much earlier, at least by the mid-nineteenth century.
It included middle-class and self-described enlightened Jews scattered throughout
the cities of Eastern Europe, many of whom learned or taught themselves to read
literature in other languages (Hebrew, German, Russian or [French], but whose
mother tongue was Yiddish.40
Among Jewish critics who loved Sholem Aleichem, his status as a ‘writer of the
people’ required constant reiteration. Moreover, the most significant aspect of his
new-found celebrity was precisely that it was new. The story of Sholem Aleichem’s
discovery by the ‘Yiddish reader’ points to a profound shift in Jewish public culture
that produced a much larger audience for modern Jewish fiction than had ever
existed before. This audience was neither particularly religious nor exclusively
Yiddish-speaking; like Sholem Aleichem’s first middle-class Russian readers, it was
more solidly steeped in contemporary secular literature than in Jewish texts.
Sholem Aleichem’s phenomenal rise to fame during the last decade of his life
was bound up with the embourgeoisement of Jewish reading habits and the formation
of a Yiddish-speaking ‘civil society’.41 This process began back in the 1880s but
accelerated rapidly after 1905. By 1910, even those Russian Jews who were living
in small provincial towns, far away from the great urban centres of the empire,
had access to a wide array of local institutions, all somehow linked to secular
reading and to the discussion and exchange of books. Jews with middle-class aspir-
ations but without formal secular education could turn to Yiddish as a vehicle of
self-improvement. This was the case in America as well; closely bound up with
English-language Jewish literature, modern Yiddish not only catered to popular
taste and political convictions, but increasingly articulated the values and anxieties
associated with upward mobility and civic integration.42 In post-1905 Russia, the
proliferation of Yiddish newspapers and journals, thanks to the easing of censorship
restrictions, brought increasing numbers of vernacular readers into contact with
contemporary ideas about the arts, philosophy, and politics and helped to create
a widely dispersed secular reading public with an increasing sense of personal
investment in both Hebrew and Yiddish literature. By the First World War, the
lines dividing Jewish vernacular literature and its middle-class Russian-language
counterpart had become blurry. Firmer ideological boundaries now divided the
orthodox who continued to speak Yiddish but who harboured all of the traditional
prejudices against fiction-writing and had no interest in Sholem Aleichem and
the world he claimed to represent from non-believing and occasionally traditional
20 Olga Litvak
Yiddish readers who made up Russia’s alternative Jewish ‘civil society’: ‘social
activists’, ‘intellectual workers’, and hundreds of thousands of ‘half-educated’
artisans, storekeepers and ‘organization men’, members of Jewish artisans’ clubs,
and graduates of Jewish vocational schools who transformed the Jewish cooperative
movement and the Yiddish press into mass phenomena.43 These readers, who had
already ‘severed their links with the traditional community’, embraced Sholem
Aleichem’s work as an authentic representation of their Jewish values, true to their
own experience of modernity.
Sholem Aleichem’s rise to the status of a popular Yiddish writer is traceable to
the institutionalization of secular Jewish literature in late imperial Russia after 1905.
For the first time in his career, he was able to contribute consistently to a mass-
circulation Jewish press, not only in Russia but in the United States. He developed
longstanding contractual relationships with two of the most important Yiddish
dailies in the Russian empire, which lasted much longer than the small weeklies
and obscure yearbooks in which he had published before 1905. Sholem Aleichem’s
relationship with Haynt (Today) and Der moment (The Moment), both published
in Warsaw, brought him into regular contact with a large, stable, and continually
expanding Yiddish readership. Circulation figures are scarce for the period before
the First World War, but running a Yiddish daily was fast becoming a profitable
enterprise; in 1912, the combined circulation of Haynt and Moment was 175,000.44
At the same time, Sholem Aleichem continued to publish work in Der fraynd in
St Petersburg, Undzer lebn (Our Life) issued in Odessa and Warsaw, as well as
several smaller provincial papers in Kiev, Riga, Bialystok, Vilna, and Lodz. Sholem
Aleichem’s audience was not only growing but becoming more geographically
diverse. There was also the issue of sustaining the interests of regular newspaper
readers. After the revolution of 1905, Sholem Aleichem returned to novel-writing,
this time in serial form and with much more success. Der mabl (The Flood), his novel
of the 1905 revolution, was serialized in Undzer lebn in 1907 and simultaneously
in Di varhayt (The Truth), in New York; Blondzhende shtern (Wandering Stars)
followed in 1909–10 in Di naye velt (The New World) and six months later, under
the title Navenad (Wandering), in Der moment. Marienbad appeared in Haynt in the
summer of 1911 and Blutiker shpas (The Bloody Hoax), also in Haynt, during the
winter of 1912. Although critics tend to dismiss the late novels as cheap melodrama
and a waste of Sholem Aleichem’s talent, they — and not the canonic Tevye — are
the books that turned him into a popular writer. Der mabl, issued as an offprint by
Undzer lebn immediately after the conclusion of its serial run, was a contemporary
sensation, both in Russia and in the United States, where it was quickly pirated.
Berkovich, who hated the novel, admitted that it exercised a ‘magnetic effect’ on
the Russian-Jewish reader and sold ‘tens of thousands’ of copies, both in the original
1907 edition and in a subsequent reprint in 1911–12.45 Berkovich says nothing about
the popularity of the Tevye series, which was not reprinted until after Sholem
Aleichem’s death.
The popularity of free-standing editions of the late novels points to a more general
shift in the publication history of Sholem Aleichem’s work that followed the 1905
revolution. Before 1905, Sholem Aleichem published a small number of books, most
of which were offprints of stories and novels previously published in periodicals.

Only one — Der farkishefter shnayder (The Enchanted Tailor), originally published
in 1901 — came out in a second printing (in 1902). Likewise, the edition of the
Collected Works of 1904 was not comprehensive and gave the impression that Sholem
Aleichem was primarily a children’s writer. The early Menakhem-Mendl stories were
not included. Neither were the pungent comedies, Der get (The Divorce), published
in Hoyz-fraynd in 1888, and Yaknehoz, published separately in Kiev in 1894, nor
any of the early novels, except Stempenyu. Before 1905, it seems that Stempenyu was
Sholem Aleichem’s best-known work. On the whole this scattershot publishing
record indicates that the initial burst of literary activity in 1884–89 did not leave a
long-lasting impression on Jewish readers.
This picture changed dramatically after 1905. For the first time, Sholem
Aleichem’s short fiction became readily available in the form of soft-cover penny-
booklets. There were two series of these, both published in Warsaw; one was called
‘Bikher-far-ale’ (Books for Everyone) and the other ‘Familyen-bibliotek’ (Family
Library). Although they also included a small number of other titles, they were
almost entirely taken up with Sholem Aleichem’s work. This format proved ideal
for habituating vernacular readers, accustomed to the Yiddish bikhl or chapbook,
to modern fiction. In the 1890s Ben-Avigdor (b. Abraham Leib Shalkovich), the
founder of Warsaw’s first Zionist publishing house, Tushiyah, had successfully
used a similar strategy to introduce traditional readers to modern Hebrew fiction.
The f lood of Ben-Avigdor’s clever and highly accessible little storybooks — he
produced more than a hundred — included in his Hebrew Library series accounts
for the notable expansion of Hebrew readership at the turn of the century. But
the potential audience for ‘Bikher-far-ale’ and the ‘Familyen-bibliotek’ was much
larger. Both enjoyed consistently high print runs, even by the standards of post-
1905 vernacular literature, thanks to Sholem Aleichem. At three to four thousand
each, the print runs of his books surpassed those of other Yiddish works, which
ranged from five hundred to a thousand. Indeed, between 1905 and 1914, Sholem
Aleichem outsold every other Yiddish writer of fiction, including Peretz, Asch,
and Abramovich. In 1912 (a sample year for which detailed statistical information
is available) his titles comprised a third of all printed Yiddish books. Reviewing
Sholem Aleichem’s publication record for 1912, the journalist Moshe Shalit reported
the astonishing total of 179,000 copies; Sholem Aleichem, Shalit mused, was now
not just a significant presence on the Jewish literary market, he was the Jewish
literary market.46
In one sense, Shalit got it exactly right: Sholem Aleichem’s work institutionalized
secular Jewish fiction. But in another sense, his popularity was made by a Jewish
public, receptive to modern secular literature. If Zeev Gries is equally correct in
his assertion that until the end of the nineteenth century it was traditional religious
writing that satisfied the existential and intellectual needs of the Jewish people, then
Sholem Aleichem’s post-1905 domination of the literary marketplace marks a point
at which it had plainly ceased to do so. And not only for tiny numbers of disaffected
intellectuals and creative types. The extraordinary growth of public interest in
Sholem Aleichem’s work is in and of itself a significant historical indicator of a
22 Olga Litvak
dramatic and widespread surge towards secularization. Implicated in this process,

Sholem Aleichem’s popularity became both a cause for celebration and a source
of cultural anxiety about the displacement of the one great Jewish Book by a
proliferation of Jewish pocket-books (bikhlekh) whose power to command attention,
let alone obedience, had nothing to do with the word of God.
Behind the myth of the ‘untranslatable translated’ there is a romantic fantasy
of perfect language, a transcendent form of Jewish expression that has the power
to instil community where the perception of a common structure of feeling and a
shared sense of historical purpose has been lost. Jewish intellectuals began to ascribe
this kind of potency to Jewish language, first Hebrew, then Yiddish, precisely at the
moment when normative discourses of estate and confession began to give way to a
more f luid vocabulary of social ascription which implied that ‘Jewishness’ itself was
no less provisional than other ways of categorizing human difference. While the
‘cacophony’ of Jewish language use consistently drowned out both sides in the ‘great
Jewish language war’, maintaining Jewish collective discipline was becoming more
politically urgent.47 For this reason, the idea of secular Jewish literature — that is
to say, a literature that was Jewish in the same way that Balzac’s work was French,
Chekhov’s was Russian, and Dickens’s was English — eluded Sholem Aleichem’s
twentieth-century readers in the Russian-Jewish diaspora. Yet, that is exactly
the kind of sophisticated, ‘cosmopolitan’ Jewish literature that Sholem Aleichem
produced.48 What translators often find so troubling about Tevye, and, for that
matter, about Sholem Shachnah, the fugitive hero of ‘On Account of a Hat’, is
not that their Jewish dilemma cannot be communicated in any other language but
precisely the reverse: that the Jewish everyman is just like everybody else, that his
Jewishness (and ours) is nothing outside the text, or, to put it another way, a matter
of choosing the proper headgear.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Jacob Shatzky (1948), cited in Jeffrey Shandler, ‘Reading Sholem Aleichem from Left to Right’,
YIVO Annual, 20 (1991), 309.
2. Ibid., p. 326.
3. Ibid., p. 309; for his conclusion, see pp. 326–28.
4. The phrase is Shatzky’s, cited ibid., p. 329, fn. 3.
5. Ibid., p. 320.
6. Ibid., p. 324.
7. Ibid., 3p. 28.
8. The Best of Sholom-aleichem, ed. by Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (New York: Washington
Square Press, 1979), p. xvii.
9. See the pioneering work of Alyssa Quint, ‘‘Yiddish Literature for the Masses’? A Reconsideration
of Who Read What in Jewish Eastern Europe’, AJS Review, 29.1 (2005), 61–89, and, now, Jeffrey
Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2009), pp. 24–140.
10. Roskies, ‘Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat’, Prooftexts, 21.1 (2001), 46.
11. Ibid., pp. 54–55.
12. The quotation is from ibid., p. 55.
13. See Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900 (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization, 2007), esp. pp. 113–37.
14. Ioachim Tarnopol, Opyt sovremennoi i osmotritelńoi reformy v oblasti iudaizma v Rossii (Odessa:
L. Nitche, 1868), pp. 86–87, cited in Quint, ‘Who Read What’, p. 73. Emphasis added and
translation slightly altered.
15. On the role of such factors in the emergence of a robust reading culture, see Richard D. Altick,
The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1957) and James Smith Allen, Popular French Romanticism: Authors,
Readers and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981).
16. On the economic and political conditions informing the history of Jewish publishing in imperial
Russia, see D. A. Eliashevich, Pravitel´stvennaia politika i evreiskaia pechat´ v Rossii, 1797–1917 (St
Petersburg and Jerusalem: Mosty kul´tury/Gesharim, 1999).
17. See Dan Miron, Beyn hazon le-emet: neitsanei ha-roman haívri vehaýidi bemeah ha-19 ( Jerusalem:
Mosad bialik, 1979), pp. 237–38.
18. A sample can be found in Morris Neiman, A Century of Modern Hebrew Literary Criticism, 1774–
1884 (New York: Ktav, 1983).
19. Compare David E. Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture (Pittsburgh: The University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2010), pp. 18–32.
20. I have written about Abramovich’s literary anniversary elsewhere; see Olga Litvak, Conscription
and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 128–32.
21. On Landau, see Victor Kel’ner, ‘Adol’f Landau: izdatel’, redaktor, publitsist’, Vestnik evreiskogo
universiteta, 2.20 (1990), 238–73.
22. On the secular origins of Odessa’s Jewish culture, see Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa:
A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).
23. Tsederbaum, cited in Quint, ‘Who Read What’, p. 76.
24. Fishman provides these circulation figures; see Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, p. 12.
25. See Y. Kh. Ravnitskii, ‘Di ershte yorn fun mayn bakantshaft mit Sholem-Aleykhem’, in Tsum
ondenk fun Sholem-Aleykhem, ed. by I. Tsinberg and Sh. Niger (Petrograd: Y. L. Peretz-fond,
1917), p. 44.
26. The letter is reproduced in Khone Shmeruk, Shalom-Alekhem: madrikh le-hayah veli-yetsirato (Tel
Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1980), 10.
27. The letter is dated 23 December 1884. See Dos sholem-aleichem bukh, ed. Y. D. Berkovich (New
York: Sholem-aleichem bukh komikt, 1926), pp. 190–91.
28. See Sophie Grace-Pollack, ‘Shomer le’or shomers mishpet leSholem Aleichem’, Hulyot, 5 (1999),
109–59.
29. See Justin Cammy, ‘Judging the “Judgment of Shomer”: Jewish Literature and Jewish Reading’,
in Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays in Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse, ed.
by Justin Cammy, Alyssa Quint, and Dara Horn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008), pp. 85–128.
30. On the alternative ‘southern’ genealogy of modern Yiddish literature, see Bal-Makhshoves, Dos
dorem-yidntum un di yidishe literatur in XIX yorhundert (Berlin: Klal-ferlag, 1922).
31. See, for instance, Sholem Aleichem’s 1886 letter to Ravnitskii, in which he first declared himself
to be the ‘troublemaker’ incapable of ‘serious novel-writing’, quoted in Ravnitskii, ‘Di ershte
yorn’, p. 45.
32. See Joseph Goldstein, ‘Some Sociological Aspects of the Russian Zionist Movement at its
Inception’, Jewish Social Studies, 47.2 (1985), 167–78.
33. Yitshak-Dov Berkovich, Harishonim kivnei adam, in Collected Works [Heb.], 12 vols (1951–65), vi
(Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1953), 23–24.
34. The book officially came out under the editorship of Yudishe folks-tsaytung, a short-lived
Yiddish weekly edited by Spector in Warsaw but published in Krakow, because of censorship
restrictions; see Hilf: a zamlbukh far literatur un kunst (Warsaw: Folks-bildung, 1903).
35. The full title reads Pomoshch evreiam postradavshim ot neurozhaia, literaturno-khudozhestevennyi
sbornik (St Petersburg: Tip. I. Gol’dberg, 1901). The subtitle is a word-for-word translation of
‘zamlbukh far literatur un kunst’.
36. Bal Makhshoves, ‘Sholem Aleichem: A Typology of His Characters [1908]’, Prooftexts, 6 (1986),
7–8.
37. Letter from Bal Makhshoves to Berkovich, cited in Shmuel Werses, Bikoret ha-bikoret: ha’arakhot
ve-gilgulehen (Tel Aviv: Agudat sofrim ha’ivrim beyisrael, 1982), p. 168.
24 Olga Litvak
38. See Khone Shmeruk, ‘ “Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt” vehahatsagot shel hamahazeh besafah hapolanit
bevarsha beshanim 1905 v-1910’, Ayarot u-kherakhim: Perakim bi-yetsirato shel Shalom-Alekhem, ed.
by Chava Turniansky ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2000), pp. 113–31.
39. Jeffrey Shandler, Sholem Aleichem in America: The Story of a Culture Hero (New York: YIVO
Institute for Jewish Research, 1991), p. 9.
40. Quint, ‘Who Read What’, pp. 65–66.
41. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Yiddish in Imperial Russia’s Civil Society’, in Jews in the East European
Borderlands: Essays in Honor of John D. Klier, ed. by Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav (Brighton,
MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), pp. 94–123.
42. Gerald Sorin, ‘Tradition and Change: American-Jewish Socialists as Agents of Acculturation’,
American-Jewish History, 79.1 (1989), 37–54; Nancy von Rosk, ‘ “Go, Make Yourself for a Person”:
Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and
Anzia Yezierska’, Prospects, 26 (2001), 295–335, and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, ‘The Moral
Evolution of the Russian-Yiddish-English Writer Abraham Cahan’, East European Jewish Affairs,
38.2 (2008), 159–67.
43. See Estraikh, ‘Yiddish in Imperial Russia’s Civil Society’, p. 99.
44. See David E. Fishman, ‘The Bund and Modern Yiddish Culture’, in The Emergence of Modern
Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe, ed. by Zvi Y. Gitelman (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), p. 108.
45. Berkovich, Harishonim kivnei adam, ix, 242.
46. M. Shalit, ‘Statistik fun yudishen bikher-mark in yor 1912’, in Der pinkes, ed. by Shmuel Niger
(Vilna: Kletskin, 1913), pp. 299–306. For the statistics, see pp. 278–95.
47. See Hillel Halkin, ‘The Great Jewish Language War’, Commentary, 114 (2002), 48–55.
48. See, for instance, the remarks of A. Litvin, ‘Far vos iz Sholem-Aleykhem balibt ba di masn?’
(originally published in Forverts on 17 May 1916), in Gennady Estraikh, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems
levaye mit 95 yor tsurik durkh der prizme fun Forverts’, Forverts, 10 June 2011. I am grateful to
Gennady Estraikh for bringing this reference to my attention.
CHAPTER 2
Y
Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator

Alexander Frenkel
The importance that Sholem Aleichem attributed to the translation of his works
into Russian is well known — it is manifest in the vigour and persistence of his
detailed letters of instruction to the numerous translators,1 including his own son
Misha who was testing his literary skills translating his father’s works.2 It would
have been odd for a writer who had such a clear picture of how his works should
be rendered in Russian and who knew the language to perfection not to attempt to
do the translations himself. And yet, the published self-translated works by Sholem
Aleichem are very few.
Why so? And why have even those scattered self-translated works remained
buried in the old Russian and Russian-Jewish periodicals, almost never to be
republished? Why would the writer’s respective works later reach the Russian
readers in the renditions of other translators, or never reach them at all? This chapter
does not attempt to give definitive answers to these questions (which probably do
not exist). Our goal is to provide some data worth considering, particularly in view
of the creative psychology of a writer, specifically a multilingual writer.
Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Forgotten Production’

Obviously, Sholem Aleichem’s work on the translation of his own texts into Russian
should be considered within the context of his entire ‘Russian-language heritage’
that still remains obscure even for Sholem Aleichem scholars; in a broader sense, it
should be placed into the framework of the entire Russian-Jewish literature of the
second half of the nineteenth century, to which his ‘Russian-language heritage’
belongs both from the formal point of view and in essence. Literary scholars
have already pointed out, though tentatively, the inf luence of the founder of the
Russian-Jewish literature, Osip Rabinovich (1817–69), on the classical writers in
Yiddish, primarily on Mendele Moykher-Sforim and Sholem Aleichem. The plots,
the characters, the ironic intonation that they have inherited from Rabinovich have
been discussed; generally, his works have been defined as the earliest examples of
the Jewish literary fiction that attempted to meet the high standards of Russian
literature.3
Osip Rabinovich’s namesake, Sholem Nokhumovich (Solomon Naumovich)
Rabinovich, who became the classic of Yiddish literature under the pen-name of
26 Alexander Frenkel
Fig. 2.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Pereyaslav, his birthplace

photograph © Alexander Frenkel 1984
Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator 27
Sholem Aleichem, would never mention that semi-forgotten writer and journalist,
the adept of the Jewish enlightenment and the antagonist of ‘jargon’, the founder
of the first Russian-language Jewish magazine Razsvet (Dawn), among his
predecessors. Sholem Aleichem preferred to trace his literary genealogy back to
the more impressive figures, Mendele Moykher-Sforim (he even gave him the
famous nickname, The Grandfather) or to the Russian writers, Gogol in particular.
However, his Russian-language works, especially the very early ones, with their
themes, formal devices, and style, are indeed the ‘missing link’ that reveals him
as the direct follower of the tradition founded by Osip Rabinovich. Moreover, in
the late 1870s and early 1880s, and possibly even later, the aspiring man of letters
Solomon Rabinovich seriously considered the career of a Russian-Jewish author
writing in the imperial language for the Russian-educated Jewish elite.
Sholem Aleichem’s Russian-language output is relatively small and does not
reach the literary heights of his much more extensive Yiddish production. But it is
of importance for the history of Jewish literature, for it helps us to trace the essential
elements of Sholem Aleichem’s genesis, and thus of the genesis of Jewish fiction
more generally.
According to Sholem Aleichem’s autobiographical notes, he started to write
poems, novels, and plays in Russian when he was only seventeen years old — far
earlier than his writing in Yiddish. The young man dreamt of a literary career, and
he read and wrote a lot. ‘I would send my “works” to all the existing Jewish and
non-Jewish (goyishe) periodicals (I wrote in Hebrew and in Russian) and the editors,
thank God, had enough fuel for their stoves’, he would recall later.4 Finally, one
of his texts did appear in a Russian-Jewish periodical. In 1884 the St Petersburg
Evreiskoe obozrenie ( Jewish Review), edited by the maskilic journalist Leon Kantor,
published a short story entitled Mechtateli (The Dreamers) under the author’s real
name, S. Rabinovich. The story, on the traditional maskilic theme of the religious
fanaticism of the Jewish masses, was not immune to a certain schematism and f lat
didactics, and yet in that story it was already possible to hear distinctly the ironic
tone, typical of his oeuvre, as well as to feel his kind, compassionate attitude to
the characters. Sholem Aleichem was obviously proud of getting published by a
metropolitan periodical, and used the occasion to introduce himself in his first letter
to Mendele Moykher-Sforim as the follower of the renowned master of ‘the Jargon
literature’, as well as to call his story The Dreamers, ‘a pale ref lection of ’ Mendele’s
‘own magnificent Travels of Benjamin III’.5
Yet, for over a year before The Dreamers was published, the first stories in Yiddish
under the pen-name Sholem Aleichem were being contributed to the St Petersburg
weekly Yudishes folksblat. The stories were highly praised by the readers, and the
career of a ‘folk writer’ ( folksshrayber) writing in ‘jargon’ was looking more and
more appealing to Solomon Rabinovich.
Two short novels, published later, in the beginning of the 1890s, in the Russian-
Jewish magazine Voskhod (Dawn), can also be attributed, according to their stylistic
features, to Sholem Aleichem’s early ‘Russian-Jewish period’; these are Roman moei
babushki (My Grandmother’s Romance) and Gore reb El’iukima (The Grief of Reb
Elyukim).6 As with The Dreamers, neither novel used the pen-name that had already
gained celebrity among Yiddish readers, but rather bore his real name. Both novels
touched on the theme that was very topical, for personal reasons, to the young
writer — a marriage against one’s parents’ will. Certain characters and story lines of
the novels (the unsuccessful matchmaker in The Grief of Reb Elyukim; the ‘prophetic
dream’ where the dead sister ‘prompts’ to the mother the ‘right’ match for her
daughter in My Grandmother’s Romance) remind us of the writer’s later works.
These two stories are, in my judgement, the most mature of Sholem Aleichem’s
Russian-language works. At the same time, the author seems to experience certain
problems with what was for him the main stylistic tool of his Yiddish-language
works — the speech characteristics of his characters. Both stories are predominantly
monologues. The traditional problem for Russian-Jewish prose writing — how to
render Jewish speech through the Russian language — is resolved in a similarly
traditional way. The monologues are peppered with Yiddish words that are trans-
literated in Cyrillic (megila, zivug, shidukhim, khatsi-Elul, etc.) and explained in
footnotes or in brackets; there are some Yiddish sayings and idioms in word-to-
word Russian translation: tarelochka s neba (a plate from the sky), tverdyi evrei (a hard
Jew), mezhdu chetyr´mia glazami (between the four eyes) instead of s glazu na glaz (eye
to eye). Like Osip Rabinovich and many other Russian-Jewish writers the author
seemed to believe that his reader was familiar with Yiddish and could discern
those ‘hidden signs’ of Jewish speech.7 Yet, all of these insertions remained just
‘decorative elements’ — they did not offer an ultimate solution. Apparently, Sholem
Aleichem realized that the highly literate, error-free ‘intellectual’ Russian of his
stories did not sound natural in the speech of his characters, the traditional shtetl
Jews from the Pale of Settlement. Sometimes, using certain Russian expressions,
he would supplement them, in brackets, with the Yiddish analogues rendered in
Latin letters: ‘na zdravie (lechaim)’ (to your health), ‘nebom blagoslovennaia parochka
(Siwug min haschomaim)’ (supremely blessed couple). The writer was attempting
to intimate to his bilingual readers that the monologues of the characters in fact
are translations.
The novels The Grief of Reb Elyukim and My Grandmother’s Romance were written
after the bankruptcy of the Kiev merchant Solomon Rabinovich and his escape
to Odessa. In the notes for his memoirs Sholem Aleichem would state, referring
to himself in the third person, ‘1890–1891 (his affairs in disarray, the writer
moved to Odessa) — a small break for jargon, would write mostly in Hebrew [...]
and Russian’.8 Taking this for granted, most of Sholem Aleichem’s biographers
describe his life in Odessa as a period of active collaboration with the local Russian
dailies Odesskii listok and Odesskie novosti, to which, according to them, he regularly
contributed his articles, essays, and short stories in 1891–92.9 This is far from true —
both chronologically and substantively. Sholem Aleichem’s collaboration with the
Russian newspapers was very brief, lasting only three months, and neither active
nor diverse. Moreover, it started towards the very end of his residence in Odessa
— in the late autumn of 1892, already after a significant episode in his literary
career, the attempt to revive the annual Yudishe folks-bibliotek ( Jewish Folk Library).
It is well known that instead of a full-scale book he came up with a booklet Kol
mevaser tsu der yudisher folks-bibliotek (Forerunner to Jewish Folk Library) composed
exclusively of his own works, including a real gem, the first collection of letters by
Menakhem-Mendl.
The writer’s cooperation with Odesskii listok appeared to be a momentary one. A
small piece, Sto tysiach (One Hundred Thousand), was published by the newspaper
at the very end of December 1892, under a ‘transparent’ pen-name Ser (Sir, i.e.
Solomon Rabinovich). The piece was presented as the beginning of a cycle Tipy
maloi birzhi (Types of the Small Stock Exchange). The idea was to introduce a
whole gallery of characters ‘witnessed’ (like Menakhem-Mendl) at the Odessa stock
exchange. Yet, the plan never went any further — no other contributions by Sir
ever appeared in Odesskii listok. The collaboration with Odesskie novosti was slightly
longer. From November 1892 to January 1893 he was contributing weekly ‘small
feuilletons’ entitled Stikhotvoreniia v proze (Poems in Prose); the editorial foreword
stated that these sketches were written by ‘a folk writer popular among the Jews,
known under the pen-name of Sholem Aleichem’ and that they were ‘originally
published, among many others, in the Jewish colloquial language and translated for
us by the author’.10 Thus, for the first time the Russian reader was addressed not by
the Russian-Jewish man of letters Solomon Rabinovich, but by Sholem Aleichem,
the ‘folk writer’, who creates his works in the vernacular of the Jewish masses. This
attempt at self-translation, the first one in Sholem Aleichem’s career, will be dealt
with in more detail later.
At the end of January 1893 Poems in Prose was replaced in Odesskie novosti by
another cycle of ‘small feuilletons’ — Babushkiny skazki (Grandmother’s Tales), also
under the pen-name Sholem Aleichem. The writer tested his abilities in the new
genre of short stories stylized to look like Jewish folk legends about ‘the old times’.
Still, after the publication of just two tales, the cycle, obviously meant to continue,
came to an end. Shortly afterwards Sholem Aleichem and his family left Odessa.
Yet another chapter of his life was about to begin.
The last period of Sholem Aleichem’s Russian language writing dates back to the
late 1890s. Since there were no Yiddish periodicals in Russia at the time, the writer
could find no edition that would publish his works, and he went back to Voskhod
in St Petersburg. But his Russian-language contributions of this period are, for
the most part, revised versions of older works, rather than anything new. Selected
sketches from Poems in Prose were published in the magazine under the title Skazki
getto (Tales of the Ghetto), and Grandmother’s Tales, largely reworked, appeared in
its weekly supplement Khronika Voskhoda. The manuscript of another story from
the Grandmother’s Tales series was preserved in the collection of the All-Ukrainian
Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture in Odessa (the museum was
opened in 1927, but lost during the war). On the title page of the manuscript there
was a ‘vague reference to certain conditions’ set by the author. Most probably, the
editors of Voskhod had found the conditions unacceptable, the story had not been
published, and the author’s work on the cycle was interrupted again, this time for
good.11
That was Sholem Aleichem’s last attempt to ‘try on the outfit’ of a Russian-
Jewish writer. In 1899, after the foundation of the Warsaw–Krakow periodical Der
yud, Yiddish literature entered a new stage; Sholem Aleichem finally got access to
Fig. 2.2. Arn (Aron) Vorobeytshik, 1920

Courtesy of Marks Jofe, Riga
the Yiddish-speaking audience, and, from all appearances, he had neither time nor
interest for further experiments with the Russian language.
In the early years of the new century the writer who was gaining more and
more popularity with the Yiddish readers, still cherished a dream of conquering
the Russian audience — now with the help of various translators. At least twice at
that period he tested his own translating abilities — Sholem Aleichem’s short stories
Nashi deti (Our Children) from Tevye the Dairyman cycle and Po etapu (The Convoy)
were published in the Russian-Jewish periodicals translated by the author (as a case
study one of these texts will be analyzed below).12
Obviously, the above overview of Sholem Aleichem’s ventures into writing in
Russian is not exhaustive. From his correspondence we can see that at one point, in
1901, he was working on a Russian translation of the works by Mendele Moykher-
Sforim;13 in 1913–15 he was writing Russian scripts for silent films based on his
books.14 Yet, none of these works got published. Needless to say, a considerable part
of his letters are written in Russian, as are some of his shorter articles in Russian-
Jewish periodicals and his autobiographical notes, but these texts are outside the
framework of our analysis.15
A Bouquet of Flowers
Sholem Aleichem’s first attempt at self-translation into Russian was in the literary
form of poems in prose, or as he termed it in Yiddish, poezye on gramen (unrhymed
poetry). Thus the genre was called on the title page of a small, well-printed book
A bintl blumen (A Bouquet of Flowers) that was published in Berdichev in 1888 and
dedicated to the memory of his recently deceased father. The collection included
sketches dwelling on old age, death, deprivation, destiny, friendship, love, and
childhood. Sholem Aleichem wrote in one of his letters,
Dedicated to the memory of my righteous father; in the days of shiveh, when my
poor muse was dressed in mourning, I have selected the best, the most precious
pearls of my thoughts and put them into a bouquet, A bintl blumen, to place on
the fresh grave of my father, may his memory be blessed. This tiny bouquet is
composed of poems in prose, in the style of Turgenev and Guy de Maupassant,
an original piece never seen or heard before in jargon. In total, eighteen small
essays, poems, novellas [...]16
It was the texts from this collection that Sholem Aleichem started to translate
into Russian and publish in Odesskie novosti in the autumn of 1892, in the column
entitled Small Feuilletons.
Sholem Aleichem’s poems in prose have so far failed to catch the attention of
literary scholars. The only researcher to have taken any special interest in this
cycle (in both its Yiddish and Russian versions) was the Soviet Yiddish scholar Arn
Vorobeytshik.17 In an essay with the tell-tale title In a Forgotten Corner published at
the end of the 1930s and written in the highly ideological style typical for the Soviet
literary critics of the period, he stated,
Here Sholem Aleichem’s incredible gift has manifested itself in full glory, yet
the zest of his individuality, his humour, is almost completely absent. However,
this deficiency is largely compensated by the fact that in these sketches and
studies Sholem Aleichem directly displays some of the traits of his personality,
his opinions and certain points of his worldview that are not as obvious in his
later, classical works where the loud hilarious laughter seems to stif le the painful
groan, where the refined, ironic smile sometimes obscures the compassion and
understanding, where the outwardly comic is so often attached to the most
tragic life stories. [...] Sholem Aleichem concealed underneath his laughter a
protest against the existing order, more specifically against the existing state
system of oppression and autocracy. [...] In his Poems in Prose [...] the humour
element is almost imperceptible. Yet these works fully reveal Sholem Aleichem
as a democrat, a humanist [...]18
Vorobeytshik was obviously biased. He provided a detailed, rather astute analysis of
the stories in which problems of social inequality came to the forefront, but chose
to mention only in passing — or to ignore fully — the other themes and plots of
Poems in Prose. Yet, the collection dedicated to the memory of Sholem Aleichem’s
father features distinctive Palestinophilic motifs, and even some traditionalist ones
(the latter, in the terms of the Russian literary critics of the late nineteenth century,
would be called anti-nihilist). The social and political views of young Sholem
Aleichem as ref lected in the eighteen novellas of the A bintl blumen cycle were much
more eclectic than what was considered appropriate for the image of ‘a progressive’
writer, ‘a democrat and a humanist’ that was being shaped by the Soviet critics.19
Yet, herein we are not so much concerned with the ideological content of the
collection as with the literary goals set by the writer. In a letter to Simon Dubnow
the author described his undertaking:
My work Dos bintl blumen, or Bouquet, the poems in prose [...] [is] the first
attempt to write this kind of poem in the Jewish jargon, bringing the language
to perfection, using neither German nor Russian expressions or words.20
Today, more than a century later, a Yiddish reader would note that, nevertheless,
there were some German and Russian words in the book (batsoybert, druzhno,
rasporazhenie, zhadnost, dibom, etc.). Besides, the writer seemed to be concerned
that, while ‘bringing the language to perfection’ he made it hard to understand
for his contemporaries, and thus once in a while he would offer in brackets a
prompt, a Russian equivalent of an Yiddish word: svive (akruzhnost, the periphery),
fortsimer (prikhozhe, the entry hall), and twice added the Russian equivalents, also
in brackets, to the chapter headings — they were printed in Cyrillic (while he
offered the ‘reverse’ prompts in brackets to the readers of his stories in the Russian-
Jewish periodicals). Still, A bintl blumen was a major landmark in the ‘construction’
of the language and the literature undertaken by Sholem Aleichem, for it widened
considerably the scope of genres of the literature in ‘jargon’ and demonstrated the
enormous expressive potential of Yiddish. The writer had a very high opinion of
this work and even stated in one of his letters that ‘only there I begin to write’.21
The unusual book in ‘jargon’ also met with the approval of the most inf luential
Jewish literary critic of the time, Simon Dubnow.22
Thus it comes as a major surprise that Sholem Aleichem would select pieces from
A bintl blumen, which was primarily a language experiment in Yiddish, for his first
attempt of translating his own texts into Russian. It is possible that he visualized it
as the second stage of his larger experiment — his first direct address to the ‘general’
Russian reader, not to the Jewish or even the Russian-Jewish one.
A comparison of the sketches from Odesskie novosti with the original counterparts
from A bintl blumen immediately reveals that it is not really a translation, but
rather a version, and a free rendition at best. Since almost all the Russian texts are
considerably shorter than the ones in Yiddish, the author seems to believe that the
Russian reader would be better geared to understand the essence of each story; he
seems to be sure that, unlike the Yiddish reader, the Russian one does not need
detailed explanations, as a hint would suffice. Besides, the Russian texts are almost
completely devoid of the peculiar pleonasms of the Yiddish ones, of the repetitions
that are so typical for many of Sholem Aleichem’s characters and, to an extent, for
the persona of his ‘unrhymed poetry’ as well. Finally, the Russian texts are emptied
of all their Jewish elements, none of the specifically Jewish details are mentioned,
and the characters lose their Jewish names and become nameless.
Most remarkable is the transformation of the short story Hintern himl (Under
the Sky). In the Russian version which is entitled S vysoty nebes (From the Heights
of the Sky), shtetl is rendered as gorodishko (a small town) — not just gorodishko, but
zhalkii gorodishko (a pitiful town);23 besmedresh as Shkola (school); kheyder also as shkola
(school),24 but as a hard school as well; kheyder-yinglekh as maliutki (little ones), sick
and hapless; reb Azriel der shames as uchitel’, nash despot zhestokii (the teacher, our
merciless despot). The description of the emotions of a little boy who has climbed
a hill next to the shtetl for the first time in his life, which forms the longest part
of the story in Yiddish and is full of details and subtly rendered feelings, is reduced
to a few sentences. The touching, nostalgic remembrance of the shtetl childhood
has turned, in the Russian version, into an abstract scheme, straightforward and
grotesque, devoid of psychology or irony. To a certain degree, the same drawbacks
are to be found in all the other pieces of this cycle self-translated from Yiddish.
It is possible that Sholem Aleichem recognized his defeat in translating (or
rendering) his ‘unrhymed poems’. It is equally possible that that recognition was
prompted by the readers’ feedback. But perhaps he simply decided that further
translation work no longer interested him. In any event, having translated seven
chapters of A bintl blumen from Yiddish, he started to publish in Odesskie novosti,
under the same title Stikhotvoreniia v proze (Poems in Prose), a new set of ‘small
feuilletons’ that were not part of the collection in Yiddish. The cycle published in
the newspaper included another eighteen pieces, only two of them being versions
of the ‘poems’ from the Yiddish collection, reworked almost beyond recognition
(see Appendix 2).
Most of these new texts were never published by Sholem Aleichem in their
Yiddish version. That prompted the above-mentioned Soviet literary scholar Arn
Vorobeytshik to surmise that they had originally been written in Russian. There
are other reasons to support this idea. Even the dynamics of the work on Poems in
Prose (only the first nine chapters of the Yiddish collection having been translated
and/or reworked) leads us to believe that the original plan to translate the entire
collection was cancelled at some point and replaced by an alternative one of
composing new short stories directly in Russian. However, there are reasons to
doubt this. Like the texts translated from Yiddish, the new Russian-language Poems
in Prose are completely devoid of any Jewish terms or names; on the surface the
stories do not have any specific ethnic or religious features. This is striking since
the pieces in the Odessa newspaper were signed ‘Sholem Aleichem’, and the author
was introduced to the audience as a popular Jewish folk writer. Moreover, a majority
of the pieces obviously describe the day-to-day realities of shtetls and the traditional
Jewish life, and they touch on the problem of the relationship between the Jews
and the Gentiles. Yet in most cases the reader can guess at these things through
indirect evidence. Thus, in the sketch Videnie (A Dream), a child’s touching story of
a Sabbath in his parents’ house, only the stuffed pike on the table directly identifies
the ceremony in question as a Jewish one. One is lead to suspect that originally the
piece was written in Yiddish, and in translation it had deliberately gone through a
kind of ‘de-Judaisation’. Or, possibly, was it only conceived in Yiddish?
In his essay, Vorobeytshik suggests that Sholem Aleichem’s texts in Odesskie
novosti were to a certain extent distorted by the pressure of the censorship.25 That
might well have been the case, supported by the scarce reference to anti-Semitism,
which appears only in one novella, Pervaia liubov’ (First Love). Nevertheless, this
does not explain the obliqueness, the roundabout way in which the mundane life
of the Jews is constantly described in Poems in Prose. Such self-imposed limits were
obviously Sholem Aleichem’s own decision, ref lecting his ideas on how he should
address the Russian audience. Later on in his extensive correspondence with the
translators of his works into Russian, Sholem Aleichem would often emphasize the
importance of weeding out from the text the Jewish terms and notions unknown to
the Russian reader. Yet he would never be as radical as he seemed to be in Odesskie
novosti.26
Only the last piece of Poems in Prose published in the Russian newspaper is an
exception. The sketch I on chelovek (He Is Also a Man), the Russian version of A
hoze a bisl! from the Yiddish collection, begins: ‘Old Rabbi Yanko was sitting by
the door of an old derelict School’. The synagogue is still called ‘School’, yet the
beggar sitting by the synagogue is identified by his Jewish name. The carriage of a
count passes by and raises dust that obscures the sun, and Rabbi Yanko complains,
‘How impudent on the part of His Lordship! Yet, he is also a man ...’. The Yiddish
version of the story is rather different from the Russian one; it is shorter, subtler,
and has more irony. The final remark of the beggar, who remains anonymous in
the original Yiddish version, is reduced therein to the two words, ‘A hoze a bisl!’
(‘What an Impudence!’). The writer was obviously concerned that the metaphor of
a self-contained Jewish world personified in the beggar would not be understood
by the Russian reader, so in translation he introduced both the Jewish name of the
character and a longer phrase.
He Is Also a Man, the most ‘Jewish’ novella of all, was the last Poem in Prose to
be published in Odesskie novosti. However, several years later the writer resumed his
work on this cycle. The last two issues of Voskhod to be published in 1898 featured
twelve pieces by Sholem Aleichem, select fragments from Poems in Prose. Yet, now
the cycle had a different title, Skazki getto (Tales of the Ghetto).27 It is noteworthy
that only three fragments are translations from A bintl blumen. The others come from
the part of the cycle that, according to Vorobeytshik, had originally been written in
Russian. Yet, the subtitle reads: ‘S evreiskogo’ (Translated from the Jewish Language).
This is yet another reason to doubt the hypothesis of the Soviet scholar.
The pieces selected for Voskhod were extensively edited and partially renamed.
Now the words synagogue, heder, Talmud are allowed, and the characters bear
Jewish names. A nameless shut (jester) from the story of the same name turns into
‘Reb Fayvel-Badkhen from Mazepovka’ — and the story is now called Posledniaia
shutka (The Last Jest). Two boys, two neighbours from the story Po sosedstvu
(Neighbourhood) also get names — the Jewish boy is called Moishe-Mendel-
Meer-Iosif, the Russian one Vania — and the story now is entitled Vania. The
sketch Videnie (A Dream) is renamed Angely mira (Angels of Peace), the father of the
protagonist now sings the Sabbath prayer both in Russian and in Hebrew — ‘Schalem
Aleichem, malache haschalom — mir vam, angely mira ...’ (May peace be with you, the
angels of peace). The sketch Angel smerti (Angel of Death) was reworked completely.
Both the Yiddish version in A bintl blumen and the Russian one in Odesskie novosti
present the abstract ruminations of an old man foreseeing his death. The story in
Voskhod is an adult’s recollections of a childhood illness filled with warmth and
nostalgia. The theme of social inequality is less manifest in Tales of the Ghetto than
in the Poems in Prose from Odesskie novosti, and instead the clash between the Jewish
and the Gentile worlds comes to the fore. Writing for the Russian-Jewish magazine,
Sholem Aleichem primarily addresses the educated Jewish elite, whose views and
interests required the adaptation of the cycle. However, even when reworked after
the publication in Odesskie novosti, Tales of the Ghetto still retained certain stylistic
f laws, as well as some sentimental and didactic features. The writer would never
return to them.
Unlike the Russian-language Poems in Prose, the Yiddish version, highly valued
by Sholem Aleichem, continued to attract his attention. In 1901 he was going to
publish ten reworked pieces from the cycle as a separate edition; according to his
plan, ‘the main points of each story will be illustrated by young, highly gifted
artists’. Once again, he wanted to ‘publish a book never seen in our Yiddish folk
literature’.28 The project never materialized (most probably, for financial reasons),
but in 1903 Sholem Aleichem included in his first collected works, published in
four volumes in Warsaw, a cycle of ten short stories, now entitled simply Blumen
(Flowers).
In this final version of the cycle the genre is no longer identified as poezye on
gramen, the subtitle just reads Tsen kleyne mayselekh (Ten Little Tales). Thus, the
texts lose their initial status of a language experiment. The writer purifies them
completely of any ‘German or Russian expressions and words’. And — an even
more significant change — the formerly nameless shtetl where the protagonist
has spent his childhood now gets a name. In the beginning of the very first piece
the narrator says, ‘Bay undz in Kasrilevke ...’ (In our Kasrilevke ...). The cycle gets
‘officially’ incorporated into the numerous works by the writer that create the
image of that famous ‘literary shtetl’.
Only half of the ten pieces selected by Sholem Aleichem for the final version of
the Yiddish cycle are to be found (in largely reworked versions) among the twelve
select Russian-language Tales of the Ghetto in Voskhod. The theme of the clash
between Jewish and Gentile worlds disappears almost completely. Actually, we
get but a glimpse of the Gentile world in An azes (Insolence) — formerly entitled
A hoze a bisl! (What an Impudence!) — in the image of a count’s carriage passing
by a Jewish beggar. Yet, as we know already, this piece bears not so much on the
clash of the two worlds, as on the spiritual self-sufficiency of the Jewish world. The
central theme of the cycle now is the re-creation of the lost traditional shtetl which,
with all its drawbacks and problems, evokes in the author the nostalgic memories
of his childhood. For that purpose, not only does he bring back three pieces (Koysl
maarovi, Ek velt, and Avreml) from A bintl blumen that were absent from both Russian
versions, but he also includes the two pieces (Der oytser and Ayngeteylt zikh) that were
not part of the Yiddish version and were previously published only in Russian.
The transformation of Der oytser (Buried Treasure) that took place in the
translation from Russian into Yiddish is quite indicative. The refrain, ‘Thus my
comrades the children used to tell me’ is replaced by ‘Thus they used to tell in our
shtetl’.29 The change of the refrain indicates that now the writer sees the shtetl as the
central image of his work. The archetypal motif of ‘searching for buried treasures’
that is presented so laconically and succinctly in this piece evolved into one of
those numerous ‘submetaphors’ of which, according to Dan Miron, ‘the controlling
megametaphor that defines the essential features of the classical literary shtetl image
consists’.30 All the ten pieces from the Blumen cycle became similarly laconic and
succinct ‘bricks’ that the author used to construct his imaginary ‘Yiddish land’ of
Kasrilevke.
After the writer’s death his heirs included the cycle in volume viii of his Collected
Works, which they entitled Mayses far yidishe kinder (Tales for the Jewish Children).31
Under this inappropriate ‘nursery’ heading, the pieces that have initially been
an object of language experiments of the young writer, both in Yiddish and in
Russian, have been published over and over again and have become an integral
part of the ‘golden treasury’ of Sholem Aleichem’s classic literary heritage. Yet, if
Vorobeytshik’s hypothesis is true, we are dealing with a unique case — Sholem
Aleichem’s ‘golden treasury’ includes two pieces originally written in Russian and
subsequently translated into Yiddish.32
The Convoy
To our best knowledge, the last time Sholem Aleichem undertook the translation of
his own work in 1903, in the heyday of his literary career and the days of his active
cooperation with Der fraynd (Friend), the first Yiddish daily in Russia that had just
been founded in St Petersburg. From early June till mid-July he was contributing
chapters of a fairly long story Mitn etap (The Convoy) to this newspaper. Almost
simultaneously the story was published in Russian in the July issue of Knizhki
Voskhoda with a note, ‘Translated by the Author’. The circumstances under which
the translation was made remain unknown, yet it is likely that the simultaneity was
part of the agreement between the writer and the Russian-Jewish periodical.33 For
that purpose, Knizhki Voskhoda had even interrupted the publication of another
of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Moshka-konokrad (Moshkele the Horse Thief ), that

began running in the June issue and resumed only in August.34 It seems plausible
that, in order to meet the deadline, Sholem Aleichem had personally to work on
the Russian version of the story. No doubt, financial considerations were also of
importance, as the writer needed an income and depended heavily on the payments
from Voskhod.35
Comparing the story Po etapu (The Convoy) in Knizhki Voskhoda with the
Yiddish original we see that we are again dealing with a free rendition, or rather the
author’s free version. Again Sholem Aleichem is trying to adjust the text according
to his own somewhat simplistic ideas about the requirements of a Russian reader;
he goes out of his way to make the Gentile readers feel compassion for his heroes,
Jews from a small shtetl in the Pale of Settlement. It seems to have been his creative
temperament that restrained and weakened Sholem Aleichem the translator: when
faced by a blank page he would start to address the new audience, transforming and
sometimes destroying the original text.36
The Russian version is somewhat shorter than the Yiddish one. The chapter
depicting the family of one of the characters, Genokh Bliudoliz (Genokh the
Sponger), or Henekh Telerleker in the original, is completely omitted. Possibly,
the writer was restricted by the available space. At the same time he expands the
descriptions of landscapes — on one hand, the opulence of nature that the characters
observe on their way from their own shtetl to the neighbouring one, on the other
hand, the emphasized squalor of the shtetl where the characters arrive and which
is exactly the same as the first one. The description of the rural landscape includes
‘the silver-coloured dome of a church that forewarns of the proximity of a shtetl’
— an unusual image in classic Yiddish literature, and one that is not to be found in
the original. The author inserts into the translation other ‘markers’ that he believes
would establish a rapport with the Russian audience; but in the descriptions of the
shtetl life these ‘markers’ look unnatural. Thus, the narrator calls the policeman, his
fellow shtetl-dweller, ‘our Lecoq’, and describing the local wealthy man he quotes
Julius Caesar, ‘I had rather be first in a village ...’.
There is one more problem: Sholem Aleichem the translator has considerable
difficulties with the speech characteristics of the characters, which are brilliantly
handled by Sholem Aleichem the writer in his story Mitn etap. The translator
strives to come up with a device to render the speech of each of the characters,
yet his efforts are not always successful. The tongue-tied Henekh, who uses
funny circumlocutions in the original, in Russian begins to stammer. The jolly
pauper Berko, whose Yiddish is a cascade of jokes and proverbs, sometimes uses in
translation the archaic language of the old Russian chronicles: ‘Lopochesh’ iazykom,
Duren’ ty Bolvanovich! Pust’ usta tvoi otverzutsia, iazyk tvoi da razviazhetsia i da uslyshat
nashi ushi rech’ tvoiu medotochivuiu’ (You are pounding your gums, your Sir Blockhead
Blunder! May your lips open, may your tongue get untied and may your mellif luent
words reach our ears) or ‘Ispolat’ tebe, drug Genokh!’ (Hail you, friend Henekh!).
The speech of the police superintendent Gaman Ivanovich becomes completely
devoid of colour. In the original story the policeman who has been living in a shtetl
for quite a while uses a mixture of Russian and distorted Yiddish. The writer is
true to his concept of avoiding Jewish words in the translations, and thus he shies
away from reproducing the funny phrases of his character in the Russian version.
The superintendent’s very first remark, ‘Ti dumaesh, Yoska, podshmirovat menya tvoimi
moesami, znatshit ti groyser mashenik! A nem im a kheyder!’ (meaning, ‘You believe,
Yoska, you will be able to grease me with your money, that means you are a real
rogue. Put him in jail!’) is replaced, in Russian, by the lacklustre ‘Vziatki, kanal’i?!’
(Giving bribes, you rascals?!). The second similar remark simply disappears in
translation. It is only for the third one that the translator tries to find an adequate
equivalent, representing the ‘semi-Jewish jargon’ of the superintendent. In the
original, Gaman Ivanovich addresses the rich man he has arrested, ‘Ti poydyosh u
menya mit di raglaim!’ (I will make you go on foot!). In translation, the same remark
is, ‘Ty u menia, a groise faine ber’e, proguliaesh’sia peshochkom!’ (I will make you take a
walk, a groyse fayne berye) — an awkward attempt at a pun based on the Yiddish–
German etymology of the Russian word fanaberiia (snobbishness).
Sholem Aleichem’s translation of The Convoy cannot be called a complete failure.
It retains the dynamics of the plot, the abundance of detail; despite certain stylistic
shortcomings, its Russian is vivid and rich. Yet this text, as with other attempts
at self-translation, remained only a minor event in the literary career of Sholem
Aleichem. The writer delegated, and for a good reason, the task of making a
breakthrough to the mass Russian audience to his first Collected Works in Russian
that were issued in Moscow by the Sovremennye Problemy publishing house in
1910–13 in eight volumes. This edition also included the new Russian version of
The Convoy, a complete and accurate rendition of the original Yiddish version.
Among other things, the translator Yuly Pinus37 reproduced in full, without any
abridgements, all the Russian–Yiddish phrases of Gaman Ivanovich — offering
the explanations in the footnotes. Only the location of The Convoy, the real shtetl
Teplik, was renamed Golodaevka (‘Starvation Village’) at the author’s request (the
famous Kasrilevke would also turn into Golodaevka in Pinus’s version of Sholem
Aleichem’s short stories).38 Following the traditions of the Russian fiction of the
nineteenth century, Sholem Aleichem insisted on using, in translation, the easy-to-
comprehend charactonyms both for the characters and the locations.
Many years later, the Soviet readers would know The Convoy in yet another, third
Russian version by Mikhail Shambadal.39
The Fate of ‘Forgotten Production’

It seems that in 1948 the Moscow publishing house Der emes, which was already
working on the twenty-volume Complete Works of Sholem Aleichem, was planning
to collect all his Russian-language texts and publish them in Yiddish translation.
The eighteenth volume was announced as ‘Pieces written in other languages,
fragments, sketches, plans’. But as a result of the Communist Party Central
Committee’s decision of 25 November 1948, the publishing house was closed down
as part of the Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. The ambitious project never got any
further than the first three volumes. The only Russian-language work by Sholem
Aleichem that was incorporated therein (translated into Yiddish by Shmuel Rosin)
was the cycle Poems in Prose/Tales of the Ghetto, which was treated as a part of the
writer’s poetical heritage — and that with considerable, obviously ideologically
motivated, omissions.40
Most of the Russian-language texts by Sholem Aleichem were reprinted in
the original, i.e. in Russian, only once — in the 1939 collection Povesti i rasskazy
(Long and Short Stories). The quality of these works notwithstanding, the ‘technical’
barrier that prevented these works from reaching the reader was, paradoxically,
Sholem Aleichem’s six-volume collection that was published in the Soviet Union
in Russian three times in the post-war years. This six-volume collection played a
most important part in bringing the author’s heritage, and with it Jewish culture
in general, to the new, Russian-speaking generation of the Soviet Jews, but at
the same time it turned into a major obstacle preventing the Russian reader from
venturing a broader and deeper exploration of that heritage. The translations that
were used in the collection and have since become classics, with all their merits and
shortcomings, together with rather meagre and biased comments, amounted to a
sort of canon of the ‘Russian Sholem Aleichem’ that ensured the writer’s widespread
popularity in the Soviet Union, even among non-Jewish readers. Most of the pieces
that had been excluded from the canon remained forever hidden from the Russian
reader, just as the works that were included in the canon remained available only
within the limits set by the translations and the comments of that edition.41
The ‘canonization’ of Sholem Aleichem’s texts in the Soviet Union also pertains
to a marginal branch of his literary career — the texts originally composed in
Russian. The last volume of the first edition of the Soviet six-volume set (Moscow,
1959–61) included a special section, Short Stories Written in Russian, that consisted of
two pieces — The Dreamers and One Hundred Thousand (from the cycle Types of the
Small Stock Exchange). The annotation to the section stated that the writer ‘possessed
solid knowledge of the Russian culture and was inspired by its democratic ideals’;
also that ‘his first works were written in Russian’. Yet it offered no explanation why
these two particular stories had been selected.
Apparently, the selection was based on ideological considerations. The Dreamers
had obviously attracted the compilers with its strong anticlerical message. No
wonder a little later this story was included in a separate brochure in a propaganda
series Khudozhestvennaia ateisticheskaia biblioteka (Atheistic Library of Fiction).42 The
story One Hundred Thousand featuring the Odessa Stock Exchange was to bear
witness to the critical attitude of the ‘progressive writer and democrat’ to the world
of moneybags.43
Today the entire Soviet six-volume Collected Works by Sholem Aleichem, inclu-
ding these two short stories, are easily available online. Here we are dealing with
another paradox of literary history: for reasons that have very little to do with the
actual literary merits of the texts, the original stories now available to the mass
Russian-speaking audience are by no means the most accomplished works written
by Sholem Aleichem in Russian, for the works in question are the earliest of his
short stories published in Russian and an essay from a newspaper cycle that had been
planned but never fully written.
Afterword
Sholem Aleichem never succeeded in becoming a self-translator into Russian. His
few attempts, Poems in Prose, Ghetto Tales, Our Children, and The Convoy, are not,
strictly speaking, translations, they are rather reworked versions of the original texts
that deviate somewhat from the Yiddish originals and are much less expressive,
to say nothing of the fact that they are far from perfect stylistically. In Sholem
Aleichem’s case, the author’s insufficient command of the Russian language does
not look like a plausible explanation for this deficiency; the more likely one is
his lack of understanding of the Russian audience, his simplified concepts of its
demands and reference points.44 An even more plausible explanation is that his
literary gift was just of a different nature.45
Neither did Sholem Aleichem succeed in becoming a Russian-Jewish writer.
His Russian texts, inconsiderable in number, were but the experiments of a novice
trying to charter his literary path. Yet some of them, the long-forgotten My Grand-
mother’s Romance, The Grief of Reb Elyukim, and Grandmother’s Tales, are not devoid
of certain artistic merits and evoke the intonation, characters, and storylines of his
mature classical Yiddish works. The young Russian-Jewish man of letters Solomon
Rabinovich obviously had considerable potential, but never got a chance to fulfil it.
The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem entered the Russian literature primarily
through the efforts of a whole cohort of highly gifted and capable translators of
the Soviet era, such as Mikhail Shambadal, Yakov Slonim, and others. To a large
extent, it is to them that the writer owes the enormous popularity he has enjoyed
with several generations of Russian readers. Even today Sholem Aleichem’s books
are continuously reissued both in Russia and in the Ukraine in these particular
versions. Yet, the texts of the Soviet editions, and especially their notes and com-
mentaries, are too obviously out of date. The logic of cultural progress calls for new
translations (or revisions of the old ones), freshly annotated to meet the require-
ments of the contemporary Russian reading public and to comply with the current
level of literary studies. In view of this ultimate goal, there is an essential need for
the in-depth study and critical analysis of the entire history of ‘Russian Sholem
Aleichem’, a history that definitely incorporates his own attempts at translation,
his ventures into writing in Russian and his dynamic correspondence with those
people who were trying, in his lifetime, to find an adequate and artistically
convincing Russian-language interpretation of his outstanding Yiddish texts.
Appendix 1: Sholem Aleichem’s Works Written in Russian

1. S. Rabinovich, ‘Mechtateli: Nabroski karandashom’, Evreiskoe obozrenie, 7 (St Peters-
burg, July 1884), 26–46.
2. S. Rabinovich, ‘Roman moei babushki: Povest´’, Voskhod, 4–9 (St Petersburg, April-
September 1891), 1–32 (7th pagination).
3. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Stikhotvoreniia v proze’, Odesskie novosti, 7, 14, 21 and 28 Nov-
ember, 5, 12 and 20 December 1892, 9 and 16 January 1893.
Contents: I. ... Dve dushi; II. Brat v nuzhde; III. Osteregaites’ vorov; IV. Dva brata;
V. S vysoty nebes; VI. Mne stydno; VII. Angel smerti; VIII. Klad; IX. Shut; X.
Potselui; XI. Vchera i segodnia; XII. Pervaia lozh’; XIII. Po sosedstvu; XIV. Razdel;
XV. Zheltaia maska; XVI. Ekii nakhal!; XVII. Pervaia liubov’; XVIII. A chem
on torgoval?; XXI. Brillianty; XXII. Uchitel’ — ‘nash despot zhestokii’; XXIII.
Vykhodim na gavan’ (S natury); XXIV. Kto iz etikh dvukh?; XXV. Videnie; XXVI.
Iov nashikh dnei; XXVII. I on chelovek.
4. Ser, ‘Tipy maloi birzhi: Sto tysiach’, Odesskii listok, 21 December 1892.
5. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Babushkiny skazki’, Odesskie novosti, 23 January and 6 February 1893.
Contents: I. Pinta-razboinik; II. Chudo-tabakerka.
6. S. Rabinovich, ‘Gore reb El’iukima: Sovershenno neveroiatnoe sobytie’, Voskhod, 2–3
(St Petersburg, February–March 1893), 185–99.
7. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Skazki getto’, Voskhod, 11 (St Petersburg, November 1898), 32–39
(2nd pagination) and 12 (St Petersburg, December 1898), 42–50 (2nd pagination).
Contents: I. Klad; II. Posledniaia shutka; III. ‘Angely mira’; IV. Vania; V. V shkolu,
bezdel’niki!; VI. I on chelovek; VII. Pervaia liubov’; VIII. ‘Muchitel´’; IX. ‘Angel
smerti’; X. Razdel; XI. Chem on torgoval; XII. Potselui.
8. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Pinta-razboinik: Byl’’, Khronika Voskhoda, 12 (St Petersburg, 21
March 1899), cols. 367–70.
9. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Babushkiny skazki: Kaftan ego siiatel’stva’, Khronika Voskhoda, 15
(St Petersburg, 11 April 1899), cols. 452–55.
10. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Nashi deti: Rasskaz’, Nauchno-literaturnyi sbornik ‘Budushchnosti’, 2
(St Petersburg, 1901), 263–82.
11. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Po etapu: Rasskaz’, Knizhki Voskhoda, 7 (St Petersburg, July 1903),
91–122.
12. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Babushkiny skazki: Dedushkina loshadka’, Povesti i rasskazy (Kiev,
1939), 96–103.
Appendix 2: The Cycle A bintl blumen/Blumen: Transformation
Yiddish Russian Yiddish

Stikhotvoreniia v Ale
A bintl blumen Skazki getto Blumen
proze (Odesskie verk
(1888) (Voskhod, 1898) (1903)
novosti, 1892–1893) (1948)
1. Tsvey neshomelekh 1. …Dve dushi – 7. Tsvey +
neshomelekh
2. Nekhtn un haynt 11. Vchera i segodnia – – +
3. A hoze a bisl! (Ekaia 27. I on chelovek 6. I on chelovek 5. An azes +
derzost’!)
4. Okh letsoro (A 2. Brat v nuzhde – – +
bruder in noyt)
5. Der malkhamoves 7. Angel smerti 9. ‘Angel smerti’ 10. Malkhamoves +
6. Ikh shem zikh 6. Mne stydno – 8. Ikh shem zikh +
7. Hintern himl 5. S vysoty nebes 5. V shkolu, 1. Funem barg +
bezdel’niki! Sinay
8. Tsvey brider 4. Dva brata – – +
9. Hit zikh 3. Osteregaites’ vorov – – +
far ganovim!
(Osteregaites’ vorov!)
10. Ikh vel zikh on dir – – – +
noykem zayn!
11. Yosl patriot – – – –
12. Oyf viderzen! – – – +
13. Umglik – – – +
14. Dos porfolk – – 3. Avreml +
15. Koysl maarovi – – 2. Koysl maarovi +
16. Ek velt – – 9. Ek velt +
17. Loz zayn morgn – – – +
18. Di naye velt-firer – – – –
– 8. Klad 1. Klad 4. Der oytser +
– 9. Shut 2. Posledniaia shutka – +
– 10. Potselui 12. Potselui – –
– 12. Pervaia lozh’ – – +
– 13. Po sosedstvu 4. Vania – +
– 14. Razdel 10. Razdel 6. Ayngeteylt zikh +
– 15. Zheltaia maska – – +
– 16. Ekii nakhal! – – +
– 17. Pervaia liubov’ 7. Pervaia liubov’ – –
– 18. A chem on 11. Chem on – +
torgoval? torgoval
– 21. Brillianty – – –
– 22. Uchitel’ — ‘nash 8. ‘Muchitel’’ – +
despot zhestokii’
– 23. Vykhodim na – – +
gavan’
– 24. Kto iz etikh – – +
dvukh?
– 25. Videnie 3. ‘Angely mira’ – –
– 26. Iov nashikh dnei – – +
Note: The editors of Odesskie novosti made an error in numeration while publishing Sholem Aleichem’s
cycle Stikhotvoreniia v proze (1892–93): the numbers 19 and 20 were omitted.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. The most comprehensive picture of Sholem Aleichem’s attitude to the translation of his works
into Russian is to be found in his renowned correspondence with his translator Yuly Pinus,
which has so far been published only in part and mostly not in the original Russian-language
version, but in the Yiddish translation (see ‘Nit farefntlekhte briv fun Sholem-Aleykhemen’,
Shtern, 5 (1936), 63–65; Briv fun Sholem-Aleykhem (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Peretz Farlag, 1995), pp. 513–20,
522–23, etc.). The letters are currently in the Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian
Literature (Pushkin House) in St Petersburg ( fond Р III, opis’ 1, files 2331–453; hereafter referred
to as IRLI, with references to the particular file and the document within the file). The analysis
of this correspondence is to be found in: Maks Erik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn iberzetser’,
Tsaytshrift, 5 (Minsk, 1931), 79–88 (2nd pagination); Oyzer Holdes, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems a bintl
briv’, Sovetish heymland, 2 (1964), 133–39; Yisroel Serebryani, ‘Vegn Sholem-Aleykhems briv tsu
Yu. Pinusn’, Sovetish heymland, 10 (1966), 136–37; idem, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem vegn kinstlerishe
iberzetsungen’, Sovetish heymland, 12 (1970), 164–70.
2. See the collection of Sholem Aleichem’s letters to his son, presented in the original Russian
versions: Chaim Beider, ‘Pochti semeinaia khronika’, Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, 2
(1993), 197–201.
3. See Shimon Markish, ‘Osip Rabinovich’, Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, 2 (6) (1994), 119,
137–38, 154; Velvl Chernin, ‘ “Mnogogo reb Khaim-Shulim i ne razobral”: Idish kak substrat
russkogo iazyka Osipa Rabinovicha’, Lekhaim, 12 (Moscow, 2006), 61.
4. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Tsu mayn biografye’, Ale verk, xxvii (New York: Folksfond, 1923), p. 278.
5. Dos Sholem-Aleykhem-bukh (New York: IKUF, 1958), pp. 190–91. Also, Sholem Aleichem,
Sobranie sochinenii, vi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), p. 645 (hereafter the
texts from the six-volume Collected Works by Sholem Aleichem in Russian are quoted by this
edition).
6. Simon Dubnow provides some data on the circumstances of publication of the first of these
two works: ‘That same summer [1891] Sholem Aleichem had written in Russian his novel
My Grandmother’s Romance that I had edited from the language point of view, which posed no
difficulty since the author knew Russian rather well. I assisted with the inclusion of Romance
into a large collected volume that was published by Voskhod instead of the regular issues of
the magazine after it had been suspended by the authorities for half a year’ (Simon Dubnow,
‘Vospominaniia o Sholom-Aleikheme i ego literaturnaia perepiska’, Evreiskaia starina, 9.2–3
(1916), 231).
7. On numerous calques and literal translations from Yiddish in Osip Rabinovich’s novel Istoriia
o tom, kak reb Khaim-Shulim Feigis puteshestvoval iz Kishineva v Odessu i chto s nim sluchilos’ (Tale
of Reb Chaim-Shulim Feigis’s Trip from Kishinev to Odessa and What Befell Him; 1865) see
Chernin, ‘ “Mnogogo reb Khaim-Shulim i ne razobral”’, p. 64.
8. Dos Sholem-Aleykhem-bukh, p. 6.
9. For such inaccurate statements, see e.g. Zalmen Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese
un filologye, iv (Vilna: B. Kletzkin, 1929), col. 680; Dos Sholem-Aleykhem-bukh, p. 363; Kratkaia
evreiskaia entsiklopediia, x ( Jerusalem: Keter, 2001), col. 32; Sholem Aleichem, Sobranie sochinenii,
i, 11; vi, 773.
10. Odesskie novosti, 7 November 1892.
11. Arn Vorobeytshik, ‘In an opgelegn vinkele’, Shtern, 3–4 (1939), 109.
12. For a full list of Sholem Aleichem’s Russian literary texts of which we are aware, see Appendix 1.
13. See Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte briv (Moscow: Der emes, 1941), p. 117. The translations
were intended for the anthology of Yiddish literature initiated by Maxim Gorky. Various
circumstances prevented this edition from happening. The third story from the Grandmother’s
Tales series came out in the 1939 collection Povesti i rasskazy.
14. See Ber (Boris) Kotlerman, ‘ “In kinematograf ligt a groyse tsukunft” oder Sholem-Aleykhems
letste libe’, Afn shvel, 350–51 (2011), 13–18.
15. Sholem Aleichem made his own list of periodicals he contributed to; apart from the Russian
newspapers from Odessa he mentions in this list the ones from Kiev, Kievskoe slovo and Kievskie
vesti (see Dos Sholem-Aleykhem-bukh, p. 8). Still, it is unclear whether he means the original texts
he wrote specifically for these newspapers in Russian, or the translations from Yiddish. The
issue still has to be investigated.
16. Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte briv, p. 46.
17. Arn (Aron Itskovich) Vorobeytshik (1893–1942), educator, literary critic, literary scholar, staff
scientist at the All-Ukrainian Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture in Odessa.
He was drafted into the army in the beginning of the war and perished. For more on him see
Vera Solodova, ‘Sozdateli muzeia evreiskoi kul’tury’, <http://www.migdal.ru/migdal/events/
science-confs/6/18436/>.
18. Vorobeytshik, ‘In an opgelegn vinkele’, pp. 92–95 (there is also an abridged version of the same
article: Sovetish heymland, 3 (1984), 39–52).
19. This was also clear to the ideologists of Soviet Jewish culture. No wonder that Sholem
Aleichem’s Complete Works in Yiddish, published in Moscow by Der emes in 1948, included
only sixteen poems out of eighteen. The two novellas left out were Yosl patriot and Di naye velt-
firer (New Rulers of the World). Both had the all too obvious nationalistic and traditionalistic
motifs.
20. Sholem Aleichem, Sobranie sochinenii, vi, 671.
22. See Simon Dubnow [Kritikus], ‘O zhargonnoi literature voobshche i o nekotorykh noveishikh
ee proizvedeniiakh v chastnosti’, Voskhod, 10 (1888), 21–22 (2nd pagination).
23. The adjective zhalkii (pitiful) is used three times in the first two sentences of the story, ‘The
pitiful town where my pitiful childhood was spent [...] The pitiful martyr of its hard schooling’.
This deliberate emphasis on piteousness seems to play a trick on Sholem Aleichem the translator.
And yet, such f laws of style that are to be found both in the other Poems in Prose published in
Odesskie novosti, as well as in Tales of the Ghetto in Voskhod, are indicative rather of the author’s
haste than of his lack of proficiency in Russian.
24. Thus the problem of homonymy occurs in the translation, and it is noteworthy that Sholem
Aleichem tries to deal with this problem in graphic terms. The word Shkola meaning ‘synagogue’
(a common usage in the Russian and Ukrainian vernacular of the Pale of Settlement) begins
with the capital letter, while the same word meaning ‘heder’ with the lower case one.
25. See Vorobeytshik, ‘In an opgelegn vinkele’, pp. 108–09. Still, the author failed to come up with
any definitive proof of such pressure, even though he had access to the archival documents of
Odessa Department of Censorship. Another research paper by Vorobeytshik based on these
documents contains valuable data on the Odessa period of Sholem Aleichem’s life (see idem,
‘Sholem-Aleykhem un di odeser tsarishe tsenzur’, Sholem-Aleykhem. Zamlbukh fun kritishe artiklen
un materialn (Kiev, 1940), pp. 165–75). In particular, it shows that during the fall of 1892, while
contributing to the local Russian newspapers, the writer made significant but unsuccessful
efforts to obtain a permission to establish a Yiddish daily in Odessa. A few months earlier
he published in Odessa a booklet in Yiddish about cholera prevention. This, together with
the above-mentioned Yiddish collection Kol mevaser tsu der yudisher folks-bibliotek, leads to a
conclusion: Sholem Aleichem’s definition of this period of his life as ‘a break for jargon’ was
slightly exaggerated.
26. Thus, in his letter of 3 (16) July 1910 Sholem Aleichem gives Yuly Pinus instructions regarding
the translation of one of his short stories, ‘I implore you to avoid such terms as tfiln, mezuze,
shishi, maftir, minkhe, yoyre deye, bier, shulkhn-orekh, tones, ato-horeyso etc. Replace them with
general terms. Only for shive zitsn you should explain in a footnote the essence of the custom.
In short, you should remember that you translate me for the Russians, for the Gentiles’ (IRLI,
2376, 16–17). Three months later, on 10 October, he repeats the same idea, ‘Remember once and
for good that you translate for the aliens, even if 99% of our readers were [ Jewish]’ (IRLI, 2409,
6–7). In yet another letter to Pinus we read, ‘Try, as far as it is possible, to leave out the Hebrew
words, such as kadish, kidush, yortsayt etc.’ (IRLI, 2431, 1). We find similar instructions in Sholem
Aleichem’s letters to another translator, Abram Derman (see ‘Briv fun Sholem-Aleykhemen’,
Sovetish heymland, 1 (1966), 146).
27. Sholem Aleichem seemed to admire the use in the Russian translations of his works of the word
getto (ghetto) to define the Jewish world of the Pale of Settlement (a hundred years later, in the
light of the tragic history of the twentieth century, the Russian reader would hardly find this
usage appropriate). Thus, in the letter of 3 January 1910, he wrote to his translator Yuly Pinus
regarding the title for the first volume of his collected works in Russian, at the time prepared for
printing, ‘I would love Children of the Ghetto, yet I have been preceded by my English colleague
Zangwill’ (IRLI, 2331, 3–4). He meant the novel of the same name by the Anglo-Jewish writer
Israel Zangwill that had been published in Russian more than once. Finally, Sholem Aleichem
settled on the title Children of the ‘Pale’ for the first volume of his collected works.
29. Here’s Vorobeytshik’s interpretation of this transformation, ‘The mellow and humorous adult’s
affirmation of the naïve childish credibility [...] is replaced by the bitter and ironic [...] affirmation
of the idiocy of the shtetl!’ (Vorobeytshik, ‘In an opgelegn vinkele’, p. 104). Remaining a
prisoner of his simplistic sociological approach, the Soviet scholar regards Sholem Aleichem
exclusively as a critic of social relationships in traditional Jewish society and fails to admit that
Blumen, a cycle of lyrical novellas, is the least appropriate piece for such interpretation.
30. Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 16.
31. See Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, viii (New York: Folksfond, 1918), pp. 201–23.
32. Ironically, the Blumen cycle, much treasured by the author, remained virtually unknown to the
Russian readers. Sholem Aleichem planned to include it, in translation, into his first Russian-
language Collected Works (on that plan see e.g. his letter to Pinus of 1(14) March 1910 in Shtern,
5 (1936), 63). Yet, for some reason, it was omitted from the final version of the Collected Works.
Very inadequate (in effect, word-by-word) translations into Russian of nine pieces from Blumen
made by one Iosif Krasnianskii were published in 1910 in Odessa in three brochures: S gory
Sinaia (From Mount Sinai), Dva kozaka (Two Cossacks), and Moi poklonnik (My Suitor) as a
part of a series ‘Deshevaia evreiskaia bibliotechka’ (Cheap Jewish Library). It is obvious that the
brochures have been published without the author’s permission (see Sholem Aleichem’s open
letter protesting against the illegal publishing of his works in Russian translations in Odessa:
‘A briv fun Sholem-Aleykhemen’, Gut morgen, Odessa, 17 May 1910). To our best knowledge,
Blumen has never again been published in Russian translation.
33. Various Yiddish periodicals, as well as the Russian-Jewish ones, would compete for the right
to publish the new works by the most popular Yiddish writer, and he, on his part, would try to
satisfy each and all. A few years later, in 1908, a similar combination — simultaneous publication
of the original and of the Russian translation — formed the base of Sholem Aleichem’s
agreement with Der fraynd newspaper and Evreiskii mir magazine (see his letters in Sholem
Aleichem, Sobranie sochinenii, vi, 697–704, 768).
34. The story Moshka-konokrad, translated by one O. L. (Olga Loeva, his wife?), was published in
Knizhki Voskhoda with a note, ‘Translated from the manuscript, edited by the author’. The
Yiddish version of this story, Moshkele ganev, was published in June–July of the same year in
the Warsaw–Krakow weekly Yudishe folks-tsaytung — here, in fact, we also have a case of the
simultaneous publication of the original and the translation.
35. See reference to it in his correspondence in: Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte briv, p. 128.
36. A similar process took place while his first collected works in Russian were being prepared.
Judging by Sholem Aleichem’s correspondence with Yuly Pinus, the author would often send
the translator new Yiddish versions of his stories (or certain fragments from them) meant
specifically for the Russian edition.
37. Yuly Iosifovich Pinus (1884–after 1950), born in Shklov, a physician, graduate of Moscow
University Medical Department. In 1910–13 he translated into Russian the works of Sholem
Aleichem, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and Yitskhok Leybush Peretz for the Moscow publishing
house Sovremennye Problemy. Later he gave up translating, lived in Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd),
and worked as a children’s doctor. For more on him see Erik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn
iberzetser’, pp. 79–80; Serebryani, ‘Vegn Sholem-Aleykhems briv tsu Yu. Pinusn’, pp. 136–37;
Yoysef Burg, ‘A zeltener mentsh’, Sovetish heymland, 5 (1973), 138–40.
38. The idea to replace Kasrilevke with Golodaevka in the Russian translations was voiced for the
first time in Sholem Aleichem’s letter to Pinus of 1 (14) March 1910 (see in Shtern, 5 (1936), 63).
In the subsequent correspondence the author would more than once remind the translator of
the importance of that change. When The Convoy was included into the same volume as the
Kasrilevke cycle, the writer deemed it necessary to shift the scene of this story to Golodaevka as
well. Thus, in the letter of 12 (25) July 1910 he wrote: ‘I would also like to draw your attention
to The Convoy, that is even though you have placed it into a separate entry [i.e. into a separate
section of the book] [...] it would still destroy the harmony if instead of Golodaevka you put in
Teplik. Which means that the story has to be adjusted to Golodaevka [...]’ (IRLI, 2382, 31).
39. See Sholem Aleichem, Sobranie sochinenii, ii, 112–42.
40. See Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, ii (Moscow: Der emes, 1948), pp. 346–56. As mentioned above
(see n. 19), the original version of the cycle in Yiddish, A bintl blumen, was also included into the
collection in a reduced version (see ibid., pp. 239–52, 338–45).
41. In the post-Soviet years the works of Sholem Aleichem in the Russian translations were
reprinted many times both in Russia and in the Ukraine, most of the editions being based on
the six-volume Collected Works. The only addition to the Soviet canon was the novel Krovavaia
shutka (The Bloody Hoax), reprinted several times in early twentieth-century translations.
42. The anti-religious brochure included two short stories, Mechtateli (The Dreamers) and Tsarstvie
nebesnoe (Eternal Life). See Sholem Aleichem, Tsarstvie nebesnoe (Moscow: Politizdat, 1964).
43. The Dreamers was also included into the second (1971–74) and third (1988–90) editions of Sholem
Aleichem’s six-volume Collected Works in Russian. One Hundred Thousand was only included into
the second edition.
44. It seems that Sholem Aleichem was aware of that, for in his correspondence with Pinus, alongside
his numerous appeals to keep in mind that the translations were intended for the Gentiles, there
was another recurrent motif: in order to assess the translator’s work, ‘each print-ready translation
has to be shown to a real goy’ (IRLI, 2453, 2).
45. The question of how far Sholem Aleichem has succeeded in becoming the translator of the
works of Russian writers, such as Leo Tolstoy or Vladimir Korolenko, into Yiddish is outside
the framework of this essay.
CHAPTER 3
Y
Sholem Aleichem and the

Polish-Jewish Literary Audience
Eugenia Prokop-Janiec
Modern Jewish Multilingual Culture and the Question of Translation

The problem of literary audience is one of the classic issues in studies on literary
reception. In the case of studies on the literary reception of the works of Sholem
Aleichem in Poland before 1939, this problem gains additional importance because
it was one of the themes current in contemporary criticism, and it was a matter
of dispute in Polish-Jewish literary circles. One of the harshest disputes between
the assimilationist writers and national-Jewish writers in the early 1930s referred
to the translation of short stories from the volume Notatki komiwojażera (Tales of
a Commercial Traveller [Ayznban-geshikhtes]), focusing exactly on such issues as
potential readers and their reception of Yiddish prose in Polish translation.1
Let me stress at the beginning that when I talk about the Polish-Jewish literary
audience, I mean both Jewish readers of translations of works by Sholem Aleichem
into Polish, as well as the broader environment created by translators, publishers,
editors of periodicals, literary and theatrical critics, as well as writers referring to his
works in their own writings. In other words, all the participants in Polish-Jewish
literary life whose activities related to such institutions as the press, publishing
houses, and criticism determined the emergence of Polish translations and
popularization of opinions about Sholem Aleichem and his works.2
It is obvious that translations of Yiddish literature into Polish, coming from
Polish-Jewish circles, as well as works of literary criticism in the Polish language,
could reach both Jewish and Polish readers, and therefore function in either the
Polish-Jewish or the Polish milieu. This was because the borderline between
the Polish and Polish-Jewish audience was not a language border, but a cultural
and social one. This was ref lected in the different status of Polish translations
from Yiddish in both these environments. For the Polish-Jewish audience, Polish
translations from Yiddish had the nature of intracultural translations, and their
status was analogous to the status of translations from Hebrew into Yiddish. In
turn, the status of the same translations was radically different for Polish readers,
for whom these were intercultural translations.3
The fundamental context in which the problem of the Polish-Jewish literary
audience is to be considered, as well as its reception of Yiddish literature, is the
48 Eugenia Prokop-Janiec
trilingual polysystem of the Jewish culture in Poland. This modern multilingual

culture (and literature) is treated by scholars — I refer here especially to the classic
work by Chone Shmeruk, Hebrew — Yiddish — Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture
(1986) — as a dynamic unity of various elements that are yet connected and
coordinated with one another.4 In the polysystem treated as a whole, there were
local centres and peripheries, and the transfer of elements was possible both within
particular language systems (between their centres and peripheries) and between
various systems.5
This was — as emphasized by Benjamin Harshav in his descriptions of its
emergence in the course of the ‘modern Jewish revolution’ — a secular and
open polysystem that allowed individuals to adopt European values and models.
On the other hand, it also allowed ‘assimilated Jews to turn (or return) to the
selected aspects of knowledge and Jewish culture’.6 Its multilingual aspect, as
well as its secular and open nature, had the consequence of allowing the multi-
directional f low of people, ideas, symbols, and values between various language
and cultural options, institutions, and domains.7 In Poland (and more broadly in
Eastern Europe), the polysystem of modern Jewish culture was characterized by the
important and sustainable position of the institutions in Yiddish.8 The interaction
between the various linguistic systems of Jewish culture in Poland was ref lected
in the book collections of inter-war secular Jewish libraries. Despite the substantial
growth of Polish sections, Yiddish books always predominated in these multilingual
collections.9
Links between the systems in Yiddish and in Polish took place in various areas of
the polysystem. They were observed as early as in the first decade of the twentieth
century by the political activist Max Horwitz. In 1907 he noted that:
The popularity of the jargon not only did not push out and did not tame the
adoption of the Polish language by the Jewish mass, but to the contrary, it
clearly strongly enhanced it. One can say that reading every ten books in jargon
resulted in reading of the eleventh one in Polish, soon followed by the twelfth,
etc.10
Such relations were increasingly intensely revealed in the inter-war period, with the
progress of linguistic Polonization and the development of the Polish-Jewish press.
In the inter-war period, many contributors to the Polish-Jewish press were often
bilingual and contributed also to Yiddish periodicals.11 The magazines not only
published numerous translations from Yiddish, but also information on Yiddish
literary life, such as notes on the activities of publishing houses, announcements and
advertisements for books, subscription announcements, reviews, announcements of
public readings and literary meetings. In these magazines advertisements of books
in Yiddish and in Polish were sometimes printed side by side, and the very ‘visual
representation of languages’12 signalled the relation between the systems.
Sholem Aleichem and the Polish-Jewish Literary Audience 49
Fig. 3.1. Cover of Tales of a Commercial Traveller (1925)

Sholem Aleichem’s Reception in Poland: An Outline

In the Polish-Jewish reception of Sholem Aleichem, I would like to point to certain
characteristic features. Firstly, its most important medium was the Polish-Jewish
press, principally dailies and magazines for children and youth, while to a lesser
extent weeklies and monthlies. Periodicals publishing translations and reviews
represented a range of ideological stands and political camps, from assimilationists
to Zionists. In the late nineteenth century, translations of Sholem Aleichem’s works
were published in the assimilationist Izraelita weekly; in the inter-war period they
appeared in the most important national Jewish newspapers, such as Nasz Przegląd
in Warsaw, Nowy Dziennik in Krakow, and Chwila in Lvov. The Polish-Jewish
periodicals at the time reached a circulation of 20,000 to 30,000 copies.13 If we were
to assume that a newspaper was usually read by several people, one may estimate
that via the Polish-Jewish dailies, the translations of Sholem Aleichem’s works and
critical works about him could reach at least 60,000 readers at a time. At the same
time weeklies, monthlies, and books had a print-run of 1,000–2,500 copies. For
example, the weekly Izraelita ran about 1,000 copies at the turn of the century and
inter-war Polish-Jewish weeklies for children ran on average 2,000 to 2,500 copies,
whereas some Polish-Jewish books were published in 1,000 copies.14
Translations printed in the press were sometimes published later in book form.
Such was the path of the Stempenyu translation; before it appeared in 1900 in Polish
as a book, it was printed in 1898 in instalments in Warsaw’s Izraelita weekly.15 The
press also fostered the reception of Sholem Aleichem by popularizing translations as
book bonuses for their own readers; such, for example, was the practice of Warsaw’s
Nasz Przegląd.16 In this the press in Polish cooperated with the press in Yiddish. For
instance, as a bonus for readers, Sholem Aleichem’s works were published in 1939
by Warsaw daily Haynt.17
The daily press often published anonymous translations.18 Sometimes — parti-
cularly in periodicals for children — excerpts, adaptations, or free translations
of texts were also printed. It is significant that the Polish-Jewish press not only
published original works in literary criticism devoted to Sholem Aleichem, but
also translations or abstracts of articles by outstanding Yiddish critics and writers,
for example by Bal-Makhshoves (Isidor Eliashev),19 Naftali Weinig,20 or Itsik
Manger.21
Secondly, in the Polish-Jewish daily press, translations of Sholem Aleichem’s
works were principally published in holiday editions, while critical texts were
mainly of occasional and jubilee or anniversary nature, when they were usually
related to anniversaries of certain literary works, or of Sholem Aleichem’s birth and
death. This tendency prevailed from the earliest essays devoted to Sholem Aleichem
published in Zionist almanacs from the first decade of the twentieth century,
through popular articles in dailies in the 1920s and 1930s, to ambitious studies
published at the end of the inter-war period in the prestigious academic Miesięcznik
Żydowski ( Jewish Monthly). Anniversary publications sometimes took the form of
separate monograph sections of journals, which contained various literary materials
— not just translations, but also critical texts and biographical documents.22
Fig. 3.2. Cover of The Musician (1900)

Thirdly, Sholem Aleichem’s works were published in Poland principally in series.

In 1900, a Polish translation of Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Stempenyu, was published
by Henryk Lew entitled Muzykant (The Musician) on its own, while the next
novel to be translated, Listy Menachema Mendla (The Letters by Menakhem Mendl),
translated by Jerzy Ohr and entitled Miliony: Powieść giełdowa w liścikach (Millions:
A Stock Novel in Letters), was published in 1903 as a volume of Biblioteka Dzieł
Wybranych (Library of Selected Works). This respected Polish series offered an
educated reader principally the works by classics of the Polish and world literature.23
In the inter-war period, volumes of Sholem Aleichem’s prose were published
exclusively in series aimed at the popularization of Jewish literature in Polish
translation. These included Biblioteka Pisarzy Żydowskich (The Library of Jewish
Writers, 1925–1929) by the Safrus Publishing House, edited by Samuel Wołkowicz,
which published the volume Tales of a Commercial Traveller; Biblioteczka Pisarzy i
Klasyków Żydowskich (A Small Library of Jewish Writers and Classics, 1925–1928)
by the Orient Publishing House, edited by E. Zylberman, which published the
volume of short stories Porada (The Advice); and Biblioteka Młodzieży Żydowskiej
(The Library of Jewish Youth, 1933), which put out the volume of short stories
Esrog. Przecież jam sierota (Esrog. I’m an Orphan, after All).
It is striking that among the translations, special importance was given to Sholem
Aleichem’s works addressed to children. Newspapers readily published them in their
holiday editions. His short stories about children and Jewish holidays also filled the
magazines for young readers, and supplements published for them by dailies. Take,
for example, Mały Przegląd (1926–39), edited by Janusz Korczak, which described
itself as ‘a magazine of children and youth’. It was filled every week with letters,
correspondence, and reports written by children, while literary translations were
published rarely, usually in the summer, when during the vacations the creative work
of young contributors was weaker24 Sholem Aleichem’s translations were also fre-
quently published by the Lvov assimilationist monthly for children, Nasza Jutrzenka
(1921–39),25 established by a well-known activist, Eleazar Byk (1881–1924), and
coedited by the writer Wilhelm Raort (pen-name of Józef Rappaport, 1887–1941).
Sholem Aleichem’s works — principally short stories about holidays — were
also regularly included in textbooks on Jewish history, literature, and the Polish
language, which were designed for Jewish schools with Polish as a language of
instruction. Two typical examples are Wypisy polskie dla dzieci żydowskich (Polish
Reader for Jewish Children), published in 1918 and edited by R. Gutman and
Samuel Hirszhorn;26 and Literatura. Zbiór przekładów polskich z literatury hebrajskiej
i żydowskiej dla szkół (Literature. Collection of Polish Translations from Hebrew
and Yiddish Literature for Schools), published in 1934, by Ch. Indelman and Lewi
Wiener.27
Among the Polish-Jewish criticism devoted to Sholem Aleichem, anniversary
articles predominate, in which the authors most frequently choose the form of a
literary portrait28 or a general description of his works. Therefore, they are domi-
nated by biographical and historical information, general assessments of the writer’s
works, opinions about his place and role in the Yiddish literature, with relatively
few comments of an analytical nature. Historical and sociological perspectives
Fig. 3.3. Cover of Millions: A Stock Novel in Letters (1903)

also dominated Sholem Aleichem’s literary portraits which appeared in general

overviews or synthetic essays on the history of the Yiddish literature. It is worth
mentioning that the style of reports on performances of the dramas or stage
adaptations of Sholem Aleichem’s works was quite different: they focused on the
literary text and treated the issues of performance as secondary.
The broadest, and at the same time the most important, framework for the
inter-war Polish-Jewish criticism is formed by the national discourse. Sholem
Aleichem’s literary position is defined by the critics in relation to Yiddish literature
understood as an institution of modern national culture and an important factor in
community life. He himself is considered a national writer (‘an artist organically
bound to his nation’)29 who addressed his works to a national audience. His
protagonists are usually interpreted as personifications of national types, or rather
archetypes (e.g. Tevye as Job).30 Sholem Aleichem’s humour is awarded the status
of national humour, shaped by the national ethos and national history. His works
are assigned an integrative role: reading them unites various groups into a national
community.31
In many works of literary criticism, the collective image of Sholem Aleichem’s
readers acts as an image of the nation, its wholeness and unity. Jakub Appenszlak
wrote in the introduction to Tales of a Commercial Traveller:
Everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, religious or free-thinking,
progressive and orthodox, men and women, the landlords and the servants, the
employer and his employee, rich and poor, all delight in Sholem Aleichem’s
works and he has something to say to each of them [...].32
A similar image of national community as a community of readers can be found
in the essay by Ozjasz Tillemann, for whom Sholem Aleichem is the ‘favourite
of all Jews, both simple people and the intelligentsia, cooks and their employers,
nationalists and assimilationists’.33
Polish-Jewish critics also employ key figures of the national discourse: the folk
as a synonym for the nation and folk culture as a synonym for the clearest source
of the national culture. Sholem Aleichem — as a ‘national’ writer — is therefore
presented as the folk badkhn (jester), or even as an anonymous folk artist, a ‘scribe’
writing down the voices of the people. Monologues and letters of his protagonists
provide the transcription of the folk, colloquial language, and act as a ‘snatch of the
language f lowing from the mouths of people at the synagogue and bet ha-midrash,
in a railway wagon, and in a big city’.34 His humour is seen as drawing on the
tradition of folk laughter and has a liberating power. Because a nation exists among
other nations,35 Yiddish literature is analysed in connection to other European
literatures. Sholem Aleichem tends to be referred to as a ‘European chevalier’36 and
an apprentice of Russian prose writers, while his protagonists are compared to such
literary characters as Don Quixote (Menakhem-Mendl)37 or Ulysses (Motl).
One other important reference framework for criticism is formed by the
discourse of modernity. In this perspective, the writer’s world appears to be a world
in a state of transformation and motion, while its protagonists, rapt by the ‘whirl
of modernised life’,38 change ‘from old living forms to new, European ones’,39 and
face the elements of modernity and change. Menakhem-Mendl is here transformed
into a Jewish variant of Chaplin’s figure of Charlie,40 interpreted as a symbol of

the modern condition. His tragicomic clowning is the key to the truths of the new
world. Another key — acceptance of the world, hope and trust in the future — is
offered by Tevye’s life philosophy.41
In the Polish-Jewish circles, references were made — both approvingly and
disapprovingly — to the interpretations of Yiddish criticism, including the works
by Shmuel Niger.42 Polish-Jewish criticism stressed Sholem Aleichem’s relations
with Russian culture and literature, and referred to his conf lict with Y. L. Peretz. 43
He was described as a man with a ‘face characterized by Russian style’ and an
artist whose works were patronized by the ‘Jewish badkhn and Russian fighters of
the pen’.44 By stressing Sholem Aleichem’s ties with Russia and Russian culture,
Polish-Jewish literary critics revealed their sensitiveness to local contexts and local
rootedness of the Yiddish literature as well as their readiness to show and accept its
regional differences.
The Polish-Jewish Literary Audience

‘Literary audience’ is defined as a ‘part of some society, therefore all the social divisions
and social bonds operate within it’.45 Already from the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the Polish-language Jewish audience was a complex group
with significant cultural and ideological differences. It included assimilationists,
Zionists, and advocates of Jewish autonomy; there were representatives of circles
acculturated for several generations, and newly acculturating circles; there were also
those who could participate in all linguistic systems of modern Jewish culture, and
those who had no access to Hebrew and Yiddish systems.
Cultural ideas of (at least a part of ) this milieu were revealed during a debate
concerning the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia in 1929. Generally speaking, they def-
ined themselves as a group participating in modern, secular, multilingual Jewish
culture,46 a group of people for whom Polish was a Jewish vernacular language so
they located itself beyond the battlefield of Yiddishists and Hebraists. As one of the
participants in the debate wrote:
It is an irrefutable fact that the Jewish intelligentsia is undergoing linguistic
Polonization. [...] This does not prevent them to [...] be faithful children of their
nation. [...] This does not [also] mean that the intelligentsia despise Yiddish, or
the more so — Hebrew, yet treat such languages not as vernacular, but auxiliary
in learning about our culture [...].47
It is from this multilingual society that readers of Polish translations of Sholem
Aleichem derived, as well as his Polish-Jewish translators, publishers, and critics.
We don’t have information for describing in detail the profile of the average
Polish-Jewish reader of Sholem Aleichem’s works. Many, or even the majority,
of them presumably belonged to (to employ the concept of the Polish sociologist
Jan Stanisław Bystroń) ‘curious people’48 who reached for Yiddish literature in
Polish translation. In the inter-war period, the largest group of ordinary readers of
Sholem Aleichem was formed by readers of the press, principally newspapers — the
Jewish intelligentsia and the middle class. Also, children were an important part of
the audience. One can, therefore, speak of the writer’s presence in popular, mass,
and also school and children’s circles. A separate group of consumers of Polish
translations of Sholem Aleichem consisted of theatre audiences for plays staged in
Polish, such as the performances of Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt (Scattered and Dispersed)
in Warsaw in 1905 and 1910. According to Chone Shmeruk, among theatrical
audience in Warsaw there were not only assimilationists but also people from the
orthodox Jewish milieu.49
A fruitful avenue for further research would be a thoroughgoing investigation of
Jewish libraries and readership in Poland before 1939. Fragmentary and accidental
information about individual readers may be found by tracing the fate of the books
preserved in libraries. For example, in the National Library collection in Warsaw,
there is the only copy of the Polish translation of Stempenyu of which I am aware.
It includes a dedication that testifies that the book was originally a part of private
collection by Naftali Prywes, to whom it was offered by Maurycy Kohn: ‘With the
intention of instilling beautiful thoughts and good principles, this book is offered
to Naftali Prywes by Maurycy Kohn’.50 We are not certain who the donor and
the beneficiary were, although both names can be found in works devoted to the
history of Jews in Warsaw and in contemporary genealogical internet sources.51 The
only certainty is that around 1900, they belonged to the Polonized Jewish circles
which were interested in and admired Yiddish literature.
To a less fragmentary extent, it is possible to reconstruct the image of another
layer of the Polish-Jewish audience — the active audience, namely those who
‘reacted to literary texts with their own texts’:52 translations, comments, reviews,
original works. They formed a group of — using the Polish theoretician of
literature, Janusz Sławiński’s term — the ‘reading generals’,53 or experts, the
reading elite. At the turn of the twentieth century, this circle included translators
and critics related to the assimilationist Warsaw Izraelita weekly. Principal among
them were two antagonists, Henryk Lew, author of the Stempenyu translation, and
Jerzy Ohr, translator of Menakhem-Mendl.54 Significantly, Lew and Ohr differently
defined the functions and importance of translations from Yiddish. Ohr, the author
of a leaf let on the Yiddish language,55 considered himself a continuator and heir
of the first Polish translator of Yiddish literature, Klemens Junosza Szaniawski.
Like Szaniawski, he maintained that such translations should perform non-artistic,
social functions in Polish-Jewish relations.56 Lew, a literary critic and a researcher
of Jewish folklore and humour, tended to emphasize the artistic values of Yiddish
literature and assigned an aesthetic function to translations.57 (The very choice of
Stempenyu as a novel about an artist testified to how far he was from focusing on
the ethnographic and social dimensions of literature.) Izraelita’s circle also included
the playwright and theatrical director Andrzej Marek (1878–1943), who translated
Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt,58 and the prose writer and journalist Leo Belmont (1865–
1941), who — via Esperanto — translated one of Sholem Aleichem’s short stories
‘Gimnazye’ (Gymnasium).59
In the inter-war period, the circle of the most active Polish-Jewish proponents
of Sholem Aleichem’s works consisted of writers from the nationalist Jewish press,
most notably Maksymilian Koren,60 Saul Wagman, M. Holcblat, Leo Herbst-
Staw,61 Pesach Schmutzer, Z. F. Finkielstein, Salomon Dykman,62 Leon Fajn, Zwi

Tamar,63 Ozjasz Tilleman, Leo Finkielstein, Benzion Zangen, Lazar Schachner, and
Naftali Weinig. Some of them were devoted admirers of Sholem Aleichem. Thus,
Mojżesz Kanfer called his own works about Sholem Aleichem ‘an act of gratitude
of a moved and loving reader’.64 Apart from professional writers or journalists, this
group also included teachers, lawyers, as well as political and social activists. Of this
rather large group, I would like to present three translators and critics related to the
Library of Jewish Writers and Small Library of Jewish Writers and Classics, namely:
Jakub Appenszlak, Mojżesz Kanfer, and Saul Wagman. All of them were well
known both inside and outside the Polish-Jewish circles and played an outstanding
role in Polish-Jewish literary life.
Jakub Appenszlak (1894–1950) started as a man of letters in Warsaw assimilationist
journals, while later he moved to the nationalist camp. A poet, prose writer,
journalist, and editor of Nasz Przegląd, he translated Tales of a Commercial Traveller for
the Library of Jewish Writers and authored a large essay (reprinted several times)65
entitled Sholem Aleichem, which became the subject of a sharp debate in the early
1930s. This debate revealed the differences in cultural-literary positions and views of
the assimilationist and nationalist Jewish writers. Whereas Appenszlak stressed the
universal values of Sholem Aleichem’s works, his adversary, Leo Belmont, perceived
in them principally the attachment to what was particularly Jewish and criticized
‘excess stress on the ritual sphere, on terms uninteresting to [...] the general public
[...], incomprehensible words’.66
In turn, Mojżesz Kanfer (1880–1942), originally from Buczacz, represented the
type of Jewish intellectual shaped by the atmosphere of multicultural Galicia.
As a journalist and translator, he equally freely used the three Jewish languages
of Galicia: Polish, German, and Yiddish.67As an editor of Nowy Dziennik and
contributor to the Yiddish weekly Literarishe bleter, he systematically published
anniversary articles on Sholem Aleichem and theatrical reports from performances
based on the writer’s works.68 Together with Ber Horowitz, he translated the play
Shver tsu zayn a yid (Hard to be a Jew).69 At the same time, he was not an uncritical
follower of Sholem Aleichem. He was critical of his early novels and works written
at the dictate of publishers, yet he had high praise for the works for children, and
particularly Tevye the Dairyman, which he considered a masterpiece. In his essays,
he often returned to the problem of recipients and styles of reading of the writer’s
works. In one of his anniversary articles, he presented Sholem Aleichem’s literary
career from the point of view of the literary public, as a journey from being an
author admired by the masses, yet not very much praised by the ‘intelligentsia
educated in European style’,70 to the status of a national writer, the ‘property of the
entire Jewish community’.
Saul Wagman, editor of Nasz Przegląd and a translator, initially tried his hand
at being a Polish-Jewish poet. He translated several of Sholem Aleichem’s short
stories for the Small Library of Jewish Writers and Classics, as well as publishing his
translations and essays about the writer in the press.71 Wagman’s translations and
literary criticism were distinguished for their emotional and lofty style.
Conclusion
(1). In the inter-war period one of the most important groups of Sholem Aleichem’s
readers in Poland consisted of children and youths. The importance of young
readers was also ref lected in the position of Sholem Aleichem’s works in the literary
canon propagated by secular Yiddish schools and by Jewish schools with Polish
language of instruction.72
(2). Critical works principally transmitted historical and biographical knowledge,
were involved in canon-building, sustained standards, and preserved stereotypical
interpretations. It is also striking that in Polish-Jewish literature, we can only find
a few original texts concerning Sholem Aleichem’s works.73 The most interesting
among them is the poem Kasrylewka by Roman Brandstaetter, interpreting Sholem
Aleichem’s world as a sentimental, idyllic vision of a Jewish province:
Senne bethamidrasze, chaty z strzechą płową,
Plac i brudna ulica, z której wyjścia nie ma,
W oknach schylone dłonie nad świecą piątkową –
Oto kraina szczęścia Szalom Alejchema.74
[Sleepy bet ha-midrash, houses with pale thatch, a square and a dirty street with
a dead end, in windows hands leaning over the Sabbath candle — this is the
Sholem Aleichem’s world of happiness.]
(3). In the process of building the canon of Yiddish literature, regional differences
were of some importance. In the Polish-Jewish perspective, Sholem Aleichem
remained the advocate of Russian Jews, an author shaped in the atmosphere of
Russian literature and culture.
(4). In the society in which the turn from Yiddish to Polish occurred on a large
scale, an important — if not the main and dominant — role of translations of the
canon of Yiddish literature (including Sholem Aleichem’s works) into Polish was
to provide the readers with a sense of continuity when they transferred between
different parts of the multilingual polysystem of culture.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Cf. Leo Belmont, ‘Służalcy odrodzonego ghetta’, Zjednoczenie, 1 (1932), 8–10; H. Adler, ‘Nowa
metamorfoza Pana Belmonta’, Nowy Dziennik, 25 (1932); ‘Oszczercy w odpowiedzi’, Zjednoczenie,
2 (1932), 13.
2. Such an understanding of the literary audience was initiated in Polish literary studies by the
work of Jan Stanisław Bystroń, Publiczność literacka (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Instytutu Filozofii
i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2006; first published in 1938). The audience is treated by
some researchers as a heterogenic environment, divided into literary circuits (‘circuits sociaux
de literature’). Concepts of literary circuits have been developed by sociologists of literature,
e.g. Robert Escarpit, and in Poland by Stefan Żółkiewski, who treats the circuits as ‘reception
environments’ with specific social position. Cf. Stefan Żółkiewski, Wiedza o kulturze literackiej.
Główne pojęcia (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1980).
3. This fact was mentioned by critics. Leo Belmont accentuated the cultural barrier in the
reception of Yiddish literature by Polish, namely ‘foreign readers’: ‘Służalcy odrodzonego
ghetta’, Zjednoczenie, 1 (1932).
4. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Hebrew — Yiddish — Polish: A Trilingual Jewish Culture’, in The Jews of
Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. by Y. Gutman and others (Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1989), pp. 285–311.
5. In the description of the polysystem, I refer here to the concept of Itamar Even-Zohar,
‘Polysystem Theory’, Poetics Today, 1–2 (1979), 287–310.
6. Benjamin Harshav, Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993),
p. 15.
7. Ibid.
8. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of
California Press, 1990); idem, Language in Time of Revolution.
9. Research on the book collections of the inter-war Jewish libraries and reading has been carried
out by Nathan Cohen from Bar Ilan University: Polish Reading in Jewish Libraries in Interwar
Poland (in print).
10. Maksymilian Horwitz, W kwestii żydowskiej (Krakow: Drukarnia Narodowa, 1907), pp. 82–83.
11. Marian Fuks, Prasa żydowska w Warszawie 1823–1939 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo
Naukowe, 1979), p. 258.
12. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 60.
13. See Michael Steinlauf, ‘The Polish-Jewish Daily Press’, Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies,
2 (1987), 227. According to Fuks, Prasa żydowska w Warszawie 1823–1939, p. 263, the circulation
reached 45,000 in 1938.
14. These circulations were greater than the circulation of Izraelita, which in the years 1860–70
amounted to approximately 460, in 1895 almost 1,000 copies. Cf. Fuks, Prasa żydowska w
Warszawie 1823–1939, p. 89. An example of a children’s weekly is Okienko na świat, whose
circulation ranged between 2,750 and 2,400 copies. Manual Literatura edited by Ch. Indelman
and Lewi Wiener (1934) was published in 1,000 copies.
15. Szulem Alejchem, Muzykant, trans. by H. Lew, appeared in Izraelita, nos. 28–34, 37–43, 45, 49
(1898).
16. ‘Wielkie premjum książkowe dla czytelników “Naszego Przeglądu”’, Nasz Przegląd, 122 (1930), 143.
17. Sholem Aleichem, Ale werk: Premye far di lezer fun ‘Haynt’, vi-ix (Warsaw, 1939).
18. Szalom Alejchem, ‘Dwaj odszczepieńcy’, Nowy Dziennik, 55 (1918).
19. Cf. I. Eliaszow, ‘Literatura żargonowa’, in Safrus: Książka zbiorowa poświęcona sprawom żydostwa
(Warsaw: Nakładem Towarzystwa dla wyd. żydowskich ‘Safrus’, 1905).
20. Naftali Weinig, ‘Szalom Alejchem: W 50-lecie twórczości literackiej’, Miesięcznik Żydowski, 1
(1934), 37–53.
21. Itsik Manger, ‘Szalom Alejchem jaki nam się udał tylko raz’, Chwila, 5306 (1933); idem,
‘Opowieści o Chełmie’, Chwila, 5341 (1934), 9–11; idem, ‘Co nam dał Szalom Alejchem:
W 80-lecie urodzin wielkiego humorysty żydowskiego’, Nowy Dziennik, 77 (1939), 8.
22. The will of Sholem Aleichem was printed together with the article by Mojżesz Kanfer, ‘Szolem
Alejchem: W 10-lecie jego smierci’, Nowy Dziennik, 94 (1927), 5.
23. The series was published in the years 1897–1911. It featured 669 volumes. Another translation
from Yiddish published there was novel Miasteczko [Shtetl] by Sholem Asch (1911).
24. Mały Przegląd published for example ‘Mnie dobrze — jestem sierotą’, Mały Przegląd, 221 (1928);
‘Rabczyk’. ‘Żydowski pies’, Mały Przegląd, 182 (1929), 6; ‘Podarunek chanukowy’, Mały Przegląd,
203 (1929), 2; ‘Pożar’, Mały Przegląd, 217 (1929); ‘Na Synaju’, Mały Przegląd, 206 (1930), 2; ‘Zegar’,
Mały Przegląd, 227 (1930), 1; ‘W pałacu króla Ahaswera’, Mały Przegląd, 223 and 244 (1932). About
the activity of the magazine’s collaborators see: ‘Cztery lata „Małego Przeglądu” ’, Mały Przegląd,
279 (1930).
25. Nasza Jutrzenka published inter alia short stories ‘Trzy główki’, Nasza Jutrzenka, 9 (1930), 185–86;
‘Bezbronne żyjątka’, Nasza Jutrzenka, 4 (1931), 93–97; ‘Mnie jest dobrze — jestem sierotą’, Nasza
Jutrzenka, 6–7 (1931), 151–55; ‘Mytuszelech’, Nasza Jutrzenka, 7 (1932), 168–75; ‘Zegar’, Nasza
Jutrzenka, 2 (1933).
26. Wypisy polskie dla dzieci żydowskich, ed. by R. Gutman and S. Hirszhorn (Warsaw: Nakładem
Towarzystwa Wydawniczego Szkoła, 1918). The collection includes short stories ‘Chorgiewka’
and ‘Przy uczcie purymowej’.
27. Literatura. Zbiór przekładów polskich z literatury hebrajskiej i żydowskiej dla szkół, ed. by Ch. Indel-
man and Lewi Wiener (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo N. Szapiro, 1934). The collection includes short
stories ‘Kuczka’, ‘Symchat Tora’, ‘Chanuka’, ‘Wigilia święta Pesach’.
28. One of the first such portraits was the essay by Z. F. Finkielstein Sylwetka smutnego Satyra
published in Almanach żydowski, ed. by Leon Reich (Lvov: Juffy. Drukarnia Udziałowa, 1910).
29. I. Eliaszow, ‘Literatura żargonowa’, in Safrus: Książka zbiorowa poświęcona sprawom żydostwa
(Warsaw: Nakładem Towarzystwa dla wyd. żydowskich ‘Safrus’, 1905), p. 49. The Editors’
Board of The Library of Jewish Writers recommended the series as the outline of ‘national
Jewish literature’: ‘Wstęp’, in Notatki komiwojażera, p. viii.
30. Weinig, ‘Szalom Alejchem: W 50-lecie twórczości literackiej’, 37–53.
31. About the role of reading audience in shaping the nation’s ‘imagined community’, see B.
Anderson, Wspólnoty wyobrażone: Rozważania o źródłach i rozprzestrzenianiu się nacjonalizmu, trans.
by S. Amsterdamski (Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 1997).
32. Jakub Appenszlak, ‘Szolem Alejchem’, in Notatki komiwojażera (Warsaw: Nakładem Wydawnictwa
“Safrus”, 1925), p. xii. Also Kanfer stressed that the writer ‘has become the property of the entire
Jewish society’ (Nowy Dziennik, 134 (1931)).
33. Ozjasz Tillemann, ‘Pięćdziesięciolecie śmiechu’, Chwila, 5306 (1933), 9–10.
34. Appenszlak, ‘Szolem Alejchem’, p. xiii.
35. ‘The people which has risen onto the level of a nation enters [...] the family of nations as an equal
among equals, not fearing the loss of its specificity and individual character’ (‘Zarys literatury
żydowskiej’, Nasz Przegląd, 263 (1928)).
36. Z. L. Finkelstein, ‘Sylwetka smutnego Satyra: Szalom Alejchemowi — w 25. jubileusz pracy
pisarskiej’, in Almanach żydowski, ed. by L. Reich (Lvov: Juffy. Drukarnia Udziałowa, 1910),
p. 113.
37. Kanfer, ‘Szolem Alejchem’.
38. L. Schachner, ‘Szalom Alejchem (Szalom Rabinowicz): W 20-tą rocznicę śmierci’, Nasza
Opinia, 46 (1936).
39. ‘Zarys literatury żydowskiej’, Nasz Przegląd, 98 (1928).
40. O. Abeles, ‘Charlie Chaplin: Żyd wieczny tułacz’, Nasz Przegląd, 98 (1928), 4.
41. Such an interpretation of Tewje’s characters, which appeared in Kanfer’s and Weinig’s writings,
is close to the contemporary interpretation offered by Yuri Slezkine, Wiek Żydów, trans. by S.
Kowalski (Warsaw: Media Lazar. Nadir, 2006).
42. Mojżesz Kanfer, ‘W piętnastolecie śmierci Szaloma Alejchema’, Nowy Dziennik, 134 (1931).
43. Lektor, ‘Czy mamy już literaturę żydowską’, Nasz Przegląd, 58 (1929).
44. Z. F. Finkelstein, ‘Sylwetka smutnego Satyra’, in Almanach żydowski, ed. by L. Reich (Lvov:
Juffy. Drukarnia Udziałowa, 1910), pp. 113, 118.
45. J. Lalewicz, ‘Pojęcie publiczności i problem więzi społecznej’, in Publiczność literacka, ed. by S.
Żółkiewski and M. Hopfinger (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy in. Ossolińskich — Wydawnictwo,
1982), p. 15.
46. Harshaw, Secular Polysystem, in Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1993, 33–38).
47. B. S., ‘Czy inteligencja żydowska oddaliła się od narodu. Artykuł dyskusyjny’, Nasz Przegląd, 29
(1929), 7.
48. Bystroń, Publiczność literacka, p. 97.
49. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Rozsiani i rozrzuceni Szolem Alejchema w Warszawie (1905 i 1910)’, Pamiętnik
Teatralny, 1–4 (1992), 253–72.
50. Szulem Alejchem, Muzykant, trans. by H. Lew (Warsaw: Nakład Hieronima Cohna, 1900).
51. The name of Naftali Herz Prywes (1886–1968) can be found in one of the genealogical internet
sources, while the name of Maurycy Kohn is listed in the works by Rafał Żebrowski on the
Warsaw Jewish community. The Prywes family was one of the renowned Warsaw merchant
families; its literary portrait is The Family Muscat by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
52. J. Sławiński, ‘Odbiór i odbiorca w procesie historycznoliterackim’, in Publiczność literacka, ed. by
S. Żółkiewski and M. Hopfinger, p. 84.
53. Ibid., p. 85.
54. H. Lew, ‘O godność prasy’, Izraelita, 49 (1898), 515.
55. J. Ohr, Polszczyzna w żargonie żydowskim (Warsaw, 1905). On this study, cf. M. Brzezina,
‘Zapomniana praca o wpływach polskich w jidysz’, Zeszyty Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, vol. 87:
Linguistic Works (Krakow, 1988).
56. Cf. J. Ohr, ‘Wstęp’, in Miliony. Powieść giełdowa w liścikach (Warsaw: Druk. A. T. Jezierski,
1903), pp. 5–6. This type of motivation for translations was existed until 1939. Also the editors
of The Library of Jewish Writers declared that they addressed translations to Poles and the ‘vast
Jewish intelligentsia who takes advantage of the Polish language’: ‘Od Wydawnictwa’, in Szolem
Alejchem, Notatki komiwojażera (Warsaw: Nakładem Wydawnictwa “Safrus”, 1925), p. vii .
57. H. Lew, Żydowski humor (ludowy): Żydowscy dowcipnisie ludowi (Warsaw: Nakład H. Cohna, 1898);
idem, ‘Nasi krytycy o Firułkesie’, Izraelita, 30 (1898).
58. Sholem Aleichem’s play Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt was translated by Andrzej Marek as Rodzina
żydowska.
59. The translation into Esperanto was made by Ludwik Zamenhoff. Information about Belmont’s
translation comes from the works by the translator himself, but I have been unable to find the
text so far: L. Belmont, ‘Służalcy odrodzonego ghetta’, 8.
60. Szalom Alejchem, ‘Esterka’, trans. by M. Koren, Nowy Dziennik, 79 (1921).
61. Szalom Alejchem, ‘Haman i jego córki’, trans. by L. Herbst, Nowy Dziennik, 64–66 (1939).
62. Szolem Alejchem, ‘Rajskie jabłuszko’, trans. by S. Dykman, Chwila, 6299–6300 (1936), 9.
63. Szalom Alejchem, ‘Esrog’, trans. by Z. Tamar, Chwila, 3082 (1927).
64. Kanfer, ‘Szolem Alejchem’.
65. Jakub Appenszlak, ‘Szolem Alejchem: Z okazji 50-lecia twórczości’, Nasz Przegląd, 352 (1933),
11.
66. Belmont, ‘Służalcy odrodzonego ghetta’.
67. I have written more about Mojżesz Kanfer in the article ‘Mojżesz Kanfer a teatr jidysz’, in Teatr
żydowski w Krakowie, ed. by J. Michalik and E. Prokop-Janiec (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka,
1995), pp. 125 — 50
68. Mojżesz Kanfer, ‘Ostatnie dzieło Szalom Alejchema’, Chwila, 1846 (1924); ‘Z teatru żydowskiego.
Tojwie Mleczarz. Sztuka ludowa w 3 aktach Szolem Alejchema’, Nowy Dziennik, 8 (1927); Mojżesz
Kanfer, ‘Problemy literatury żydowskiej’, Chwila, 3563 (1929), 7–8 and 3572 (1929), 7–8; ‘W
piętnastolecie śmierci Szaloma Alejchema’, Nowy Dziennik, 134 (1931), 8; ‘Nieśmiertelny
humorysta duszy żydowskiej: W 50-lecie twórczości Szaloma Alejchema’, Nowy Dziennik,
2 (1934), 6; ‘Morris Schwartz jako Tewje Mleczarz’, Nowy Dziennik, 356 (1935); ‘Wieczory
teatralne. Hocmach redivivus. Błądzące gwiazdy’, Nowy Dziennik, 103 (1939).
69. ‘Z teatru, literatury i sztuki’, Nowy Dziennik, 122 (1937).
70. Mojżesz Kanfer, ‘W piętnastolecie śmierci Szaloma Alejchema’, Nowy Dziennik, 134 (1931), 8.
71. Saul Wagman, ‘W siódmą rocznicę śmierci Szolem Alejchema’, Nasz Przegląd, 34 (1923);
idem, ‘Dobosz radości’, Nasz Przegląd, 193 (1933). He also published in the press translations
of miniatures from the cycle ‘Kwiaty’, Nasz Przegląd, 34 (1923) and ‘Pojęki’, Nasz Przegląd, 352
(1933), 12.
72. It is worth mentioning that Sholem Aleichem’s short stories were adapted for the purpose of
school performances, and special Sholem Aleichem exhibitions of children’s drawings, town
models, and protagonist puppets were organized. Cf. Sholem-Aleykhem oysshtelung fun di yidish-
vetlekhe shuln (Warsaw: Tsisho, 1937). Adaptations of the writer’s short stories for school purposes
were prepared, for example, by Shloyme Bastomski: Der farshterter peysekh (Vilna: Naye Yidishe
Folksshul, 1927); Der zeyger (Vilna: Naye Yidishe Folksshul, 1938).
73. See also F. Istner, ‘Błądzące gwiazdy’, Chwila, 3692 (1929), 8.
74. R. Brandstaetter, ‘Kasrylewka’, in Brandstaetter, Królestwo trzeciej świątyni (Warsaw: Grafia,
1934), p. 21.
CHAPTER 4
Y
Soviet Sholem Aleichem

Gennady Estraikh
Students of Soviet Jewish intellectual life have often been more interested in
Yiddish-speaking culture, paying less attention to Jewish cultural life in Russian. To
a considerable degree, this state of affairs mirrors the official Soviet understanding
of Jewishness, according to which Yiddish, the language of the Jewish toiling
masses, was the only ‘appropriate’ — by the logic of Soviet nationalities policies —
language for the activities of the Jewish population. Russian Jewish culture provoked
suspicion of being a concealed effort to preserve the durability of the Jewish nation
and also ref lected Soviet ideologists’ aversion to hyphenized cultures, such as
Russian-Jewish or Russian-Ukrainian ones. At the same time, Russian translations
from Yiddish did not fall under the category of Russian-Jewish literature, being
shelf-marked as representations of a literature written in one of the Soviet ‘languages
of inter-ethnic communication’. In the thematically compartmentalized Soviet
literary world, particularly under the auspices of the Writers’ Union established in
1934, such ‘representations’ had broader leeway for specifically Jewish topics than
works originally written in Russian.
The Communist Party’s Jewish sections (1918–30), whose original raison d’être
was ‘to translate Communism into Yiddish for the benefit of those who could not
receive its message in Russian’,1 acted as the watchdog for Jewish-related issues
and spared no effort to suppress non-Yiddish forms of Jewish cultural activities.
The majority of Yiddish-speaking communists hailed from various Jewish political
currents and brought from them ‘militant Yiddishism, though dyed in Soviet
ideology’.2 They were instrumental in closing down independent Russian-Jewish
organizations that endured in the first years after the revolution.3 For all that,
the Jewish sections never managed to monopolize the whole terrain of Jewish
cultural activities, though their functionaries sought to officiate as (to borrow
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetic lines) ‘a commissar | with a decree | to lean over
the thought of the age’.4 Full monopolization of the Jewish cultural terrain would
essentially have meant introduction of cultural autonomy, most notably in the field
of education, which was, indeed, the dream of many Jewish activists, particularly
of the Bundist vintage. However, Lenin considered cultural-national autonomy
‘absolutely impermissible’5 and, as a result, education and the majority of other key
domains of cultural activity remained under the direct control of the overall state
apparatus.
Soviet Sholem Aleichem 63
Apart from the Jewish sections that craved for hegemony in all areas of Jewish
life, the Soviet apparatus had alternative, less dogmatic, and more down-to-
earth constituents, such as, from 1924, the Committee for the Rural Placement
of Jewish Labourers and, as the committee’s ostensibly non-governmental twin,
the Organization for the Rural Placement of Jewish Labourers. While the Jewish
sections enjoyed camaraderie with similar subdivisions of foreign communist
parties, the other parts of the Soviet apparatus for Jewish affairs could deal with
non- or even anti-communist circles. In addition, Jewish-related cultural activities,
notably publication of translations from Yiddish, often had nothing to do with the
specifically Jewish bureaucracy. This was particularly characteristic of private and
cooperative publishing houses, which from the end of 1921 could function in the
relatively liberal climate of the New Economic Policy (NEP), playing a particularly
momentous role in producing Russian translations from various languages.6
This essay analyses the role of translations in the process of domestication and
canonization of Sholem Aleichem in the Soviet Union.
Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish

During the First World War, the Russian military censorship had almost completely
paralysed production of books and periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish. In addition,
Warsaw and Vilna, the main centres of Yiddish publishing in imperial Russia, had
been cut off by the frontlines and, later, post-imperial borders. The few Yiddish
private publishing houses, which emerged around 1917, went out of business in the
first couple of years after the revolution and did not revive during the NEP.7 First
of all, Yiddish books, especially middle- and high-brow literature, had limited
demand. Secondly, and more importantly, publishing was one of the domains, on
which the Jewish communists kept their close watch, even if some of the publishing
houses were organized as cooperative enterprises and officially did not belong to
the Jewish sections. One such outlet emerged following the Bolshevization of the
Kultur-Lige (Culture League), which formed and matured during the years of
Ukrainian independence as a successful network of Yiddish cultural organizations.
Until 1931, when cooperative and private publishing was entirely phased out, the
Kultur-Lige cooperative publishing house functioned as the leading Soviet producer
of Yiddish books, including books by Sholem Aleichem.8
The titles of Yiddish books, which came out in early Soviet Russia, Ukraine,
and Belorussia, indicate that works by Sholem Aleichem were published predomi-
nantly for children, especially as he wrote for children even before this genre
of Yiddish literature began to develop on a considerable scale in the 1910s.9 In
Soviet publications, Sholem Aleichem’s texts had to be carefully selected and even
adapted for the younger readers, who did not (and were not supposed to) receive
any religious education and therefore had problems with understanding references
to religious rituals and texts. Moreover, even Soviet Yiddish intellectuals educated
after the revolution often could not understand in full writings by authors of older
generations.10
Infantilization of Sholem Aleichem also ref lected the attitude that prevailed
among Jewish activists, notably Moyshe Litvakov who from 1921 edited the Jewish
64 Gennady Estraikh
sections’ central Yiddish daily Der Emes (Truth) and, generally, dominated the field
of Soviet Yiddish literary criticism. In May 1916, while an obituary note published
in The New York Times praised the writer who ‘advised and appealed, but [...] did
not command or bind’, Litvakov, then a Jewish nationalist Marxist, wrote in the
Russian-language newspaper Kievskaia mysl’ (Kiev Thought) that Sholem Aleichem’s
literary legacy represented ‘a blind alley’ rather than a ‘programme’. The Marxist
critic believed that it was Y. L. Peretz who pioneered modern Yiddish literary
style, while neither Mendele Moykher-Sforim, with his ‘careless language’, nor
Sholem Aleichem, ‘choked with anthropological material’, could serve as models
for progressive writers.11 Litvakov and other like-minded critics theorized that
Sholem Aleichem did not have a world-view (velt-anshoyung). Instead, his creativity
was based on world-perception (velt-emfindung). As a result, his writings did not lead in
any direction, but were a tabula rasa, which ideologists of various affiliations could
use as a foundation for their thought constructions.12 Moyshe Rafes, a leader of the
Bund (and later a high-ranking Soviet official), emphasized in 1917 that Sholem
Aleichem did not belong to the culture of the working class.13
In December 1924, the inf luential Soviet literary critic A. Lezhnev (Abram
Gorelik), writing in Pravda, ridiculed the ‘exotic’ style of the ‘classic Yiddish story’,
arguing that it was characterized by such traits as
facetiousness (pribautnichestvo), wittiness, shallow anecdote, hypocritical
idealization of the petty bourgeoisie, and lack of taste. The old generation of
Yiddish writers were short of self-respect. Try to develop slightly the contours
of portrayals by Sholem Aleichem, add to them some caricature details — and
you get a typical judeophobic anecdote about ‘Yids’.14
While Lezhnev usually did not broach problems of Yiddish literature, Isaac
Nusinov pursued two careers — in general and Yiddish literary scholarship and
criticism. Nusinov disagreed with Lezhnev (especially as the two critics belonged
to bitterly competing literary cliques) and described Sholem Aleichem as ‘the great
Jewish humorist’ who shared the fate of other underestimated and misinterpreted
humorists, notably Dickens, Mark Twain, Molière, and Beaumarchais. He parti-
cularly praised Sholem Aleichem for bringing such characters as Motl the cantor’s
son into literature which had previously ignored children.15
In 1932, Nusinov chastised Litvakov in the tone-setting Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia
for describing Sholem Aleichem’s works as useless for purposes of class struggle.16At
the same time, however, Nusinov also contended, in the same Literary Encyclopaedia,
that while ‘Mendele Moykher-Sforim was [...] an enlightener, he wakened the
masses, sought to elevate them to his ideas’, ‘Sholem Aleichem did not try to bring
the masses from their medieval existence to the new capitalist life. Rather, he told
us about the reaction of society and individuals to the encounter of both social
systems’.17 Characteristically, the Jewish Commissariat at Lenin’s government did
not select Sholem Aleichem’s writings for its first publishing projects. Rather, the
commissariat rushed to reissue in 1918 Di klyatshe (The Nag), Mendele Moykher-
Sforim’s allegory on the anti-Jewish persecution in Russia.18
Apart from putting to use Sholem Aleichem’s stories for (or about) children,
Soviet ideologists — notably Yekhezkel Dobrushin, the ‘master of correcting
Sholem Aleichem’19 — could make the popular Yiddish author harmless by using
his writings for theatre and film, and turning them into cultural products which
ref lected the new attitude to Jewish life. Dobrushin explained that ‘the theatrical
art knew how to utilize the distance, which had separated us from the time of
Sholem Aleichem’.20 The Polish Yiddish writer Hersh David Nomberg, who
visited the Soviet Union in 1926, noticed that Sholem Aleichem’s ‘friendly way of
laughing at the old Jewish mode of life’ had transmogrified into ‘a harlequinade or
circus clownery’.21 According to the historian of cinema Miron Chernenko, Soviet
film-makers usually found in Sholem Aleichem’s writings material for sentimental-
cum-paternalist portrayals of Jews as oppressed, broken-spirited people, unable to
resist their servile destiny.22 Sholem Aleichem could be turned into a fighter too.
An American journalist, who visited the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, realized
that Moscow theatregoers encountered not the Sholem Aleichem he knew: the
Yiddish writer ‘emerged as prophet not only of a crumbling order, but also of the
new life’.23
While Sholem Aleichem could be doctored in Soviet theatrical and cinematographic
productions, his writings continued to be deemed ‘dangerous’ for Yiddish readers,
who still carried in themselves seeds — or, in Dobrushin’s words, dos sholem-
aleykhemishe24 — of traditional life. Dobrushin and his like, who generally believed
in the identity-shaping power of literature, assumed that Sholem Aleichem’s novels,
stories, and plays could strike a chord with such Jews, reinforcing their Yiddishkayt
and hindering their Sovietization. As Nusinov put it, although Sholem Aleichem
showed the decline of the social basis of the shtetl, his milkmen and cantor’s sons
continued to live as literary embodiments of eternal Jewishness.25 In addition, it was
worrying that Sholem Aleichem and other pre-1917 authors continued to be much
more popular than Soviet Yiddish authors. The latter produced mostly poetry,
while readers, especially Yiddish-speaking library borrowers, tended to look for
novels and stories.26
In the early 1930s, when the screw-tightening process had encompassed all
domains of Soviet life, works by Sholem Aleichem and other pre-and-non-
Soviet Yiddish writers began to disappear from Soviet Yiddish school curricula.
Significantly, by that time Soviet Yiddish prose writing had already taken off
and was providing a certain amount of reading material. The 1933 reader for the
seventh grade of Yiddish schools contained only one text by a non-Soviet Yiddish
writer — an excerpt from Itshe Meir Vaysnberg’s story ‘A Shtetl’, whereas a similar
reader, published in 1928, included stories and poems by such pre-1917 and non-
Soviet authors as Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Asch, David
Eynhorn, and Hersh David Nomberg, and even a translation of Homer’s Iliad by
Max Weinreich.27 In 1932, the journalist of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts
(Forward) Mendel Osherowitch visited the Soviet Union, where one of his sisters, a
teacher at a Yiddish school, explained him: ‘We don’t care about bourgeois Yiddish
literature. We believe that literature has to serve the revolutionary proletariat and
we don’t recognize any other literature’.28
At the same time, Soviet ideologists believed that acculturated Jews as well as
non-Jews could hardly be affected by Sholem Aleichem’s portrayals of Jewish life
66 Gennady Estraikh
and therefore did not see any serious problems with Russian translations of his
works. Moreover, Sholem Aleichem’s gallery of literary characters, most notably
such ne’er-do-wells as Menakhem-Mendl and the brother of Motl the cantor’s son,
were regarded as a useful propaganda tool, because they illustrated the decline of
the economy in the Pale of Jewish Settlement and, thus, countered the accusations
that the Soviet regime had ruined Jewish life in Russia.29
The Jubilee of 1926

Interest in Sholem Aleichem’s Russian renditions became stronger in 1926, when
the tenth anniversary of his death was commemorated in many places of the Soviet
Union. Jacob Lestschinsky, a social scientist and the head of the Berlin bureau of
Forverts, found it amusing that Sholem Aleichem’s yortsayt, anniversary of death, was
celebrated as a ‘great people’s holiday’, especially as the object of glorification was,
Lestschinsky ironized, ‘the same petty-bourgeois reactionary Sholem Aleichem
who had already been neglected and chucked into the attic, because communists
deemed him inappropriate’.30 Indeed, some Soviet Yiddish proletarian writers were
unhappy with the pomp around the jubilee of Sholem Aleichem, especially as
similar anniversaries of ideologically more acceptable Yiddish authors, such as the
American sweatshop poets Joseph Bovshover and David Edelstadt, remained low-
key events.31
The tradition of marking anniversaries of Jewish writers’ deaths is sometimes
associated with the Jewish practice of recalling great individuals at the time of their
yortsayt, and not on their birthday. Perhaps more importantly, public observance of
anniversaries of Jewish writers’ death had a Russian model: in the country with
no freedom of assembly, secular underground democratic circles widely employed
the panikhida, or the Russian Orthodox office for the dead, as a form of public
ceremonies.32 In November 1886, a 1,000-man demonstration at the Volkovo
Cemetery in St Petersburg commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
death of the literary critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov.33 In November 1911, the first
anniversary of the death of Lev Tolstoy, students across the country called a one-day
strike in memory of the writer and for the next five years the date was observed
with either a strike or a memorial service.34 Solomon Mikhoels, later director of the
Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, was expelled from the Kiev Commerce Institute
for his participation in one of the commemorations in 1911.35 Meanwhile, the
incidence and scale of celebrations marking birth anniversaries rose significantly
after the centennial of Alexander Pushkin’s birth in 1899 and reached their climax
after 1907.36 Russian Jewish circles also became affected by the ‘jubilee mania’.
In the autumn of 1908, admirers of Sholem Aleichem honoured the twenty-fifth
anniversary of his first literary publication and, in the beginning of 1909, his fiftieth
birthday by a fundraising campaign for reclaiming his copyrights from publishers.
At the same time, numerous jubilee articles appeared in the Yiddish press.37
In September 1908, Vladimir Lenin wrote an article on the occasion of Lev
Tolstoy’s eightieth anniversary, ‘Lev Tolstoy as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution’,
which after the revolution inadvertently protected the writer’s legacy from those
hot-headed communist who advocated wholesale rejection of bourgeois culture.

The Bolsheviks — ‘a mass Party of backward workers led by parvenu bureaucrats’38
— had, among their ‘bureaucrats’, inf luential intellectuals who believed in the
selective continuation, rather than complete renewal, of cultural traditions. In 1920,
Soviet state-sponsored events marked the tenth anniversary of Lev Tolstoy’s death,
although militant communist critics continued to see him as a reactionary writer.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s centennial jubilee in 1921 also triggered discussions about the
pre-revolutionary literary legacy and its role in Soviet society. In Yiddish circles,
the tenth anniversary of Peretz’s death, in 1925, generated a number of articles with
literary and ideological appraisals of Peretz’s writings. No doubt, former activists of
the Kiev Kultur-Lige played an important role in initiating the Peretz campaign.
In 1926, the decision of the Ukrainian People’s Commissariat for Education to
mark the anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s death was one of the first steps to Soviet
canonization of the Yiddish writer. In Moscow, the anniversary was honoured by a
gala occasion with Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Education, as the
key speaker, and Vladimir Mayakovsky and many other cultural celebrities among
the guests.39 Libraries, schools, and streets were named after Sholem Aleichem in
Pereyaslav, the writer’s birthplace, and in Belaya Tserkov, where he used to live in
the 1880s. In Minsk and other towns of Belorussia, a whole week, 13–21 May, was
allocated for meetings, concerts, and literary parties devoted to Sholem Aleichem.
Iosif Adamovich, head of the Belorussian government, Anton Balitskii, Belorussia’s
Commissar for Education, and Yanka Kupala, the People’s Writer (it was his
honorific title), expressed — ten years after Sholem Aleichem’s death! — their deep
condolence to the Jews over the loss of the great writer, but emphasized that thanks
to the unprecedented development of Jewish culture there was no funereal mood in
the republic, where Yiddish was one of the four official languages. The anniversary
was also marked in such cities as Kiev and Leningrad. Addressing a group of
Moscow students, Litvakov admitted that Sholem Aleichem had become a popular
author, primarily because his literary heroes presented a gallery of convincing
Jewish types of pre-revolutionary society.40
The Yiddish writer Avrom Veviorka, who did not belong to admirers of Sholem
Aleichem (his 1931 book Revision would question Sholem Aleichem’s importance),41
was among those who had to acknowledge the writer’s growing acclaim:
Now it is clear, without doubt, that Sholem Aleichem is destined to live longer
than all our classic writers. On our literary and artistic horizon, we can see
balloons which recede and disappear, turning into diminishing points — these
balloons are Mendele and Peretz, and the wind carries them in an opposite
direction. The situation with Sholem Aleichem is different. He is becoming
increasingly visible and prominent. [...]
With Sholem Aleichem we, generally, witnessed such a curious thing that
in the booming period of his creativity people did not recognize his greatness.
The ‘official’ recognition of his greatness began to develop only later.42
According to Veviorka, Sholem Aleichem’s ‘ideological poverty and nakedness’
were, in fact, beneficial for his popularity in Soviet society. It made him ideologically
more acceptable than Mendele and Peretz. The latter was a particularly problematic
68 Gennady Estraikh
figure for Soviet Jewish activists. First of all, he was associated with Poland rather
than with the territories that became Soviet. In addition, as Nusinov explained it,
communists were happy ‘to listen to the artist of the past’, but they would ‘fight
every trace of ideology of the past if this trace could delay even one step to our
communist future’ and, therefore, they would not bother with any trouble-making
artist, ‘including even Peretz’ (emphasis in original). According to Nusinov, only some
part of Peretz’s writings could be incorporated in the cultural legacy of Soviet Jews,
whereas his essays were better suited for Jewish nationalists and socialists.43
Aron Gurshteyn, who, like Nusinov, was known as both Yiddish and generally
Soviet literary theorist, echoed Veviorka’s observation about the rising profile of
Sholem Aleichem:
Sholem Aleichem — a merry-maker and jester, an author of funny anecdotes
— has left far behind him other ‘moulders of opinion’ in Jewish circles and is
being transformed into one of the most significant Jewish writers. A progressive
Jewish mindset recognizes the broad social context that appears behind
the contours of the anecdotes created by the writer, who comprehensively
portrayed the peculiarities and social features of the Jewish petty bourgeois
mainstream of his time. This rise of the writer is taking place virtually before
our eyes, because the revolution had particularly graphically emphasized and
even overemphasized the social groundlessness of the Jewish petty bourgeois
life style [...].44
Gurshteyn wrote it in his review of a new Russian rendition of Motl the Cantor’s
Son. He praised the translator, B. I. Marshak, for his attention to detail, but, at the
same time, he regretted the loss of many hallmarks of Sholem Aleichem’s literary
style and hoped that one day this style would be recreated in translations. In fact,
this objective was never to be fully achieved.45
Translations and Translators

The situation in Russian-language publishing differed significantly from the
situation in Yiddish publishing, because Russian editors could ignore — or even be
unaware of — discussions about the validity of Sholem Aleichem’s writings in Soviet
society. In the 1920s, several Russian-language publishers, owned by the state or
cooperative shareholders, began to release translations of Sholem Aleichem’s novels
and other works, only a few of which were marketed as children’s literature. Among
the early publications were reprints of pre-1917 translations, usually by Yulius
Pinus (1884-?), who in 1910–13 was the main translator of multi-volume editions
of works by Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and Peretz. A medical
student at the Moscow University and a Jewish activist, he was encouraged by the
historian and folklorist Peysekh Marek to turn to translating Yiddish authors for
the publishing house Sovremennye Problemy (Contemporary Problems) owned by
the ( Jewish) brothers Stolyar. Sholem Aleichem regularly corresponded with Pinus
and actively participated in editing the translations for the eight-volume Sobranie
sochinenii (Collected Works). In particular, he insisted on deleting many words and
phrases that were known to Sholem Aleichem’s target audience, but could puzzle a
Russian-speaking reader.46 Interestingly, decades later a similar strategy of erasing
or glossing Jewish realia was pursued by Isaac Bashevis Singer, when he worked
with translators of his writings into English.47
The Sovremennye Problemy was one of the private publishing houses that
endured in Moscow until the end of the 1920s. In 1925, it put out a volume which
contained several translations by Yulius Pinus. The volume was entitled Skvoz´
slezy (Through Tears) — an allusion to the Maxim Gorky’s often-quoted charac-
terization of Sholem Aleichem’s humour as ‘laughter through tears’. (This phrase
had been coined initially by Alexander Pushkin for Nikolai Gogol’s satire, but
parallels between Gogol and Sholem Aleichem were repeated ad nauseam by Yiddish
and Russian critics.)48 The editor of the 1925 volume, Andrei Sobol, a popular
Russian-language writer, shortly chaired the Moscow-based Sholem Aleichem
Yiddish theatre troupe, which was designed as a realist answer to the avant-gardism
of the Yiddish Chamber Theatre, known from 1924 as the GOSET, or State Yiddish
Theatre.49 In his introduction, Sobol (who committed suicide next year) wrote, in
the spirit of the time, that Sholem Aleichem died ‘on the eve of the new construction
work’ (i.e. the revolution), which ‘would somehow have affected him as well’.50
The idea that Sholem Aleichem would have certainly been on the side of
communism became one the motifs of Soviet literary mythology. In 1928, the
Ukrainian journal Kino (Cinema) contended that the writer would have been happy
to see the achievements of the Soviet nationality politics ‘if he had the luck to see
the national and social liberation, for which he hoped against hope’.51 Four decades
later, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow Yiddish journal Sovetish heymland (Soviet
Homeland) suggested that, if Sholem Aleichem had lived in the 1960s, he would
have written about collective farms and other contemporary Soviet settings.52
In 1926–27, the Moscow-and-Leningrad-based publishing house Zemlia i Fabrika
(Land and Factory), the largest non-state publisher in the country,53 produced two
volumes of Sholem Aleichem’s Izbrannye sochineniia (Selected Works), edited by
Isaac Babel. The translator, Semen Gekht (1903–63), was considered to be a writer
of Babel’s literary school. According to Efraim Sicher, Sholem Aleichem ‘always
remained close to Babel’s heart’. Thus, Babel wrote subtitles for the Soviet silent
film Jewish Luck (1925), which was an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem-
Mendl stories, and Babel’s script based on Sholem Aleichem’s novel Wandering Stars
was published in 1926.54 The film came out in 1927, but no print of it survives.
Judging by the script, Babel had reworked the ‘thankless material’ of the original
novel, turning its protagonists into revolutionaries.55 Babel’s archive contained his
translations of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, and intertextual links between Babel’s
and Sholem Aleichem’s prose have been analysed elsewhere.56
In his introduction to the two-volume edition published in 1926–27, Babel
wrote that Sholem Aleichem’s characters presented ‘the parting babble (lepet) of
people who had failed to adjust their business, intellect, feeling and idiom to the
new forms of economic life’.57 A critical introduction, known among Russian
editors as a konvoi, or ‘safeguard’, was widely used in Soviet publishing as a way of
making permissible books by classic writers.58 In 1926, the Zemilia i Fabrika put
out Gekht’s translations of Sholem Aleichem’s stories Zakoldovannyi portnoi (The
Bewitched Tailor) and Shest’desiat shest’ (A Game of Sixty-Six), both of which
70 Gennady Estraikh
came out as separate pamphlets. Like many other translators, Gekht tended to omit
idiomatically or otherwise difficult parts of the text.59
The Zemlia i Fabrika publishing house emerged as a ‘state joint-stock cooperative’
at the Central Committee of the Trade Union of the Paper-Making Industry. Its
initiator was the Russian poet Vladimir Narbut, who headed the publishing house
until 1928, when he was replaced by the militant communist poet Ilya Ionov
(Bernshtein), and a year later by Lunacharsky, who by that time had been removed
from the government. Eventually, the publishing house turned into a subdivision of
the State Publishing House for Belles-Lettres. Ber (Yakov) Cherniak (1898–1955), an
editor on Zemlia i Fabrika in 1929–31, became one of the leading Soviet translators
of works by Sholem Aleichem and other Yiddish writers (such as David Bergelson,
M. Daniel, and Note Lurye) published in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, the longest list of Sholem Aleichem’s Russian
renditions belonged to the Moscow publishing house Puchina (Dark Depth), which
emerged as a private enterprise owned by a certain E. G. Minovitskaia. Among the
editors and translators, who played the central roles in the production of Puchina’s
Russian translations of Sholem Aleichem’s prose, were David Glikman (1874–1930),
Yakov Slonim (1883–1958), and Mikhail (Peysekh-Mendl) Shambadal (1891–1964).
Glikman, also known by his Shakespearian pseudonym Dukh Banko, or Ghost
of Banquo, began his career as a Russian journalist and playwright in pre-First
World War St Petersburg. In the translations from Yiddish released by Zemlia i
Fabrika and Puchina, Glikman usually acted as the editor, though sometimes he
also translated the works, most notably Sholem Aleichem’s Krovavaia shutka (Bloody
Joke), published twice, in 1928 and 1929, under the imprint of Puchina.60 Still, the
most prolific translators were Slonim and Shambadal.
Slonim’s first translations from Yiddish appeared no later than 1910.61 A
member of the Zionist Socialist (territorialist) party, he also was an activist of the
Obshchestvo remeslennogo truda (ORT), known in English as the Organization
for Rehabilitation through Training. So, his 1932 Russian pamphlet Kustar’ do i
posle Oktiabra (The Artisan before and after the October Revolution) can be seen as
a logical continuation of his involvement in the social transformation of the Jewish
population. Yet, his translations of Sholem Aleichem’s works became the main
trace left by him in the history of Jewish and Russian culture. In 1927–30, Puchina
published eight volumes of Slonim’s translations of Sholem Aleichem’s novels and
stories. Andrei Sobol edited one of the volumes; the other seven volumes were
edited by Glikman.
One of the collections of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Vyigryshnyi bilet (The
Winning Ticket, 1930), had two translators: Slonim and Shambadal. The latter
began his literary career as a journalist (in particular, he was a pioneer of radio
journalism) and a poet. In 1928, the State Publishing House released a small book
of his children’s Russian poems entitled Kak rebiata igrali v Krasnuiu armiiu (How
Children Played Red Army [Soldiers]). However, like Slonim, he made his name
as a translator from Yiddish. After The Winning Ticket, he translated three volumes
of Sholem Aleichem’s writings published by Puchina in 1929 and 1930.
An important outlet for translations from Yiddish emerged in Odessa. Apart from
three separate titles of Sholem Aleichem’s works produced in 1929–30, the Odessa-
based cooperative publishing house Kultura i Trud (Culture and Work) published
during the same two years his selected works in five volumes with an introduction
by Alexander Sukhov (1881–1938), once a prominent Menshevik and later a
professor of geography at Odessa university, also known as the author of the book
Iudaizm i khristianstvo ( Judaism and Christianity).62 According to Sukhov, Sholem
Aleichem’s stories about Tevye manifested the writer’s ‘total political helplessness’,
because the petty-bourgeois writer and his characters, people of ‘indistinct social
substance’, were unable to find a way out of the impasse of their miserable existence.
Yet he admitted that thanks to Sholem Aleichem’s talent, his portrayals of pre-1917
shtetl life would continue to have an artistic and historical value.63 In 1931, Kultura
i Trud published another two-volume selection of Sholem Aleichem’s writings
with an introduction by Isai Falkevich (1883–1937), a professor best known for his
works on jurisprudence and city planning. Behind all these publications stood the
veteran revolutionary and an established Russian-Jewish writer Naum Osipovich
(1870–1937).
In 1929, Kultura i Trud published a volume, Lykhi pryhody Menakhem-Mendelia
(Menakhem-Mendl’s Misfortunes), in Ukrainian. In general, beginning from 1928,
an increasing number of Sholem Aleichem’s works began to come out in Ukrainian.
The main translator was Efraim Raitsin (1903–69), a Ukrainian writer in his own
right. All in all, thirty Russian titles and twenty-seven titles in Ukrainian came out
in 1925–1930. Characteristically, the year 1930 saw only two new Russian books of
Sholem Aleichem’s translations, compared with eighteen Ukrainian titles. These
statistics ref lect the end of the NEP and its associated decline of private publishing,
including the disappearance of Puchina. As for the Ukrainian translations, they
came out under imprints of state-run publishing houses. The majority of Russian
titles published in the 1920s were ‘thick’ volumes that targeted a sort of a connoisseur
market and their print-run usually did not exceed 3,000–6,000 copies, though the
Bloody Joke was printed in 10,000 copies. At the same time, Ukrainian translations,
often pamphlet-size editions with a print-run of 20,000–30,000, were intended to
attract a broader readership.64
During the same period, only one book came out in Belorussian, in 1930,
Khlopchyk Motka (Motl the Cantor’s Son), translated by one of the founders of
Belorussian literature Zmitrok Byadulya (Shmuel Plavnik). His translation first
appeared in instalments in the newspaper Savetskaia Belarus’ (Soviet Belorussia)
in 1926. Byadulya was the speaker during the Sholem Aleichem conference at the
Institute of Belorussian Culture (from 1928, the Belorussian Academy of Sciences),
where he worked at the Yidish-vaysrusisher tashn-verterbukh (Yiddish-Belorussian
Pocket Dictionary), published in 1932.65
In the Canon
From the mid-1930s onwards, the Soviet literary canon incorporated many pre-
revolutionary writers. As the Pravda explained in its editorial of 8 August 1936,
‘great artists of the past belong to the toiling masses who inherited cultural treasures
of the previously existed classes’.66 In the second half of the 1930s, Sholem Aleichem
72 Gennady Estraikh
finally became ‘number one’ in the hierarchy of Yiddish classics. His works were
again broadly taught at various school levels of the Soviet Jewish educational
system. Characteristically, the library in Birobidzhan was named after Mendele
Moykher-Sforim when its construction began in 1936, but in 1940, when it finally
started functioning, the authorities decided to name it after Sholem Aleichem.67
Yiddish publications, not Russian ones, peaked in the 1930s. Most importantly,
in 1935–41 the Moscow Yiddish publishing house Der emes (Truth) produced
a fifteen-volume edition of Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre. The situation changed
after 1938, when the government began to close the national schools of diaspora
minorities outside the minority’s ‘titular’ territory. As a result, the whole Yiddish
educational system outside the Jewish Autonomous Region (Birobidzhan) had been
axed, and the number of institutions and individuals who would buy Yiddish books
declined precipitously.
In the meantime, two more jubilees, in 1936 and 1939, reinforced the top position
of Sholem Aleichem. On 12 May 1936, one day before the twentieth anniversary
of his death, a plaque appeared on the house in the Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav,
where the writer was born.68 Olga Loeff Rabinowitz, who visited the Soviet
Union in 1936, received 10,000 dollars as the royalty payment for her late husband’s
publications, which was an act of goodwill, because at that time the Soviet Union
did not recognize the international copyright convention and its publishing houses
usually produced foreign literature without permission and without payment.69
From the distance of seven or eight decades it is hard to gauge the exact weight
of various factors, which contributed to the final choice of Sholem Aleichem as the
foremost classic Yiddish writer. Yet, it is clear that the dominance of the critics and
writers of the so-called Kiev Group, such as David Bergelson, David Hofshteyn,
and Yekhezkel Dobrushin, who were rooted in pre-1917 literary traditions, over the
militant, anti-traditionalist proletarian literati (the majority of whom were either
marginalized or physically liquidated in the second half of the 1930s) played a very
significant or even crucial role in the process of canonization of ‘one of their own’.
Sholem Aleichem, who lived in Kiev until 1905, certainly reinforced the pedigree
of their literary circle, especially compared to the ‘fatherlessness’ of Minsk, the
stronghold of ideologists who advocated for proletarian Jewish culture.70
Strictly speaking, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, who did not ‘defect’ to America
and was buried in Odessa, where the All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Culture
was named after him, could be the only serious candidate for the top position in
the Soviet Yiddish literary hierarchy, though his writings were less well known
— and certainly less accessible — to the general reader than Sholem Aleichem’s
stories, novels, and plays. Characteristically, his books did not appear in Russian
translation during the first twenty-five years after the 1917 revolution. Nonetheless,
Shota Rustaveli’s Georgian national epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin arguably
was even less suitable for bedtime reading, but it did not stop Soviet ideologists
from welcoming the medieval writer to the Olympus of Soviet culture. In other
words, the popularity of Sholem Aleichem’s works, in original and translations, was
a significant, but not a decisive, determinant in the cultural environment nourished
by ideology.
Friendly relations between Maxim Gorky, the guru of the Soviet literary world,
and Sholem Aleichem became one of the most important contributing factors to the
reputation of the Yiddish writer. In 1937, portraits of Gorky and Sholem Aleichem
in the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair symbolized their belonging to the
same ideological and aesthetic league.71 Gorky’s letter to his Yiddish colleague
opened the volume of Sholem Aleichem’s Izbrannye sochineniia (Selected Works)
in Shambadal’s Russian translation, produced by the State Publishing House for
Belles-Lettres in 1937.
Sholem Aleichem’s eightieth birthday in 1939 was celebrated on a grand scale.72
In Kiev, thanks to the efforts of the Yiddish linguist Elye Spivak, who headed
the Jewish research unit at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the celebrations
transcended the borders of Yiddish intellectual circles.73 By the end of 1938,
republican and regional jubilee committees and commissions began to prepare
celebrations.74 The All-Union Sholem Aleichem Committee, chaired by Alexander
Fadeyev, Secretary-General of the Writers’ Union, conducted a meeting on 11
November 1938. Its members included such leading Yiddish writers as David
Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Itsik Fefer, Leyb Kvitko, David Hofshteyn, and Zelig
Akselrod, the critics Isaac Nusinov and Yekhezkel Dobrushin, the actors Solomon
Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin, and Sholem Aleichem’s brother Volf (Vevik)
Rabinovitsh. Also in attendance were representatives of the Russian, Ukrainian,
Belorussian, and Azerbaijani literatures, as well as Solomon Lozovsky, director of
the State Literature Publishing House.
The surname Lezhnev was also listed among the participants of the meeting, but
it was not Lezhnev-Gorelik who criticized Sholem Aleichem in 1924. The same
pseudonym (apparently inspired by the eponymous protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s
novel Rudin) had been chosen by Isai Altshuler, also a critic. Lezhnev-Gorelik had
been arrested as a ‘Trotskyist and terrorist’ and executed in February 1938. Many
committee members would sooner or later disappear in the Stalinist purge. Thus,
Lozovsky, Bergelson, Hofshteyn, Kvitko, Fefer, and Markish would be executed
on 12 August 1952 for their ‘anti-Soviet activities’ in the Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee. Much earlier, on 15 May 1939, the secret police would arrest Isaac
Babel, who also participated in the November 1938 meeting and even promised to
finish his Russian translation of Tevye the Dairyman by 1 February 1939. During the
meeting, Babel spoke about the difficulties of translating Sholem Aleichem’s works
(and, probably, trying to justify the delay in submitting his translation):
I reckon this writer has been generally terribly misinterpreted and distorted in
Russian and, therefore, the Russian reader has not the remotest conception of
him. Even the recent translations are imbued with such a vulgar Jewish accent
that we cannot speak about any equivalence with the original. One has to take
into consideration the sound-richness of his language. I work with his text and
can tell you: one has to write him in Russian. (Laughter).
I think that the comrades who know Sholem Aleichem in the original will
agree with me. Before starting my work I have re-read the existing translations
and can tell you that even those that are correct still don’t ref lect the spirit of
Sholem Aleichem. Instead of Sholem Aleichem’s magic we have some horrible
accent. It means that it’s not a simply task [to translate him].
74 Gennady Estraikh
According to Babel, Sholem Aleichem was ‘the funniest writer in the whole
world’, the writer who provoked ‘laughter combined with strong body movements’.
He listened to the reaction of Jewish audiences to readings of Sholem Aleichem’s
works in the original and usually heard cackling (gogotanie) rather than just
laughter.75 Quality of translation was one of the central topics discussed by the
committee. Bergelson suggested solving the problem of inadequate Russian
renditions by forming tandems of talented Russian and Yiddish writers. Markish
praised B. Marshak and David Volkenshteyn (the latter turned to Yiddish after a
successful debut in Russian) as the best translators.76
The committee discussed a variety of issues, including the logistics of opening
the Sholem Aleichem museum in Pereyaslav. Another important issue was the
re-evaluation of Sholem Aleichem’s humour. Fadeyev set the tone during the gala
event which took place on 19 April 1939 at the Pillar Hall of the House of the
Union, the traditional Moscow venue for important ceremonial gatherings. In his
short speech, the head of the Soviet literary guild emphasized that ‘Sholem Aleichem
found scathing words, full of disdain and sarcasm, aimed at the bourgeoisie and
plutocracy’.77 Irme Druker, a Yiddish writer and literary scholar, developed this
thesis in his analysis of Sholem Aleichem’s satire. According to Druker, both the
‘vulgar sociologist critics’ (as dogmatic simplifiers of Marxism were called in Soviet
parlance) and ‘bourgeois nationalist critics’ wrongly described Sholem Aleichem
as a ‘good-natured’ humorist. The former criticized his good nature, whereas the
latter praised him for it. However, in order to occupy a place in the Soviet literary
canon, the Yiddish writer had to be seen as a sharp critic of exploiters.78 Thus,
Bashevis Singer missed the point when twenty-five years later he tried to explain
to the American public the motivations for keeping the Yiddish writer in the Soviet
canon:
Among Sholem Aleichem’s characters, there are neither villains nor saints
[...]. The worries and difficulties connected with making a living, generally
overlooked or ignored in world literature, are his main topic. This is perhaps
the reason for the Marxists’ special fondness for his work. Despite all the twists
and turns of Soviet attitudes towards writers, he has always remained kosher.79
On 24–26 April 1939, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences convened a session
of its Social Sciences Department and devoted it to ‘the oeuvre of the classic of
Yiddish literature Sholem Aleichem’.80 Books in Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian,
and Belorussian came out in 1939. One of them was published in Kiev under the
title Mayn bruder Sholem Aleykhem (My Brother Sholem Aleichem), written by Volf
Rabinovitsh.81 Conveniently, 1939 was also the year of the 125th anniversary of
Taras Shevchenko’s birth, and Sholem Aleichem’s admiration of the Ukrainian poet
became one of the central topics of jubilee speeches and publications.82 At the same
time, Shevchenko’s jubilee (born 9 March 1814) and the eighteenth congress of
the Communist party (10–21 March 1939) forced to shift all events associated with
Sholem Aleichem’s eightieth anniversary to the second half of April.
Aron Gurshteyn, secretary of the All-Union Sholem Aleichem Committee,
wrote in the central newspaper Pravda that Sholem Aleichem became a household
name for all nations of the Soviet Union.
Fig. 4.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Moscow

photograph © Gennady Estraikh 2011
Sholem Aleichem’s literary characters had to face enormous challenges of

capitalist reality. But there was one great source of energy that fed Sholem
Aleichem’s inexhaustible optimism and belief in a better future. Sholem Alei-
chem was intimately linked with the people’s masses. [...] Sholem Aleichem’s
works bitterly condemn the social system based on exploration of one individual
by another. This is why the Jewish people have always loved Sholem Aleichem
more than all other writers.83
In March 1939, when the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre marked its twentieth
anniversary, Peretz Markish, whose plays were in the repertoire of the theatre,
praised the troupe for their turn to Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman. According
to Markish, this play gave the theatre the chance to
portray the aspiration of ordinary people in pre-revolutionary Russia to fight
for a different life, for freedom, for the people’s real friendship, which had been
gained as a result of the Great October revolution and reinforced thanks to the
victory of Leninist-Stalinist nationalities politics.84
The 1950s and Later

In the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, Sholem Aleichem anniversaries helped to revive
publications of Yiddish writers after the complete devastation of all Soviet Jewish
institutions in 1948–50. In 1956 numerous cultural events were dedicated to the
fortieth anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s death.85 In 1957, the Moscow publishing
house for children’s literature, Detgiz, produced a new Russian version of Motl
the Cantor’s Son, with a print-run of 50,000. The translator, Lev (Leyb) Goldberg
76 Gennady Estraikh
(1892–1955), was a member of a distinguished Yiddish literary family; his two

brothers played a visible role outside Russia: Menakhem Boreysho was a significant
American Yiddish writer; Abraham Goldberg edited the large-circulation daily
Haynt (Today) in pre-Second World War Warsaw. (As It happens I borrowed this
book at a children’s library in 1960 or 1961, and it became my first encounter with
Sholem Aleichem. It also gave my father a chance to explain to me who Sholem
Aleichem was and that the book was a translation from Yiddish, the language
spoken in our family.)
In 1959, Sholem Aleichem’s centenary helped to revive Yiddish publishing in the
Soviet Union by printing a collection of the Yiddish classic’s stories. The Foreign
Language Publishing House distributed an English translation of Sholem Alei-
chem’s The Bewitched Tailor. Many central, regional, and professional periodicals
published articles about Sholem Aleichem. A six-volume collection of Sholem
Aleichem’s works, translated into Russian, was issued in 225,000 copies in 1959–61.
The Ministry of Communications issued a postage stamp with his portrait.86 Boris
Sandler, a Yiddish writer of the post-Second World War generation, recalled how a
street in his Bessarabian hometown Belts was named after Sholem Aleichem in 1959.87
Two new multi-volume collections came out in 1971–74 and 1988. In general,
in the 1950s and later Soviet publishing houses printed scores of Sholem Aleichem’s
writings in translation into various languages. Thus, by the mid-1960s, forty-two
Ukrainian translations came out with a total print-run of over 700,000 copies.88
By that time, the combined list of all books by Sholem Aleichem published in
the Soviet Union listed over 500 titles in twenty languages with the total print-
run of over 6 million copies.89 For all that, the 1959 Yiddish volume was the last
publication produced in the Soviet Union in book form. From the 1960s to the
1990s, all other Yiddish publications of Sholem Aleichem’s works came out in the
journal Sovetish heymland or its supplements.
As early as the 1930s, the official image of imperial Russia had taken a different
form: the ‘prison house of nations’ (this catch phrase from a travelogue by the
nineteenth-century French writer Marquis de Custine was widely used in
revolutionary circles) began to be described as the country of ‘people’s friendship’.90
Friendship and mutual admiration encompassed only the toiling and progressive
parts of the population, and Sholem Aleichem became part of that official historical
narrative. The Soviet Ukrainian writer and functionary Mykola Bazhan wrote in
his introduction to the 1971–74 edition of Sholem Aleichem’s collected works:
Despite Russian Tsarism’s ferocious politics of oppression and [national]
discrimination, despite the chauvinism of the ruling circles of Tsarist Russia’s
landlords and bourgeoisie, the Russian people — thanks to their revolutionary
activities, their truth-seeking literature, their advanced culture, and the efforts
of their progressive personalities — strengthened the unity of all peoples of
Russia in their struggle for liberation. Sholem Aleichem sensed this powerful
process of unification and ref lected it in his writings.91
Bazhan also claimed that, although the Yiddish writer ‘was not a consistent revo-
lutionary’, he was familiar with Marxism and sympathized with young Jewish,
Russian, and Ukrainian revolutionaries.
The mini-industry that emerged in the 1920s around Sholem Aleichem-related

cultural activities continued to function during the last Soviet decades. Thus, Grigory
(Hersh) Remenik, the leading literary historian and critic of Sovetish heymland, was
a holder of two advanced Soviet academic degrees: kandidat of philological science
(1937) and doctor of philological science (1972), both on the strength of his Sholem
Aleichem research. (For sixteen years — a half of the period between the two
dissertation defences — he was incarcerated in the Gulag.) Remenik’s biography of
Sholem Aleichem came out in Russian in 1963 with a print-run of 10,000 copies.92
Academic or semi-academic works on the same topic were published by several
other Soviet literary specialists, most notably Moisei (Moyshe) Belenkii, the former
head of the Moscow Yiddish publishing house Der Emes. Although he wrote anti-
religious books and pamphlets (and defended a kandidat dissertation on this topic
in 1967), his real forte was Jewish book editing. The corpus of literature published
with Belenkii’s participation includes collections of Sholem-Aleichem’s works
and two books on Sholem-Aleichem.93 Artists such as Nathan Altman, Anatoly
(Tankhum) Kaplan, Mendl Gorshman, and Grigory (Hirsh) Inger illustrated
Sholem-Aleichem’s works.94 The biographical novel Sholem Aleichem by the Yiddish
writer Abram Kagan (Avrom Kahan) came out in book form in Russian in 1961
and in Ukrainian in 1963, while its original version was serialized in the journal
Sovetish heymland in 1974. Russian and, to a smaller degree, Ukrainian translations
of Sholem Aleichem played an important role in satisfying the cultural needs of
Soviet Jews, only a small minority of whom could read Yiddish.
During perestroika, Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye entered deeper into the general
Russian cultural mainstream. To a significant degree it happened thanks to the
new adaptation of this work by the playwright Grigory Gorin (Ofshteyn). His
play Pominal’naia molitva (A Prayer for the Dead), first staged in 1989 by the Moscow
Lenkom Theatre, became a high-profile cultural event of the perestroika period,
appeared as a TV version in 1993 (an earlier TV film, Tevye the Dairyman, was
produced in 1985), and was included in the repertoires of other Russian troupes. A
Prayer for the Dead, hardly a socialist realist cultural product, emphasized inter alia
the problems of uprootedness, which became central in the disintegrating Soviet
Union.
In December 2001, a Sholem Aleichem statue was unveiled a few blocks from the
Lenkom Theatre, in Malaya Bronnaya Street. The building of the former Moscow
State Yiddish Theatre is on the right of the monument, and the gate of the former
Polyakovs’, now Chabad Lubavitch, synagogue is directly visible from the bronze
statue. Tevye the Dairyman, now a household name, even became a Russian brand
of kosher dairy products sold also in non-kosher shops.95
The presence of Sholem Aleichem’s translations on the bookshelves of hundreds
of thousands of Soviet and post-Soviet Jews calls into question Yuri Slezkine’s
statement that Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Tevye [...] was of no use to the late Soviet
intellectuals, few of whom were curious about Judaism and virtually none of whom
had any interest in shtetl culture or Yiddish literature’.96 Numerous new Russian
renditions of Sholem Aleichem’s works, produced in the twenty-first century, make
this statement even more disputable. Moreover, Russian-speaking intellectuals
78 Gennady Estraikh
Fig. 4.2. The cheesecake bar ‘Tevye the Dairyman’ and the
1959-61 Russian collection of Sholem Aleichem’s works
constitute one of the most — or perhaps the most — significant cohort of contem-
porary readers of Sholem Aleichem’s works. Importantly, Russian translators
from Yiddish usually encountered fewer semantic and stylistic problems than
did translators into English, German, and other non-Slavic languages. For many
Russian-language readers the world of Sholem Aleichem’s characters still remains
less distant and alien than it does, say, for their English-language counterparts.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Zvi Y. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPUS, 1917–30
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 497.
2. Ibid., p. 342.
3. See, e.g., Arlen V. Blum, Evreiskii vopros pod sovetskoi tsenzuroi (St Petersburg: St Petersburg
Jewish University, 1996), pp. 28–63.
4. Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1975), p. 187.
5. Vladimir Lenin, ‘ “Cultural-National” Autonomy’, in his Collected Works, xix (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 503–07.
6. See, e.g., Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization,
1913–29 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 240.
7. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2005), pp. 42, 67; Gennady Estraikh, ‘Utopias and Cities of Kalman Zingman,
an Uprooted Yiddishist Dreamer’, East European Jewish Affairs, 36.1 (2006), 31–42.
8. Y. Meisel, ‘Yidishe farlag-arbet in Ukraine’, Komunistishe fon, 15 May 1924, p. 2; T. Draudin,
Ocherki izdatel’skogo dela v SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe sotsial’no-
ekonomicheskoe izdatel´stvo, 1934), p. 166.
9. Moyshe Olgin, ‘Af dem keyver fun Sholem Aleykhem’, Forverts, 15 May 1916, p. 5; Chone
Shmeruk, ‘Nokhem Stif, Mark Shagal un di yidishe kinder-literatur in Vilner Kletskin-farlag,
1916–1917’, Di Pen, 26 (September 1996), 1.
10. Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers, ed. by Mordechai Altshuler ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University,
1979), pp. 394–95; Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 95–96.
11. ‘Topic of the Times’, The New York Times, 18 May 1916, p. 10; Estraikh, In Harnesss, p. 56.
12. Yashe Bronshteyn, ‘Marksizm oder “ultra-marksizm” ’, Shtern, 9 (1927), 46–49.
13. Bund: Dokumenty i materialy, 1894–1921 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), p. 1068.
14. A. Lezhnev, ‘Bibliografiia’, Pravda, 3 December 1924, p. 7.
15. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Sholem-Aleikhem’. The Manuscript Department of the A. M. Gorky Institute
of World Literature, file 297–1-2. Motl the Cantor’s Son, translated by B. Marshak with an
introduction by Isaac Nusinov, was published in 1926 and reprinted in 1927, 1935, 1935, and 1939.
16. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Litvakov’, in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vi (Moscow: OGIZ, 1932), pp. 401–02.
17. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Evreiskaia literatura’, in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, iv (Moscow: Publishing
House of the Communist Academy, 1930), pp. 29–30.
18. Daniel Charney, ‘Tsu der kharakteristik fun der yidisher literatur inem ratnfarband’, Fraye shrift
farn yidishn sotsialistishn gedank, 6 (1929), 74; Pirsumim yehudiyim be-vrit ha-mo’atsot, ed. by Khone
Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1961), p. 193.
19. Hersh David Nomberg, Mayn rayze iber Rusland (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1929), p. 122.
20. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem alie: tsum zentn yortsayt’, Shtrom, 2 (1922), 61.
21. Nomberg, Mayn rayze iber Rusland, p. 120. For the grotesque and tragicomic presentations of
Sholem Aleichem’s works see, in particular, Solomon Mikhoels, ‘Tev’e-molochnik’, Sholom-
Aleikhem — pisatel’ i chelovek, ed. by Moisei Belenkii (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1984), p. 40;
Vladislav Ivanov, GOSET: politika i iskusstvo, 1919–1928 (Moscow: GITIS, 2007), pp. 93–100,
112.
22. Miron Chernenko, Krasnaia zvezda, zheltaia zvezda: kinematograficheskaia istoriia evreistva v Rossii,
1919–1999 (Vinnitsa: Globus-Press, 2001), pp. 15–16.
23. Leon Dennen, Where the Ghetto Ends: Jews in Soviet Russia (New York: A. H. King, 1934), p.
137.
24. Dobrushin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem alie’, p. 57.
25. See Nusinov, ‘Evreiskaia literatura’, p. 29.
26. See, e.g., Daniel Charney, ‘Vi halt es mit der yidisher literatur funem ratn-farband?’, Der Ufkum,
8–9 (1938), 17–21; Daniel Charney, ‘Far vos leyent men in sovet-Rusland yidishe klasiker mer
fun di yidish-sovetishe shrayber?’, Literarishe Bleter, 10 October 1930, p. 790; Leyb Bravarnik,
‘Vos hot men geleyent in Kiever Vintshevski-bibliotek in 1930 yor’, Di Royte Velt, 1.2 (1931),
220–21.
27. G. Yabrov, Literarishe khrestomatye mit eynike elementn fun literatur-teorye (Minsk: State Publishing
House of Belorussia, 1928); A. Holdes and F. Shames, Literarishe khrestomatye farn VII lernyor fun
der politekhnisher shul (Kharkov and Kiev: State Publishing House for National Minorities in
Ukraine, 1933).
28. Mendel Osherowitch, Vi mentshn lebn in sovet Rusland; ayndrukn fun a rayze (New York: n.p.,
1933), p. 97.
29. Nathan Chanin, Sovyet Rusland vi ikh hob ir gezen (New York: Veker, 1929), pp. 173–77.
30. Jacob Lestschinsky, ‘Vi lebt zikh itst di yidn in Rusland?’, Forverts, 26 September 1926, section
2, p. 1.
31. Itsik Fefer, ‘Ideolohichna borot’ba v evreiskii literaturi’, Krytyka, 12 (1930), 59–60.
32. Viacheslav E. Iakushkin, O Pushkine (Moscow: M. and S. Sabashnikovy, 1899), p. 99.
33. James H. Billinton, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (London: Temple
Smith, 1966), p. 412.
34. Susan K. Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 214.
35. Matvei Geizer, Solomon Mikhoels (Moscow: Prometei, 1990), p. 24.
36. Konstantin Tsimbaev, ‘Jubilee Mania in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
Russian Society’, Russian Studies in History, 47.2 (2008), 16.
80 Gennady Estraikh
37. See, e.g., Hillel Tseitlin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem: etlekhe verter far zayn yubiley’, Haynt, 11
September 1908, p. 2; Shmuel Niger, ‘Tsu Sholem-Aleykhems yubiley’, Der tog, 9 October 1908,
pp. 6–7; 16 October 1908, p. 6; Noah Prilutski, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem: tsum 25-yerikn yubileum’,
Teater-velt, 16 October 1908, pp. 5–9; 23 October 1908, pp. 4–8.
38. See Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (New York: Verso, 2001), p. 82.
39. See Gennady Estraikh, ‘Literature versus Territory: Soviet Jewish Cultural Life in the 1930s’,
East European Jewish Affairs, 33.1 (2003), 42–43.
40. ‘Sholem-Aleykhems tsenter yortsayt’, Shtern, 4 (1926), 66–67; ‘Der 10-ter yortsayt fun Sholem-
Aleykhem in Minsk’, Der Emes, 19 May 1926, p. 3; ‘Sholem-Aleykhem yortsayt in der provints’,
Der Emes, 25 May 1926, p. 3; A. Dibin, ‘A Sholem-Aleykhem ovnt ba di moskver yidishe
studentn’, Der Emes, 27 May 1926, p. 3; Lipe Reznik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems yortsayt in zayn
geburt-shtot’, Der Emes, 3 June 1926, pp. 2–3.
41. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 145.
42. Abraham Weviorka, ‘On a[n] idee: etlekhe bamerkungen vegn Sholem Aleykhemen’, Der Emes,
13 May 1926, p. 3.
43. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Peretses publitsistishe yerushe’, Di Royte Velt, 7 (1925), 28.
44. Aron Gurshteyn, ‘Sholom-Aleikhem. Malćhik Motl’, Pechat´ i revoliutsiia 2 (1927), 206.
45. See, e.g., Moyshe Dubinsky, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems frazeologizmen in der rusisher iberzetsung’,
Sovetish heymland, 1 (1968), 137–43; Moyshe Maydansky, ‘Tsu vayterdiker farfulkumung’, Sovetish
heymland, 11 (1968), 147–51; Abram Belov, ‘Kogda geroi Sholom-Aleikhema obíasniaiutsia na
iazyke Moldovanki’, Masterstvo perevoda (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1970), vii, 453–58. I could
not get any biographical information, or even the first name, of B. I. Marshak, who in the 1930s
emerged as one the principal Soviet translators of Yiddish prose. Presumably, he was the same
person who in 1928 wrote in the Kharkov-based journal for educators Ratnbildung about the state
of Yiddish publishing in the Soviet Union (‘Undzer farlag-arbet’, no. 3, pp. 25–29), co-edited the
Kiev-based Yiddish children’s journal Oktyaberl when it was launched in 1930, and authored the
documentary story ‘Viazoy ikh hob zikh geratevet’ in the 1943 collection Heymland (Moscow:
Der Emes, pp. 138–47), edited by Peretz Markish.
46. Max Erik, ‘Sholem Aleykhem un zayn iberzetser’, Tsaytshrift, 5 (1931), 79–88.
47. See, in particular, Anita Norich, ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer in America: The Translation Problem’,
Judaism, 44.2 (1995), 208–17.
48. Cf. ‘Sholem Aleichem is our Gogol’, in A. Litvin, ‘Far vos iz Sholem Aleykhem balibt ba di
masn?’, Forverts, 17 May 1916, p. 5; see also Joseph Sherman, ‘The Non-ref lecting Mirror:
Gogol’s Inf luence on Sholem Aleichem’, Essays in Poetics, 28 (2003), 101–23.
49. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 51.
50. Vladimir Khazan, ‘Evreiskii mir Andreia Sobolia v zerkale russkoi revoliutsii: materialy k
biografii pisatelia’, Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 godov i sud’ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva, ed. by Oleg
Budnitskii (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005), pp. 343, 344, 362, 363.
51. See Iu. Morozov and T. Derevianko, Evreiskie kinematografisty v Ukraine, 1917–1945 (Kiev: Dukh
i Litera, 2004), pp. 242–43.
52. Aron Vergelis, A Traveller’s Encounters: Speeches, Travel Notes, Interviews and Letters of a Jewish Poet
(Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1988), pp. 90–91.
53. Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of
Soviet Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 165.
54. Efraim Sicher, Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution: Writers and Artists between Hope
and Apostasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 75.
55. Vera Tarasova, ‘Babelevskaia transformatsiia romana Sholom-Aleikhema “Bluzhdaiuschie
zvezdy” ’, in Sbornik materialov pervoi molodezhnoi konferentsii SNG po iudaike, ed. by Matvei
Chlenov (Moscow: Evreiskoe nasledie, 1996), pp. 40–46; Chernenko, Krasnaia zvezda, zheltaia
zvezda, pp. 32–33.
56. Aleksandr Zholkovskii, ‘Roman s gonorarom: k teme “Babel’ i Sholom-Aleikhem” ’, Literaturnoe
obozrenie, 4 (1997), 43–54.
57. Sholem Aleichem, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, i (Moscow and Leningrad: Zemlia i Fabrika, 1926), p.
6. See also Maurice Friedberg, Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History (University Park:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 114.
58. Arlen V. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu totalńogo terrora, 1929–1953 (St Petersburg:
Akademicheckii proekt, 2000), p. 165.
59. Israel Serebriany, Sholom-Aleikhem i narodnoe tvorchestvo (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel´, 1959), pp.
133–34.
60. It was a significantly abridged translation of the original — see Leonid Katsis, ‘Vokrug “Fagota”
i “Egipetskoi marki” (k teme “Mandel´shtam i Sholem-Aleikhem”)’, Smert´ i bessmertie poeta, ed.
by M. Z. Vorob’eva and others (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2001), p. 75.
61. See obituary of Yakov Slonim in Folks-Shtime, 2 July 1958.
62. Saul Borovoi, Vospominaniia (Moscow and Jerusalem: Gesharim, 1993), p. 65.
63. Alexander Sukhov, ‘Predislovie’, in Sholem Aleichem, Tev’e i ego docheri (Odessa: Kultura i Trud,
1929), p. 12.
64. N. R., ‘Sholem-Aleykhem-iberzetsungen in sovetnfarband zint der oktober-revolyutsye’,
Tsaytshrift, 5 (1931), 88–91.
65. See also Israel Joshua Singer, Nay-Rusland: bilder fun a rayze (Vilna: B. Kletskin, 1928), p. 36.
66. Blium, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu totalńogo terrora, pp. 154–56.
67. Elena Sarashevskaia, ‘Dedushke evreiskoi literatury posviashchiaetsia’, Birobidzhaner Shtern, 12
January 2011.
68. ‘Pamiati evreiskogo pisatelia Sholom Aleikhema’, Pravda, 13 May 1936, p. 6.
69. Nepravednyi sud: poslednii stalinskii rasstrel, ed. by Vladimir Naumov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye
otnosheniia, 1994), p. 197.
70. See Mikhail Krutikov’s essay in this volume.
71. See Leo Kenig, ‘Di Sholem-Aleykhem-fayerung ba zey un ba undz’, Heymish, 3 (April 1959),
4.
72. See, e.g., Zachary M. Baker, ‘Yiddish in Form and Socialist in Context: The Observance of
Sholem Aleichem’s Eightieth Birthday in the Soviet Union’, YIVO Annual, 23 (1996), 209–31.
73. Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman, Af vegn un umvegn, iii (Tel Aviv: Y. L. Peretz, 1982), p. 175.
74. See, e.g., ‘Khronik’, Sovetishe literatur, 11 (1938), 143 and 12 (1938), 164.
75. ‘Protokol, stenogramma i perepiska po provedeniiu prazdnovaniia 80-letiia so dnia rozhdeniia
evreiskogo pisatelia Sholom Aleikhema’, Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI),
file 631–15–399, pp. 22, 26.
76. Ibid., p. 24.
77. Alexander Fadeyev, ‘Vecher pamiati Sholom-Aleikhema’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 April 1939, p. 3.
78. Irme Druker, ‘Satira v proizvedeniiakh Sholoma-Aleikhema’, in Sholom-Aleikhem, 1959–1939:
Biograficheskii ocherk i kriticheskie etiudy, ed. by Shloyme Bilov and Irme Druker (Kiev:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo natsionalńykh men´shinstv USSR, 1939), pp. 119–41.
79. Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘Sholem Aleichem: Spokesman for People’, The New York Times, 20
September 1964, p. xi.
80. See Biuleten´ sesii Viddilu suspilńykh nauk AN URSR, prysviachenoi tvorchosti klasyka ievreïs´koï
literatury Sholom Aleikhema, ed. by Elye Spivak (Kiev: Academy of Sciences, 1939).
81. A number of Russian publications c. 1939 are listed in Literatura o evreiakh na russkom iazyke,
1890–1949, ed. by Viktor Kelner and Dmitri Elyashevich (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt,
1995), pp. 484–85.
82. See, e.g., Marietta Shaginian, Sobranie sochinenii, v (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1957), pp. 31–32; Grigory Remenik, Sholom-Aleikhem: kritiko-biograficheskii ocherk (Moscow:
Goslitizdat, 1963), pp. 10–11.
83. Aron Gurshteyn, ‘Sholom-Aleikhem’, Pravda, 19 April 1939, p. 3.
84. Peretz Markish, ‘Dvadtsatiletie Goseta’, Pravda, 29 March 1939, p. 6.
85. Vsevolod Ivanov’s speech was published in Folks-Shtime, 19 May 1956; see also Itshok Katsnelson,
‘Di yidishe kultur-manifestatsye in Moskve’, Folks-Shtime, 29 May 1956.
86. Leon Shapiro, ‘Soviet Union’, American Jewish Year Book, 61 (1960), 261–62. In 1959, stamps
bearing a portrait of Sholem Aleichem were issued also in Israel and Romania. Bernard Isaacs, the
translator of The Bewitched Tailor, came to the Soviet Union from England. He was imprisoned
in the Gulag twice, for a total of about eight years — see Michael Durham, ‘Russians Wrong
about Briton who “Died in Stalin Camp” ’, Independent.co.uk, 6 September 1992.
87. Boris Sandler, Stupeni k chudu (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1988), pp. 3–8.
82 Gennady Estraikh
88. Maydansky, ‘Tsu vayterdiker farfulkumung’, p. 149.

89. Remenik, Sholom-Aleikhem, p. 3.
90. Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘ “Zanimatel’naia istoriia”: istoricheskii roman i sotsialisticheskii realizm’,
in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. by Hans Günther and Evgeny Dobrenko (St Petersburg:
Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), p. 887.
91. Mykola Bazhan, ‘Slovo svetloi very v cheloveka’, in Sholom-Aleikhem — pisatel’ i chelovek, ed. by
Moisei Belenkii (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1984), pp. 12, 18.
92. Remenik, Sholom-Aleikhem.
93. Sholom-Aleikhem — pisatel´ i chelovek, ed. by Moisei Belenkii (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel´, 1984);
Moisei Belenkii, Biografiia smekha: ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva Sholom-Aleikhema (Moscow: Khu-
dozhestvennaia literatura, 1991).
94. See, e.g., Musya Glants, ‘Jewish Artists in Russian Art: Painting and Sculpture in the Soviet
band Post-Soviet Eras’, in Jewish Life after the USSR, ed. by Zvi Y. Gitelman, Musya Glants and
Marshall I. Goldman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 233, 244.
95. See the cover story of the Moscow magazine Svoi biznes, October 2010.
96. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp.
347–48.
CHAPTER 5
Y
‘Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt’:

The Sovietization and Heroization of
Sholem Aleichem in the 1939 Jubilee Poems
Roland Gruschka
The Stalinist cultural policy of the 1930s had a positive effect on the standing of
Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre both in the official history of Yiddish literature and in
Soviet Yiddish cultural life.1 After this issue had been disputed for almost a decade,
Sholem Aleichem was finally canonized as a worthy precursor of Soviet literature in
general, honoured with an article in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia.2 Nothing is more
suitable to illustrate this career than the poems composed on Sholem Aleichem on
the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 1939, which was celebrated on a large scale
in the Soviet Union. These jubilee poems, which will be the focus of my chapter,
did not just create a ‘Sovietized’ image of the Yiddish classic author. Rather, they
communicated and popularized what one may call the official narrative of Sholem
Aleichem’s life and works.
Epic Revisionism
This official narrative emerged from the often fierce discussions among Soviet
Yiddish literary critics and scholars of the late 1920s and took its definite shape
after 1934 in the wake of a new general line which David Brandenberger and other
historians have recently termed ‘Epic Revisionism’.3 Under the slogans of ‘Soviet
patriotism’ and ‘friendship between the Soviet peoples’, the pre-revolutionary
cultural traditions of the Russians and, to a lesser extent, of a number of national
minorities were generously rehabilitated, albeit in a kitschy folklorist form
bereft of any religious and other elements labelled as ‘reactionary’. Authors such
as Lermontov and Pushkin were officially credited with a positive role in pre-
revolutionary history, even at the expense of historical consistency. Compared with
these aristocratic Russian classics, Sholem Aleichem seems to have been a slightly
easier object for revision. Nevertheless, Soviet Yiddish scholars took great pains
to reinterpret his life and works. As a rule, all facets of his biography regarded as
problematic were not completely swept under the carpet, but their implications
were denied or simply ignored. The main field of application for this official
narrative, however, was not so much the academy, but rather the state-sponsored,
84 Roland Gruschka
state-conducted and certified ‘culture for the masses’, for which such a narrative
had to be communicated and popularized. A popular culture needs heroes, real
heroes of f lesh and blood — all the more so in the late 1930s, when the Soviet
regime faced an increasingly unstable situation in international politics and tried to
prepare the peoples of its empire for future ordeals.4 As a result, Stalinist cultural
policy could not be satisfied with just placing the ‘immortal literary works’ above
the ideologically ‘backward’ author. And so Sholem Aleichem the man also became
a hero in Soviet Yiddish culture.
Sholem Aleichem’s suffering from tuberculosis, his hard struggle to make a
living as a writer, getting back the copyright to his works only in 1909, all allowed
the Soviet Yiddish critics to declare him a victim of capitalism.5 His temporary,
inherited wealth, his speculations on the Kiev stock market, and his bankruptcies
were either explained away or excused to such an extent that he was declared a mere
victim of fraudulent investment brokers.6
Sholem Aleichem’s commitment to Yiddish, his promotion of a modern
highbrow literature through the Folksbibliotek, and his defence of the whole
project against the Hebraists were universally praised.7 His own lifelong Hebraist
ambitions, however, were either downplayed or more or less restricted to his early
writings and declared a transitory stage he ultimately left behind.8 The de facto,
almost complete russification of Solomon Rabinovich, the private man behind the
persona Sholem Aleichem, seems to have been something of a blind spot in the
eyes the Soviet Yiddish critics, glimpsed only momentarily; for instance when they
dealt with Sholem Aleichem’s love for classic Russian literature, his attempts to be
translated into Russian, or his correspondence with Maxim Gorky.9
Sholem Aleichem’s f lirtations with Zionism, still in 1931 one of the key markers
used to denounce him as a ‘bourgeois’ writer,10 seem to be absent in later Soviet
publications, which is to say they were deliberately concealed. At the same time, the
Soviet critics shifted their focus to episodes suitable to credit Sholem Aleichem as
a worthy ally of the revolutionary movement, such as the nervous reactions of the
notoriously suspicious Tsarist censors to his novel Der mabl (‘The Deluge’) of 1907.11
Finally, Sholem Aleichem’s tragicomic humour of ‘laughter with tears’ was
reinterpreted as his siding with the losers of class society and earned him recognition
as a ‘bourgeois humanist’. His often-quoted bon mot lakhn iz gezunt, doktoyrim heysn
lakhn (‘Laughing is good for you, doctors prescribe laughter’) was declared a sign of
folksy, healthy optimism.12
Literary criticism proper also underwent substantial revision.13 Soviet Yiddish
scholars rediscovered the early works of Sholem Aleichem, which were still written
in the spirit of the Haskalah.14 First and foremost, the satiric ‘novel without a
romance’ Sender Blank un zayn gezindl (‘Sender Blank and His Household’; 1888) and
the acerbic play Yaknehoz, oder dos groyse berzenshpil (‘Yaknehoz, or: The Big Gamble
on the Stock Market’; 1894), which in the 1890s had displeased a number of Jewish
nouveaux riches in Kiev and Odessa and had provoked them to report it to the
censor, earned a great deal of praise.15 The Soviet critics stressed the continuity from
the sentimentalism and satire of these early works to tragicomic humour and the
obliterated satirical traits of the mature oeuvre.16 Not surprisingly, Maxim Gorky,
‘Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt’ 85
Fig. 5.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Kiev

photograph © Andrei Markin 2011
86 Roland Gruschka
who repeatedly had praised Sholem Aleichem as one of the most gifted satirists
and humorists in world literature — including in a speech on the First All-Union
Congress of Writers in 1934 — was frequently quoted as a literary authority.17
Thus Sholem Aleichem’s humour was no longer blamed as an opiate reconciling
the reader with an unacceptable reality, as a mere escape from helplessness, born
of a lack of ‘correct’ ideas.18 Instead, the Soviet Yiddish critics asserted that for the
masses it had been a source of inner strength, implying that it contributed to the
success of the revolution.
As in the Epic Revisionism of the other Soviet literatures, this official narrative
rested to a large extent on ideas which were already at hand and in the era of
later so-called ‘vulgar sociologism’ had been stamped as ‘nationalist’.19 Now, these
concepts were just reformulated in terms of genuine Stalinist phraseology. For
instance, as early as 1918 Yekhezkel Dobrushin had praised the positive role of
Sholem Aleichem’s humour as a source of strength in times of Tsarist oppression, and
the formula of Sholem Aleichem the (bourgeois) humanist was apparently coined by
the often-censored but inf luential erudite scholar Isaac Nusinov in 1926.20
The Jubilee Poems of 1939

At the time of Sholem Aleichem’s eightieth birthday, the jubilee as an event was
omnipresent in the Soviet Yiddish world of letters.21 In April 1939, the Minsk journal
Shtern, at that time the official Yiddish organ of the Union of Soviet Writers, and its
corresponding organ for the Ukraine, the Kiev Sovetishe literatur, dedicated special
issues to Sholem Aleichem, filled with literary criticism, belles-lettres, and poems of
praise. In addition, a number of collections and monographs on Sholem Aleichem
appeared, among them a semi-fictional biography by Uri Finkel.22
Eulogies and poems of praise for the Sovietized hero Sholem Aleichem were a
characteristic element of the 1939 jubilee.23 Most of the contributors were second-
and third-rate poets, who clearly made their works to order. They praised Sholem
Aleichem, the ‘friend of the people’, the enemy of social inequity and injustice, the
victim of Tsarist repressions, who would have welcomed the October Revolution
and the new Soviet society had he only been able to imagine it in his time. In
official Soviet Russian literary criticism, these phrases already had been applied
to various classic authors such as Lermontov and Pushkin.24 In fact, these are the
inevitable attributes of any writer conforming to the general stereotype of a ‘literary
precursor’ in official Soviet history.
The more specific elements of the Sholem Aleichem-narrative, however, were
slightly more varied. A number of poems gave Sholem Aleichem credit for creating
an authentic, worthy image of the struggles and sufferings of the overcome past.
Compare, for instance, the following doggerel by Ayzik Platner (1895–1961):25
Ikh shtey ba dem oytser fun sforim — der kvaliker brunem;
dem groyl fun fargangenem lebn kh’hob dortn gefunen.
[I stand before the treasure of books — the abundant well;26
the horror of life in the past I found there.]
As a matter of course, such dark reminiscences were always followed by an ecstatic

eulogy on the Soviet present and future. In a similar way, other poets such as Avrom
Gontar and Shloyme Lopatin contrasted the tears and tragic laughter of Sholem
Aleichem’s epoch with the joy of life in the here and now.27 The positive role
ascribed to Sholem Aleichem’s humour as a source of inner strength, however, is
universally emphasized, often in the context of attacks on the enemies of revolution.
Compare, again, Ayzik Platner:28
Du host mir nit eynmol a treyst-vort, a frishn, gegebn,
dayn itlekher bukh hot derlaykhtert di shverkayt fun lebn.
[More than once you gave me fresh words of comfort,
any one of your books made the burdens of life more bearable.]
The few outstanding poets among the contributors also followed the official
narrative (in the shaping of which they had been involved as literary critics).
For instance, David Hofshteyn in 1939 praised Sholem Aleichem the satirist who
unmasked the system of the Kiev stock market as shvindl — ‘fraud’.29 In one section
of this ‘suite’ (as he called his jubilee poem), Hofshteyn punned on the literal
meaning of the Yiddish classic author’s persona or pen name and reworked it in a
declamatory, agitprop but aesthetically refined neoclassicist manner:30
Sholem-Aleykhem!
Frid af aykh!
Frid af di,
freyd af di,
vos fun mi
vern mid,
vern raykh!
[Sholem Aleichem!
Peace be upon you!
Peace be upon those,
joy be upon those
whom their labour
makes tired,
makes rich!]
Letters to the Dead

Aspects of stylization aside, the choice of genres employed in the jubilee eulogies is
remarkable. A number of writers chose the most radical poetical form of resurrecting
a dead person from a bygone era; they addressed him personally, some as part of a
silent dialogue with the writer’s portrait or as an open letter to him. A prolific bard
in the anniversary of 1939 was the ‘proletarian’ poet Shloyme Lopatin (1902–1943),
who not only wrote such a fictitious letter from the merry Birobidzhan (A briv tsu
Sholem-Aleykhemen fun Birobidzhan), but also, in his fantasy Af a shpatsir mit Sholem-
Aleykhem (a fantazye), went for a walk with the classic. His poet-colleague Pinye
Plotkin (1919–2007) had A shmues mit Sholem-Aleykhems portret (‘A Conversation
with Sholem Aleichem’s Portrait’), as did Motl Hartsman in his verse.31 This
88 Roland Gruschka
poetical cult of the dead had a model in contemporary Soviet Russian lyrics and
seems to have been inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who in 1935 had been
posthumously canonized by Stalin himself. In his (however ambivalent) ‘Jubilee’
(Iubileinoe), written on the 125th anniversary of Pushkin’s birth in 1924, Mayakovsky
took the omnipresent Russian poet laureate down from his pedestal for a walk and
chat in nocturnal Moscow; and in 1929, on the fifth anniversary of the leader of the
Great October Revolution’s death, he was engaged in a slightly harsh ‘Conversation
with Comrade Lenin’ (Razgovor s tovarishchem Leninym) — more precisely, with
Lenin’s photography.32 The genre itself, however, seems to have been introduced
into Soviet Yiddish literature by Itsik Fefer, who already in 1929, on the occasion
of Sholem Aleichem’s seventieth birthday, composed the poem A briv tsu Sholem-
Aleykhemen (frilingdike shures) — ‘A letter to Sholem Aleichem (springlike verses)’.33
In European literature, the ‘dialogues of the dead’ as well as the ‘dialogue with
the dead’ form a genuinely satirical genre with a long tradition, of which both
Mayakovsky and Fefer had been aware. More overtly satirical than Mayakovsky’s
above-mentioned compositions, Fefer’s ‘springlike verses’ of 1929 take a determined
stance in the actual discussions in Soviet Yiddish literary theory, attacking all camps
and their figureheads, such as the literary theoretician, critic, and ‘Proletarian’
writer Yashe Bronshteyn or the Symbolist and ‘fellow traveller’ Der Nister.34 No
doubt it was Fefer’s outstanding position in the Soviet Yiddish literary world that
allowed him to launch his attacks, which he legitimized with a reference to Heine
and Pushkin:35
S’ hot Heyne zikh derloybt36
amol in lider shpasn,
un Pushkin hot geloybt
dem shmeykhl fun di gasn...
[Heine sometimes in his poems
had a little joke,
and Pushkin praised
the smile of the streets...]
In the 1939 jubilee poems, however, all overt or hidden satire and wit had given way
to performances of solemn, earnest hero worship and over-exalted ‘joy of life’ (as
if to illustrate Stalin’s dictum ‘Life has become more joyous’).37 Some poets such as
Ayzik Platner used lyrical metres and a fixed rhyme scheme, others, such as Pinye
Plotkin, preferred the Mayakovsky-style free verse. Plotkin’s ‘Conversation with
Sholem Aleichem’s Portrait’ is a good example of how the Soviet Yiddish poets used
the official narrative on Sholem Aleichem as a guideline, how they popularized it
and thus played their part in the stylization of the classic:
‘A shmues mit Sholem-Aleykhems portret’

Yo,
dos bistu —
ikh hob dikh derkent
nokh di blonde hor,
nokh di briln.
Vos varemer, shrayber,

tu zikh on,
du kenst zikh, kholile,
farkiln.
Mistome veystu:
Af der gantser velt
leyent men dayne bikher.
Du host zikh a denkmol
af eybik geshtelt, —
in dem kenstu zayn
zikher.
Af dir hobn raykhe
di tseyn gekritst,
du bist nit bashtanen
on keynem.
Ven du volst lebn itst
ba undz,
mit undz in eynem.
Ikh volt mit hanoe hern,
ven du volst epes lezn —
kh’hob nekhtn gezen dikh in kholem,
du bist in Minsk gevezn.
Un ver iz lem dir nit geshtanen:
eltere,
kinder,
vayber.
Un alemen hot zikh gevolt
mit dir zikh tsekushn,
shrayber.
Kh’hob oykh tsu dir tsugeyn gevolt,
iz shver dos geven mir
dergreykhn,
kh’hob mer nit funvaytn gezen
vi du host gutmutik
geshmeykhlt,
vi du host geshmak gelakht,
vi du host geshmak geredt.
S’iz do
ba mir afn vant
gehangen dayn portret,
dos hob ikh geredt mit im,
nokh itst gedenk ikh zayn shtim.
[‘A Conversation with Sholem Aleichem’s Portrait’

Yes,
this is you —
I’ve recognized you
by the blond hair,
by the glasses.
Dress yourself as warm as possible,
writer,
90 Roland Gruschka
you could, heaven forbid,

get a cold.
Probably you do know:
All over the world
they are reading your books.
You erected for yourself
an eternal monument —
of that you can be
certain.
Rich men grinded
their teeth on you,
you did not make yourself depend
on anybody.
If you lived now
here with us,
together with us.
I would listen to you with delight
when you were reading something —
yesterday I saw you in my dream,
you were at Minsk.
And who did not stand at your side:
elderly people,
women,
children.
And they all would have loved
to kiss you,
writer.
I also wanted to approach you,
but it was difficult for me
to get through to you.
I did no longer see from a distance
how you were gently
smiling,
how you elegantly laughed,
how you elegantly spoke.
Here
on the wall in my room
was hanging your portrait.
These words I talked to it,
I still remember its voice.]
In this poem, we find the main topoi of the official narrative on the classic: Sholem
Aleichem the folk intellectual and tubercular writer living in want, who is literally
in danger of catching his death of cold; Sholem Aleichem the satirist, who incurred
the anger of the nouveaux riches of Kiev and Odessa; Sholem Aleichem the Yiddish
classic author, who is nowhere so popular and held in such high esteem as in
Minsk and the rest of the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, the modes of the Soviet
personality cult of political leaders also affected the depiction of these personae:
here Sholem Aleichem the gently smiling father figure, there the ‘common people’
as a plain collective.
Plotkin may not have been a very sophisticated writer, and perhaps his choice
of a dream as the setting for Sholem Aleichem’s imagined return to life was simply
the only one that came to his mind (unless it was intended as a necessary tribute
to materialist ideology). In any event, it worked far better than the settings chosen
by his colleagues: Even in the world of dreams, a Sholem Aleichem may be so
beleaguered by his admiring readers that one cannot get through to him. Thus
Plotkin is able to evade a personal encounter between the lyrical ‘I’ (which, in this
case, we may identify with Plotkin himself ) and the classic writer in a perfectly
natural way, whereas the attempts of his colleagues to portray such an encounter in
compliance with the ideological restraints were doomed to fail artistically. They are
stuck in the conditional mode, in the monotony of du voltst — ikh volt — mir voltn.
Not so much to prevent a reading of these fictitious talks and letters, which might
leave room for denunciations such as the charge of being an adherent of backward
religion,38 but rather, to make sure (pedantically) that all personae appearing in the
poems play their role according to the official ideology. More noteworthy is the fact
that the character of Sholem Aleichem appearing in all these poems is, so to speak,
more or less deprived of his own voice. He is merely the addressee of monologues,
acting as a passive, friendly guest; receiving f lowers, honours, and other signs of
love and respect; being shown around, apparently welcoming the achievements
of the new socialist society in general and the results of the liberation of the Jews
specifically. In Shloyme Lopatin’s Ven du zolst zayn mit undz (‘If you were here with
us’), Sholem Aleichem even may enjoy such privileges as private transportation in
a new car:39
Mayn tayerer zeyde, ikh volt dikh farbetn
in undzer kolvirtishn yishev [...]
Ikh volt dir gegebn an avto-mashine
mit zilberne oygn funfornt,
af veykhe pruzhines, af gumene shines
se zol dir nit hart zayn tsu forn.
[My dear Grandpa, I would invite you
to our collective farm [...]
I would give you a car
with silver eyes on the front,
suspended by soft springs and rubber rims,
so you’d have a comfortable ride.]
This kind of poetical monologue has nothing to do with Sholem Aleichem’s
own monological masterpieces; on the contrary, readers today would sense in
them overdetermined unambiguity and unintentional satire rather than narrative
complexity and tragicomic humour. Not surprisingly, none of the eulogist-poets
dared to have the fictitiously returned Sholem Aleichem respond to the present
in a Sholem Aleichem-like manner, if such an idea ever crossed their minds. To a
certain extent, this is indeed a paradox, since they invoked the spirit of an author
whose humour universally was praised and whose qualities as a satirist had just been
rediscovered by Soviet Yiddish literary scholarship. Moreover, unlike Mayakovsky
and Fefer in the 1920s, the Yiddish poets of 1939 seem not to have been aware of the
92 Roland Gruschka
fact that the ‘dialogue of (or with) the dead’ was a genuinely satirical genre, usually
employed to criticize the present, not the past.40 In general, satire was increasingly
looked upon with suspicion.41 Even Itsik Fefer did not show any satirical ambition
in 1939. Instead, he preferred to celebrate the over-exalted Soviet ‘joy of life’ with
a lyrical song in which Sholem Aleichem, imaginatively-symbolically returned to
Russia (without further explanation), visits a merry company of liberated Soviet
Jews at a picnic In Boyerker vald — ‘In the Forest of Boyarka’.42 At the end of this
scene resembling the escapist Soviet musical-movie Volga-Volga in its all-too jaunty
mood stands a kind of eternal laughter:43
Un s’hilkht der gelekhter batog un banakht,
keyn dales, keyn umglik, far keynem gedakht,
un Sholem-Aleykhem fargest zayne trern,
er shteyt mit zayn folk af der erd un er lakht!
[And the laughter resounds day and night,
no poverty, no harm, heaven forbid,44
and Sholem Aleichem forgets of his tears,
he stands with his people on the ground and he laughs!]
Epilogue
In the anniversary of 1939, the heroic cult of Sholem Aleichem reached its peak.
Not unlike the Pushkin jubilee in official Russian and pan-Soviet culture two
years before, it was for a long time the last of its kind in the Soviet Yiddish world
of letters, but for quite different reasons that are well known to us. Nevertheless, in
the years that followed the anniversary, the Sholem Aleichem narrative remained an
essential component of Soviet Jewish identity. The intellectuals and poets involved
in the celebrations carried on the cult of their Sovietized hero, albeit in a milder
form.
For instance, in a collection of 1948 Itsik Fefer published an entirely reworked
version of his ‘Letter to Sholem Aleichem’, in which all satirical bite had been
replaced by established topoi and elements of the Sholem Aleichem cult of 1939.45
In particular, there is no more reference to Fefer’s Soviet writer-colleagues. Instead,
the lyrics emphasize that Sholem Aleichem lives on in the hearts of the readers, for
whom his humour had been a source of inner strength:46
A klung ton vet a kol
mit libe verter, veykhe
un meldn yidish prost:
Do lebt Sholem-Aleykhem!
Iz den faran a shtub,
du zolst bam tish nit zitsn?
Vu s’zol dayn zaftik vort
nit treystn un nit shitsn?
[A voice will resound
with dear, gentle words
and announce in plain Yiddish:
Here Sholem Aleichem lives!
Is there any house

in which you don’t sit at the table?
In which your strong words
do not comfort and shield?]
As a matter of course, the imaginatively returned classic Yiddish writer is welcomed
by a group of Young Pioneers with f lowers,47 and, meeting a Jewish high-rank Red
Army officer, he may even satisfy himself another time of the successful Soviet
Jewish emancipation:48
Ven du zolst zayn ot do,
ven du zolst kenen kumen,
a general a yid
volt dikh arumgenumen.
[If you were here,
if you could come,
a Jewish general
would embrace you.]
Strangely enough for the situation after the war, Fefer did not completely evade
aspects of humour and satire. However, he preferred to be short of ideas of what
could be the target of the Yiddish classic author’s wit:49
Ven du volst kumen haynt
in kant maynem in libn,
es volt dayn kluge pen
far doyres undz bashribn.
[...]
Afile haynt, mayn fraynt,
nokh ale gute zakhn,
es treft amol azoyns,
vos loynt zikh oystsulakhn.
[If you came today
into my dear country
your wise pen would leave a description of us,
passed on for generations.
[...]
Even today, my dear friend,
after all these blessings,
sometimes something happens
worth laughing at.]
As it seems, talking about satire in such mild and abstract terms could be regarded
as safe in 1948. Thus Fefer’s satirical poem of 1929, which helped to introduce the
genre of fictitious letters into Soviet Yiddish literature, in the end was transformed
into a full-f ledged product of the Sholem Aleichem cult.
In the almost two decades between the first version and the publication of the
reworked one in 1948, the situation in the Soviet Yiddish world of letters had
changed drastically. The ideological battles of 1929/30 were long since over. More
than one of the cultural figureheads satirized in the first version of Fefer’s ‘letter’
was dead; for instance, Yashe Bronshteyn had perished in the Gulag in 1937. As
94 Roland Gruschka
the opening and other poems of the whole collection Afsnay (‘Anew’) indicate,
Itsik Fefer hoped that after the victory over Hitler, Yiddish culture in the Soviet
Union could start over again.50 Not surprisingly, he obviously felt that the Sholem
Aleichem-cult was indispensable for such a reconstruction — a reconstruction that
never happened. However, the outstanding position to which Sholem Aleichem
had been elevated even survived his cult and granted him a pivotal role in the
restoration of a limited form of Soviet Yiddish culture after several years of
complete suppression. The publication of Sholem Aleichem’s works in Yiddish and
Russian on the occasion of his centenary in 1959 marked the official ‘rehabilitation’
of Yiddish.51 The anniversaries of the Yiddish classic author that later fell into the
era of Sovetish heymland were, if at all, celebrated as a rediscovery by intellectual
circles rather than as a heroic cult ‘for the masses’. Apparently, at that time no one
felt compelled to ‘prove’ Sholem Aleichem’s literary afterlife by a fictitious letter
to him.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. On this matter, see also the chapters by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov in the present
volume.
2. ‘Sholom-Aleikhem’, Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1st edn, lxii (Moscow: Sovetskaia
Entsiklopediia, 1933), cols. 574–75. The same volume includes a separate, but very brief, article
on Shomer, the rival attacked by Sholem Aleichem in 1888 (‘Shomer’, Bolshaia Sovetskaia
Entsiklopediia, 1st edn, lxii (Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, 1933), col. 577).
3. In the following, see Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, ed. by
Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Compare also Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion, ed. by Oskar Anweiler and Karl-Heinz Ruffmann
(Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1973).
4. On the role of the cultural heroes in Stalinist society, cf. Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More
Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000),
in particular p. 46. On the situation in the late 1930s, cf. Zachary M. Baker, ‘Yiddish in Form
and Socialist in Content: The Observance of Sholem Aleichem’s Eightieth Birthday in the
Soviet Union’, YIVO Annual, 23 (1996), 209–31 (pp. 211–13, 225–29).
5. Compare, for instance, Boris Valbe, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April
1939), 251–60 (pp. 255–56); see also Uri Finkel, Sholem-Aleykhem (1859–1916) (Moscow: Emes,
1939), pp. 322–23.
6. For instance, cf. Arn Gurshteyn, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems lebn un shafn’, Sovetishe literatur, 2
(March–April 1939), 187–217, cf. also (posthumous edition of the article) Arn Gurshteyn,
Sholem-Aleykhem: Zayn lebn un shafn (Moscow: Emes, 1946), p. 20.
7. Compare e.g. Hersh Remenik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems kamf far realizm in di 80er yorn’, Shtern,
14 (May–June 1938), 122–48; Y. Serebryani and L. Dushman, ‘Eynike materyaln tsu der
kharakteristik funem yungn Sholem-Aleykhem’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 83–90; Finkel,
Sholem-Aleykhem, p. 186.
8. For instance, cf. Gurshteyn, Sholem-Aleykhem, pp. 17–20; Remenik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems kamf
far realizm’, p. 134; and Serebryani and Dushman, ‘Eynike materyaln tsu der kharakteristik
funem yungn Sholem-Aleykhem’, p. 83; Finkel, Sholem-Aleykhem, pp. 143–44.
9. On the Russification of Sholem Aleichem and the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsiia, cf. David Shneer,
Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 56. On the Yiddish classic author and Russian literature, see Valbe, ‘Sholem-
Aleykhem’, p. 255. It is worth noting that even in 1939 Sholem Aleichem’s very few works
originally written in Russian were regarded as a ‘remote’ subject for study and research, cf.
Arn Vorobeytshik, ‘In an opgelegn vinkele’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 91–113. On Sholem
Aleichem in Russian translation, see also Alexander Frenkel’s chapter in the present volume.
10. Cf. Arn Vorobeytshik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem: dem kinstlers velt-onshoyung’, in Sholem Aleichem:
Geklibene verk, ed. by Arn Vorobeytshik (Kiev: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhaytn
in USRR, 1926), pp. 9–52 (p. 24); and, albeit somewhat milder, Meir Wiener, ‘Di sotsyale
vortslen fun Sholem-Aleykhems humor’ [1931], in his Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in
19tn yorhundert, ii (New York: IKUF, 1946), 235–80 (pp. 256, 265–66).
11. Maks Makharinski, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un di tsarishe tsenzur’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April
1939), 279–83. Cf. also Yerukhem Riminik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem der novelist’, Sovetishe literatur, 2
(March–April 1939), 218–50 (pp. 223–24). According to Hersh Remenik, Sholem Aleichem also
read lectures of his works on ‘illegal and semi-legal meetings of Socialist petit-bourgeois parties’,
see idem, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un di revolutsye’, Shtern, 12 (May 1936), 68–85 (p. 74).
12. On these topoi, cf. ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un dos folk’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 10–13;
Yerukhem Riminik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem der novelist’, p. 245; Valbe, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’,
p. 252; Irme Druker, ‘Satire in Sholem-Aleykhems shafn’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 71–82
(p. 71); David Bergelson, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 65–78
(pp. 70–71); Finkel, Sholem-Aleykhem, p. 146.
13. On Sholem Aleichem in Soviet Yiddish literary criticism, see also Mikhail Krutikov’s chapter
in the present volume.
14. Serebryani and Dushman, ‘Eynike materyaln tsu der kharakteristik funem yungn Sholem-
Aleykhem’, pp. 83–90.
15. Druker, ‘Satire in Sholem-Aleykhems shafn’, pp. 74–76; Remenik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un di
revolutsye’, p. 74.
16. Cf. e.g. Druker, ‘Satire in Sholem-Aleykhems shafn’, pp. 77–79.
17. Maxim Gorky, ‘Tsu Sholem-Aleykhemen’, Shtern, 12 (May 1936), 1; ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un dos
folk’, p. 12; Druker, ‘Satire in Sholem-Aleykhems shafn’, p. 82; Valbe, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, pp.
251–52.
18. For instance, cf. Wiener, ‘Di sotsyale vortslen fun Sholem-Aleykhems humor’, pp. 257, 261–64,
272–74. In a later publication of 1940, Meir Wiener explicitly revoked his criticism and joined
the chorus of eulogists, see idem, ‘Vegn Sholem Aleykhems humor’ [1940], in his Tsu der
geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert, ii (New York: IKUF, 1946), pp. 281–378. Cf.
also Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Soviet Yiddish Scholarship in the 1930s: From Class to Folk’, Slavic
Almanach, 7.10 (2001), 223–51 (pp. 241–45).
19. On Soviet literary politics in general, cf. Peter Hübner, ‘Literaturpolitik’, in Kulturpolitik der
Sowjetunion, ed. by Oskar Anweiler and Karl-Heinz Ruffmann (Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1973),
pp. 43–53 (pp. 205–25); Holger Siegel, Sowjetische Literaturtheorie (1917–1940): Von der historisch-
materialistischen zur marxistisch-leninistischen Literaturtheorie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981).
20. Cf. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem der humorist (gedanken-fragmentn): Der folks-
shrayber Sholem-Aleykhem’ [1916–18], in his Gedankengang (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1922), pp. 43–53
(pp. 52–53); Yitskhok (Isaac) Nusinov, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un “Yudishes folksblat” ’, Di royte velt,
3 (May–June 1926), 104–25 (p. 124).
21. For details, see Baker, ‘Yiddish in Form and Socialist in Content’, pp. 209–31.
22. Cf. e.g. ‘Khronik: tsum 80tn yortog ven Sholem-Aleykhem iz geboyrn gevorn’, Shtern, 14 (Sept.
1938), 93; ‘Khronik’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 284–86. For further bibliographic
reference, see Baker, ‘Yiddish in Form and Socialist in Content’, p. 229, fn. 1. See also Finkel,
Sholem-Aleykhem. A separate chapter appeared as Uri Finkel, ‘Tsvishn di Kiever yidishe shrayber’,
Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 43–46.
23. At the celebrations of the preceding anniversaries of the Yiddish classic author, which had been
observed on a much smaller scale, such eulogies and poems of praise seem to have been rare.
24. On Pushkin, cf. e.g. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, ch. 5 (pp. 113–48).
25. Ayzik Platner, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 17–18, 4th stanza.
26. This line sounds like a far echo of Khayim Nakhman Bialik’s famous poem Lifnei aron hasefarim
(‘Before the Bookcase’, 1910), which Ayzik Platner, a former Talmud student, ex-Left Poale
Zionist, and remigrant of 1932, probably knew.
27. Avrom Gontar, ‘Trern’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 166; Shloyme Lopatin, ‘Tsu
Sholem-Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 313; cf. also Motl Grubian,
‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939), 28.
96 Roland Gruschka
28. Platner: ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, pp. 17–18, 3rd stanza. Cf. also Shloyme Goldenberg, ‘Sholem-
Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 150–55, stanzas 10–11.
29. David Hofshteyn, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem (syuite)’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 93–96.
30. Ibid., p. 93. Note that the greeting ‘Sholem aleykhem!’ literally means ‘Peace be upon you!’ in
Hebrew.
31. Shloyme Lopatin [Lopate], ‘A briv tsu Sholem-Aleykhemen fun Birobidzhan’, Shtern, 15 (March–
April 1939), 47–48; idem, ‘Ven du zolst zayn mit undz’, ‘Af a shpatsir mit Sholem-Aleykhem
(a fantazye)’, ‘A briv tsu Sholem-Aleykhemen fun Birobidzhan’, in Sholem Aleykhem: Almanakh
fun sovetishe shrayber (Kiev: Melukhe-farlag far di natsyonale minderhaytn in USRR, 1939), pp.
67–72; Pinye Plotkin, ‘A shmues mit Sholem-Aleykhems portret’, Shtern, 15 (March–April 1939),
29–30; Motl Hartsman, ‘Tsu dayn portret’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 109.
32. Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Iubileinoe’, in his Sochineniia, i (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura,
1978), pp. 374–82; idem, ‘Razgovor s Tovarishchem Leninym’, in his Sochineniia, ii (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1978), pp. 382–84.
33. Itsik Fefer, ‘A briv tsu Sholem-Aleykhemen (frilingdike shures)’, Di royte velt, [ 5 ] 6 (April 1929),
19–21. An additional inspiration particularly for Itsik Fefer, a native of Shpola, the seat of an old
Hassidic dynasty, may have been the custom of leaving kvitlekh (handwritten notes with pleas)
on the grave of a Hassidic rebbe. The literary models which were already at hand in the secular
sphere, however, seem to have had a stronger impact on him.
34. On these discussions, cf. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), pp. 102–49. A slightly milder version of Fefer’s
‘letter’ was included in his collection of poems Gevetn (Kiev: Kultur-Lige, 1930), pp. 225–31. A
paper on the different versions and their historical context is in preparation.
35. Fefer, ‘A briv’, p. 19, 4th stanza. Fefer’s unique position is illustrated by the fact that he served on
both the editorial boards of the rival journals Prolit and Di royte velt, cf. e.g. Estraikh, In Harness,
pp. 128, 135.
36. Heyne: Soviet Yiddish pronunciation of Heinrich Heine’s surname, modelled after the Russian
pronunciation Geyne.
37. Stalin made this dictum in a speech at the ‘First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites’ in
November 1935, cf. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, p. 6.
38. Such an ideological alertness seems to have been more typical of the 1920s. An example is
provided by Mayakovsky’s shaping of the first line of his poem ‘To Yessenin’, cf. idem, ‘How
are verses to be made?’, in Maxim Gorky and others, On the Art and Craft of Writing, trans. by
Alex Miller (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 123–63 (p. 147).
39. Shloyme Lopatin, ‘Tsu Sholem-Aleykhem’, ‘Ven du zolst zayn mit undz’, Sovetishe literatur, 2
(March–April 1939), 313–33.
40. In fact, this genre was employed also in Haskalah literature, for instance, in Aron Halle-
Wolfssohn’s Sikha ba-arets ha-khayim (1794–97) or Tuvyah Feder’s Kol mekhatsetsim (1814). In
particular, the various forms of satirical Totengespräch (‘dialogue of the dead’), which was a
popular genre in German literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, served
as a model for the early maskilim. However, it seems that with the exception of Itsik Fefer, the
post-1918 generation of Soviet Yiddish poets simply had become more or less ignorant of all
these traditions.
41. Estraikh, In Harness, p. 164; on this development cf. also Birgit Mai, Satire im Sowjetsozialismus:
Michail Soschtschenko, Michail Bulgakow, Ilja Ilf, Jewgeni Petrow (Berne and New York: P. Lang,
1993).
42. Itsik Fefer, ‘In Boyerker vald’, Sovetishe literatur, 2 (March–April 1939), 79–82.
43. Ibid., p. 82, last stanza.
44. Heaven forbid. In the Yiddish original, the idiomatic phrase used here means literally ‘Be it not
so with anybody’.
45. Itsik Fefer, ‘A briv tsu Sholem-Aleykhemen’, in his Afsnay (Moscow: Emes, 1948), pp. 115–18.
See also footnote 34.
46. Ibid., p. 115, 3rd and 4th stanza.
47. Ibid., p. 116, 11th stanza.
48. Ibid., p. 117, 16th stanza.
49. Ibid., pp. 116–17, 10th and 18th stanza.

50. Cf. Itsik Fefer, ‘Afsnay’, in his Afsnay (Moscow: Emes, 1948), pp. 5–6. On the situation of Soviet
Yiddish culture after the war, cf. Estraikh, In Harness, pp. 168–74.
51. Cf. Gennady Estraikh’s chapter in the present volume. See also Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish and
the Cold War (Oxford: Legenda, 2008), pp. 58–60, 64.
CHAPTER 6
Y
A Writer for All Seasons:

into Soviet Ideological Idiom
Mikhail Krutikov
My heart is rejoicing that in spite of all the difficult political and economic
conditions we are growing as a nation. Our nation is growing and f lourishing,
and the future of our people is here, in this country where we live. The hard
times will pass, dark clouds will disperse, the sky will clear, and the sun will
show us its rays.
This optimistic statement, supposedly made by Sholem Aleichem during his last visit
to Russia on the eve of the First World War and published in the Vilna newspaper
Dos lebn (The Life), was taken as an epigraph to the short popular Yiddish book
Sholem Aleichem: zayn lebn un shafn, published by the Emes press in Moscow in 1946
in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the writer’s death. Its author, the
prominent Soviet literary scholar and critic Arn Gurshteyn, had been dead for five
years: like a number of Soviet Yiddish writers, he was killed in action in the battle
of Moscow in the fall of 1941.
On the surface, this quotation seems to support the official thesis about Sholem
Aleichem’s Russian patriotism and optimism about the Jewish future in Russia, in
accordance with the general tendency to represent the pre-revolutionary literary
classics as precursors of socialist realism. But if we try to read this quotation
‘between the lines’, as was a common practice among intelligent readers of the time,
its message becomes more complex. On the one hand, it is obvious to us — as it
was to any reader in 1946 — that Sholem Aleichem was mistaken in his prediction
when he made it on the eve of the most catastrophic period in the Jewish history,
which began with the devastations and displacements of the First World War and
culminated in the Holocaust. On the other hand, his words seem to express the
mood of cautious optimism among the Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia regarding the
prospects of Jewish revival in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
This is one of many examples of how Sholem Aleichem’s legacy could be
used by the Soviet Yiddish cultural establishment to project messages that they
would not dare to articulate as their own. Indeed, as I will try to argue below,
the remarkable buoyancy of Sholem Aleichem’s status as the pre-eminent Jewish
writer in the Soviet Union, which Gennady Estraikh and Roland Gruschka have
A Writer for All Seasons 99
demonstrated convincingly in their chapters, was largely due to the fact that his
works lent themselves to a variety of interpretations and could be easily (re)adjusted
to any twists in the Soviet ideological line. Sholem Aleichem has always remained
the most widely published Yiddish writer in the Soviet Union, in Yiddish as well
as in translations: as a footnote to Gurshteyn’s book informs the reader, the total of
4,417,000 copies of his works were published between 1917 and 1946 alone. Sholem
Aleichem is also the only Yiddish writer who remained an object of literary study
and criticism during the entire Soviet period (with the only gap between 1949 and
1956), from Nokhum Oyslender’s Grund-shtrikhn fun yidishn realizm (1919) to Moisei
Belen’kii’s Smekh skvoz’ sliozy Sholom Aleykhema (Sholem Aleichem’s Laughter
through Tears) (1991).
One of the reasons why Sholem Aleichem can be so easily adapted to different
rhetorical and ideological purposes has to do with a special quality of his writing. As
Yekhezkel Dobrushin keenly observed in his analysis of Sholem Aleichem’s plays,
their dramatic effect is based not on certain situations or characters, but purely on
words, verbal actions, and verbal situations; in Dobrushin’s words, it is the ‘teater fun
vort, nit fun handlung’ (theatre of words, not action). The dramatic conf licts unfold
not between characters but between different modes and styles of their speech,
vortshteyger.1 Dobrushin’s observation applies not only to Sholem Aleichem’s dramatic
works. All of Sholem Aleichem’s important characters, such as Tevye, Menakhem-
Mendl, and Motl, are personifications of a certain dramatic vortshteyger rather than
embodiments of a certain psychological or social type, which makes them open to
a great variety of very different interpretations. The entire tradition of the Sholem
Aleichem criticism and interpretation is a tradition of creative misreading, in which
the Soviet criticism occupies a place of distinction.
Archetype and History

The key dichotomy, which framed the interpretation of Sholem Aleichem through-
out the entire Soviet period, was articulated already around 1918. On the one hand,
Sholem Aleichem was celebrated as the creator of ‘eternal’ archetypical characters
who embodied certain fundamental qualities of the Jewish folk character, the ‘folk
heroes’ such as Tevye, Menakhem-Mendl, and Motl, whose ethical and aesthetical
significance transcended the geographical and chronological limits of the Jewish
situation in the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century. On the other
hand, Sholem Aleichem was interpreted as a keen realist, who accurately captured
and portrayed the predicament of the shtetl petty bourgeoisie at the critical moment
of capitalist development in the western provinces of the Russian empire. While
both views remained present in the Soviet critical discourse during the entire
period, they intermittently came to occupy the dominant, ‘official’ place depending
on the general ideological situation.
The basic points of the ‘archetypal’ concept were formulated by Oyslender in
his seminal book Grund-shtrikhn fun yidishn realizm, which was published in Kiev in
1919 and republished in Vilna nine years later. One of the leading theoreticians of
the Kiev Group, Oyslender argued that folklore was the major source of modern
100 Mikhail Krutikov
Yiddish literature. He imagined the folk artist as an instinctive rebel against the
established legalistic religious order of Judaism which valued ethics above aesthetics
and regarded any free artistic expression with suspicion.2 Thus, any form of realist
artistic representation of living reality was by default a subversion of the Judaic
tradition.
Sholem Aleichem occupied the central place in Oyslender’s scheme. Combining
Mendele’s panoramic vision of the Jewish community with Peretz’s insights into
individual psychology, Sholem Aleichem created the symbolic shtetl image of
Kasrilevke as a comprehensive metaphor of Jewish existence. Kasrilevke as an
‘aesthetic-psychological category’3 was simultaneously a synthetic Jewish space and
the birthplace of distinct Jewish psychological types such as Menakhem-Mendl and
Tevye the Dairyman. Sholem Aleichem was able to portray his characters as free
individuals in the world at large, not bound by the constraints of time and place, as
was the case with Mendele and Peretz. Thus, Oyslender argued, Sholem Aleichem
was the first Yiddish artist to throw away the burden of the collective past by
declaring, in the words of his character Motl the cantor’s son, ‘I feel good — I am
an orphan’ (‘Mir iz gut — ikh bin a yosem’). This symbolic act signified a decisive
moment in the transformation of ‘little Jews’ (‘yidelekh’) into ‘human beings’
(‘mentshn’). Sholem Aleichem formed his characters out of unmediated emotions
— inner ‘demons’ — passions which were not specifically Jewish but universal. By
liberating his characters from their outer Jewish shells Sholem Aleichem was able
to portray their human nature: ‘Sholem Aleichem’s hero stands, according to his
nature, outside of any age, he is never a product of any concrete circumstances’.4
During his earlier period, Sholem Aleichem developed a special interest in two
kinds of characters, in which universal humanity prevailed over parochial yidishkayt:
children and bohemian artists. Both groups occupied a marginal position in the
traditional patriarchal structure of the Jewish society. His most accomplished
characters, such as Menakhem-Mendl and Tevye, represented a ‘synthetic figure
of a folk hero’,5 which embodied the ‘Jewish energy in the present’.6 Tevye was
simultaneously the most ‘folkish’ and the most ‘all-human’ character, a genuine
epic folk hero who came to replace previous representative ‘types’. With Tevye,
Sholem Aleichem indicated a new direction for Yiddish realism, moving away
from typological ‘Jewishness’ towards psychological universalism. Thus Sholem
Aleichem brought to a conclusion the ‘formative period of Yiddish realism’, which
was initiated by Mendele and continued by Peretz. By placing his fellow Kiev
writer Sholem Aleichem at the top of the Yiddish classical triangle, Oyslender laid
a theoretical foundation for a new history of Yiddish literature and created a ‘usable
past’ for the Kiev group.
Oyslender’s Grund-shtrikhn fun yidishn realizm set the tone for the future
discussions of Yiddish literature in Soviet theoretical discourse. Yet his concept of
historical development was closer to Nietzsche than to Marx because he completely
ignored class theory. He imagined history as the process of self-realization of the
folk psyche through the manifestation of its free will embodied in heroic creative
individuals, who liberated themselves and their people from the stale and obsolete
religious norms. Oyslender’s concept was eclectic and not free of contradiction. On
the one hand, he shared the nineteenth-century Russian Populist ideal of the narod
as the sole custodian of national culture and morals, and championed realism as the
only true artistic representation of reality. On the other hand, his concept of the
‘primitive’ as the foundation of modern and secular Yiddish culture was distinctly
modernist.
The opposite view of Sholem Aleichem was promoted by another inf luential
Kiev critic, Moyshe Litvakov, who sought to incorporate Sholem Aleichem into
a Marxist scheme of Yiddish literary development. In his collection of articles In
umru (In Storm), published in 1919 by the same press as Oyslender’s book, Litvakov
argued that Sholem Aleichem was first and foremost a Jewish national writer who
ref lected ‘the entire peculiarity of Jewish life and Jewish psychology’.7 A keen
observer of Jewish life, Sholem Aleichem was nevertheless unable to rise above the
surface and comprehend the meaning and significance of the phenomena which
he depicted: ‘he hovers too low over the world of reality to be able to grasp its
mysterious and irrational dimension’.8
In Litvakov’s view, Sholem Aleichem’s characters were merely ethnographic
types rather than embodiments of specific aspects of the Jewish national character.
Menakhem-Mendl could have become ‘a national symbol of the Jewish intelligentsia
which searches for its true self but is unable to find it’, but instead he came out as a
merely ‘anecdotal and nearly ethnographic figure’.9 In Litvakov’s famous formula,
Sholem Aleichem remained a ‘writer of genius without a genial idea’ (a geoynisher
shrayber on a geoynisher idey), unable to build between himself and his readers a
necessary distance, which would reveal the greatness of his genius. But Litvakov
hoped that a time for Sholem Aleichem was still to come: ‘images and symbols,
purified of their topicality and deliberate humorousness, will remain forever in
our literature’.10 Contrary to Oyslender, Litvakov placed Sholem Aleichem not
above Mendele and Peretz, but between them, as a bridge between Mendele’s old-
fashioned sermonizing and the modern educational style of Peretz’s writing.
Despite their different assessments of Sholem Aleichem, Litvakov and Oyslender
both pointed out the great symbolical significance of Sholem Aleichem’s key
characters, such as Menakhem-Mendl, Tevye, and Motl. Their interpretations
paved way for the later representatives of the ‘archetypal’ trend in Sholem Aleichem
criticism, such as Y. Y. Trunk, Meir Wiener (in the late 1930s), Dan Miron, and
David Roskies, who treated Sholem Aleichem as a ‘mythologist of the mundane’,
to use Roskies’s definition. The ‘socio-historical’ trend reached its peak in the
early 1930s in the works of the Soviet scholars Max Erik, Isaac Nusinov, and Meir
Wiener, and went into decline after that.11
Form and Style

By the late 1920s Oyslender had become not only a leading literary critic, but also a
literary historian with an impressive list of research activities and academic positions
in Kiev, Minsk, and Moscow. Inf luenced by the Russian Formalist school, he
sought to construct a Yiddish literary history as a development of genres and styles
which ref lected the historical reality but was subordinated to its own artistic logic.
Fig. 6.1. Meir Wiener

Courtesy of Julia Wiener
In one of his best studies of that period, the 1928 essay ‘Young Sholem Aleichem
and His Novel Stempenyu’, he argued that Stempenyu was a turning point not only
in Sholem Aleichem’s literary career, but also in the entire development of Yiddish
literature. This essay opened the first (and only) volume of Shriftn, published by the
newly established Department of Jewish Culture at the All-Ukrainian Academy of
Sciences, where Oyslender headed the Section of Literature and Philology.
Oyslender regarded Stempenyu as the point of transition between Sholem
Aleichem’s early and mature periods. The writer’s early work demonstrated the
great versatility of his talent, but lacked a sense of ‘direction’.12 The choice of
direction was of crucial importance not only for Sholem Aleichem but for the entire
Yiddish literature, which until the late 1880s could not yet find its own course. By
1887 Sholem Aleichem emerged as the leader of the younger generation of Yiddish
writers who aspired to create a cohesive literature out of the array of individual
works. An important part of this process was the formation of a literary canon
around Abramovich-Mendele as its ‘grandfather’.13 Written in a direct dialogue
with Mendele, Stempenyu as the first yidisher roman signified the ‘new will’ of the
young Yiddish writers to move literature into the centre of the emerging Jewish
public sphere.
Responding to the ‘catastrophe’ of 1881–82, the pogroms and the anti-Semitic
legislation which caused mass emigration and the emergence of nationalist
ideologies, the young Yiddish writers looked for a new hero among the proste yidn
(folk masses), rather than among the intelligentsia or middle classes. They wanted
to portray a proster yid as an active and ‘healthy’ character who would appeal to the
mass audience and provide it with a sense of direction at the time of the growing
class antagonism between the rich and the poor in the Jewish community.14 The
new addressee of Yiddish literature was the shtetl bal-melokhe (craftsman, artisan),
who was to be educated as an independent personality with the help of illustrating
examples. Contrary to Mendele, the new generation of Yiddish writers portrayed
their characters not through their social functions but as individual human beings,
in line with the Russian literary ideas of the time. One of the new types was the
child, who was for the first time portrayed as an independent character in Sholem
Aleichem’s short story ‘Dos meserl’ (The Penknife).
Sholem Aleichem’s discovery (unexpectedly for himself, as Oyslender believes) of
a new romantic folk hero in the person of the travelling klezmer Stempenyu marked
a turning point both in his artistic development and in the development of the
entire Yiddish literature. Stempenyu was ‘the first novel with a strict and coherent
composition’ driven by its internal dramatic force rather than by a mechanical
melodramatic scheme.15 The appearance of the new folk hero signalled the rejection
of the maskilic intellectual hero by the younger generation of writers. Stempenyu’s
female counterpart, the ideal yidishe tokhter Rokhele, represented a human victim of
the spiritual and emotional poverty of shtetl life. Her very timid — in comparison
with her Russian prototypes — attempt to rebel against the patriarchal conventions
enabled Sholem Aleichem to offer a modest moral criticism of the foundations of
the shtetl life. This critique was far less radical than that of the contemporaneous
Russian literature which served as a source of inspiration for him. Yet it gave
birth to a sequence of female protesters in Yiddish literature. Oyslender traced the

genealogical link between Rokhele and Mirele from Bergelson’s novel Nokh alemen
(The End of Everything, 1913), thus affirming the continuity of the Kiev literary
tradition.
Dobrushin, another prominent critic of the Kiev Group, applied a similar
literary-historical genre analysis to Sholem Aleichem’s dramatic works. His overall
evaluation was not very positive. Dobrushin shared Oyslender’s view that Sholem
Aleichem’s strength was prose:
while the world of Sholem Aleichem’s prose, his novels and short stories,
portray a big fair swarming with people, [...] his dramatic works are not more
than a small inn at this fair, with a limited set of characters hanging about the
same place.16
Sholem Aleichem’s weakness as a playwright was the f lipside of his strength as a
prose writer: ‘he remained a captive of “theatre for reading”, of his own narrative
style’. In conformity with the sociological trend that became prominent in Soviet
literary theory by the late 1920s, Dobrushin praised Sholem Aleichem for ‘moving
the Yiddish drama forward in the social respect’ and creating a ‘social space and per-
spective’. But this did not redeem Sholem Aleichem as a dramatist: ‘he created neither
an original theatrical method [...] nor what is called a dramatic personality’ (423).
Class and Humour

While Oyslender and Dobrushin were still working within the theoretical
paradigm of late Russian Formalism, trying to analyse Sholem Aleichem’s role in
the development of the Yiddish literary genre system against the broader socio-
historical background, the Marxist critics, such as Isaac Nusinov and Meir Wiener,
sought to squeeze Sholem Aleichem into the rigid class-deterministic scheme of
literary development, which was later to be labelled as ‘vulgar materialism’. It
might come as a surprise that both critics focused on Sholem Aleichem’s humour
as the most characteristic feature of his writing, which in their view revealed his
essentially petty-bourgeois character.
Isaac Nusinov, one of the Marxist literary authorities of that time, wrote in an
article on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s death:
The appearance of Sholem Aleichem was a response to the need of the collective.
The humoristic nature of his talent was also conditioned by the social need. For
when does a humorist appear? A great humorist always emerges when a certain
class becomes socially superf luous but does not realize it yet, still believing in its
indispensability, as if the entire world is created for its sake. The psychological
condition of the collective in such a state is characterized by an incongruity
between its consciousness and its abilities.17
In this scheme, a writer is merely a function of a certain socio-economic condition,
and his humour is a product of the cognitive dissonance between the objective
reality and the subjective petty-bourgeois consciousness, its denial to acknowledge
its defeat in class struggle. Thus humour becomes an important feature of realist
style, which confronts the reader with reality: ‘Sholem Aleichem went from the
image of reality. And this image, taken from the real life, must — owing to the
above-mentioned contradiction between the abilities and the consciousness —
contain elements of humour’.18
Nusinov’s thesis was further developed by Meir Wiener in his study ‘On the
Social Roots of Sholem Aleichem’s Humour’, published as an introduction to the
first critical edition of Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl the Cantor’s Son) in 1931.19 Like
Nusinov, Wiener interpreted Sholem Aleichem as the literary voice of the Jewish
petty bourgeoisie as it was desperately trying to get a footing in Russian society
during the turbulent years of capitalist development of the 1890s. The writer’s
artistic outlook at that point was fully determined by his own economic situation
as a bankrupt stock exchange speculator trying to earn his living by literary work.
Despite the downturn in his personal life, Sholem Aleichem the writer retained his
loyalty to the bourgeoisie and never subjected it to criticism. The social criticism of
Sholem Aleichem’s early works, such as his first novel Sender Blank and his Household,
Wiener claims, was a vestige of the radical maskilic criticism of the nouveau riche,
but was never aimed at the bourgeoisie as a whole.
Later this youthful critical attitude turned into compassion and consolation,
which were to become a prominent feature in Sholem Aleichem’s works from 1892
onward. The writer could no longer ridicule the desire to become a ‘Brodsky’ —
the name of the Kiev sugar magnate, which came to signify wealth — because this
would contradict his own class interests. Now his attention turned to the petty
bourgeoisie, and Menakhem-Mendl came to epitomize the precariousness of its
pursuit of the illusion of happiness. The petit bourgeois dream of success produced
the extraordinary mobility of the impoverished masses. In Sholem Aleichem’s
world, emigration to America became the ultimate manifestation of that petty-
bourgeois fantasy. By contrast, Peretz envisioned the same impoverished East
European Jewish masses as an immobile body firmly attached to its old place. This
difference in social orientation between two contemporary writers explains why
the neo-romantic Peretz focused on the melancholic portrayal of the Jewish past,
whereas the humorist Sholem Aleichem entertained an unstable illusion of a happy
future in America (274).
The class-determined limitations of his world-view prevented Sholem Aleichem
from creating ‘an organically united, dynamically developed, and broad picture of
the processes which the class he depicts is undergoing’ (254). Sholem Aleichem was
not a social critic, and the aim of his humour was not to attack but to protect. He
kept destroying the illusions of his characters only to let them build up new ones.
Echoing Dobrushin, Wiener believed that Sholem Aleichem’s humour found its
expression in words, not in actions or situations. His weakness as a realist writer
became particularly evident when he tried to portray reality directly rather than
through the mediation of the characters’ speech. ‘The reality of his creations is
in their “unreality” ’, because they themselves are fabrications of the imagined
narrator’ (279). A talented writer, Sholem Aleichem gave us hints of the new
revolutionary epoch in his characters’ monologues and dialogues, but was unable to
present a direct adequate portrait of the revolution. Wiener concluded: ‘The extent
to which Sholem Aleichem ref lected certain moments of the revolution in his works
determines the value of these works as a heritage for the proletariat’ (253–54). In
other words, they are valuable only inasmuch as they portray reality as ref lected in
the words of the characters; they do not confront it directly.
These and other similarly critical evaluations of Sholem Aleichem in Soviet
criticism were produced during the formative period of the doctrine of socialist
realism, which by 1934 had been officially approved as the only ‘creative method’
of Soviet literature. In Yiddish literature this was the time of fierce ideological
debates between the champions of ‘proletarian’ literature and the moderate ‘fellow
travellers’. One of the key points of difference in those debates was the issue of
the yerushe, the pre-Soviet cultural legacy. The most radical proletarian zealots,
affiliated with the Minsk Institute of Belorussian Culture, believed that Soviet
Yiddish culture began in 1917, and the entire pre-revolutionary period had to be
discarded. Their opponents, most of whom were close to the Kiev Group, tried to
salvage the ‘progressive’ elements of that legacy, including Sholem Aleichem. But to
be efficient, this rescue project required fresh arguments in line with the Marxist-
Leninist theory of culture, and one of them was the new concept of humour as a
socially conditioned artistic response to a historical transformation.
The most comprehensive set of critical interpretations of Sholem Aleichem’s
works selected for his Soviet canon was produced by the editorial team of his
Selected Works in fifteen volumes, published between 1935 and 1941. For reasons that
are unclear, which may have to do with the radical socio-economic determinism
of Wiener’s position as well as with some personal rivalries between Wiener and
Erik, who took the post of head of the Section of Literature and Criticism at the
Kiev Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture which had previously been led by
Oyslender and Wiener, Wiener took no part in that project. Individual volumes
had introductions by Max Erik, Rivke Rubin, Yekhezkel Dobrushin, Nokhum
Oyslender, Alexander Khashin, and Shmuel Klitenik, and ref lected a plethora of
critical views within the established ideological framework of socialist realism.
Each author sought to strike a balance between two different attitudes, both
of which had a place in the socialist-realist scheme of literary development. On
the one hand, Sholem Aleichem was viewed as a representative of the Jewish
petty bourgeoisie at the historical moment when it was undergoing the inevitable
process of lumpenization and proletarianization as a result of the class struggle; on
the other hand, he spoke in the voice of the toiling masses which in the second
half of the 1930s gradually replaced the proletariat as the primary moving force of
history. Thus, his characters could be ‘dialectically’ interpreted both as losers and
as winners, as socially and historically doomed representatives of the vanishing sub-
class of the petty bourgeoisie as well as archetypes which represented the everlasting
qualities of the collective Jewish psyche. The second view was gradually becoming
prevalent.
The class-deterministic approach is most prominent in Max Erik’s introductions
to the first two volumes, which included the stories of the Kasrilevke and Railroad
Stories cycles. Erik interprets the synthetic shtetl image of Kasrilevke with its
hapless inhabitants as a reactionary utopia in line with the tradition of the shtetl
representation in Yiddish literature from Yisroel Aksenfeld to Mendele. Erik finds
Sholem Aleichem’s attitude to his creation ‘contradictory’: he ‘calls back to the past
— but at the same time he is also aware that no return is possible’. This contradictory
attitude is ref lected in Sholem Aleichem’s humour, which has ‘two faces’, a laughing
and a weeping one.20 In his introduction to the Railway Stories (which also appeared
in a Russian translation) Erik elaborates on his thesis by juxtaposing two dominant
themes of this collection of short stories. The first ‘thematic idea’ is ‘the increase
of sufferings of the petty bourgeoisie in Tsarist Russia during the years of the
political reaction, the sense of gloom, oppression, and hopelessness’; the other one
is the ‘idiocy of petty-bourgeois life, which takes on a pathological character and
produces such socio-psychological effects which are not far from the manic state of
madness’. The combination of these two ‘thematic ideas’ produces a specific manic-
depressive mood which permeates the collection as a whole. Sholem Aleichem’s
critique is directed both outward, against the ‘unleashed and triumphant reaction’
in the society at large, as well as inward, against the ‘sick socio-psychological
features of the [ Jewish] petty bourgeoisie’.21
Erik believed that the monologue form weakened the critical message of the
stories. It reduced the scale and the significance of the events by refracting them
through the narrow lenses of petty-bourgeois consciousness. The author positioned
himself as an outside observer and did not intervene in the narration of his characters
with his comments and judgments. In conclusion, Eriks reiterated Litvakov’s thesis
about the inherent limitations of ‘the mighty talent of the great Yiddish humorist’
by the ‘frames of petty-bourgeois cognition’ (25).
The class-deterministic approach gradually gives way to more ‘humanist’ and
universalist interpretations in the next volumes of the editions. Oyslender read the
autobiographical novel Funem yarid (From the Fair) (in the introduction to volumes
4 and 5, 1936) as a product of a deep crisis which the writer experiences in the last
two years of his life in America. Sholem Aleichem was ‘no longer able to restrain his
reactionary sympathies to the “old days” ’. The ‘healthy tendency’ of social criticism
which was characteristic of Sholem Aleichem’s best works was now weakened by
his ‘reactionary longing (drang)’ to find a ‘paradise’ in the past.22 Yet this apologetic
trend, Oyslender argued, did not overshadow the positive value of Sholem
Aleichem’s autobiography for ‘our proletarian readers’. He praises Sholem Aleichem
for ‘almost never lapsing into ethnography’ in his depictions of the ossified and
rudimentary ways of the shtetl. Instead the writer portrayed the ‘palpitations of life’,
the emergence of new social types and relationships in the Jewish environment.
From the Fair was artistically superior to many other works of Sholem Aleichem
because it did not ‘cater to the tastes of the boulevard nationalist press’.23
One of the most insightful introductions was written by Rivke Rubin, a young
lecturer at the Department of Yiddish Language and Literature of the Moscow
State Pedagogical Institute, who belonged to the new, Soviet-educated generation
of Yiddish scholars. Her analysis of Motl the Cantor’s Son differed in some important
respects from Wiener’s essay of 1931. While accepting in general the sociological
interpretation of the book as an illustration of the process of ‘degradation of the
Jewish petty-bourgeois masses’ in the wake of the failed 1905 revolution, Rubin
focused her attention on the psychology of the child’s character as it expressed itself
in the form of monologue, which she viewed — contrary to Erik — positively, as a

literary device which helps to build an intimate connection between the character
and the reader. She argued that the personality of Motl combined the key features
of Sholem Aleichem’s two major adult characters, Menakhem-Mendl and Tevye.
On the surface, Motl appeared as a ‘dynamic character’, but at its core it had
a static personality structure, resistant to any change. Rubin interpreted Motl
as a passive observer like Tevye, who preferred talking to action. His optimism
resulted from his refusal to engage with reality and grow up. As an eternal child,
whose development was stalled by the socio-economic circumstances of the time,
Motl was the opposite of the autobiographical hero of From the Fair: ‘Motl is an
imaginary (oysgetroymte) character, an ideal of folksy wholesomeness ( folks-gantskayt)
[...] the bearer of trust (bitokhn), of optimism’.24 Sholem Aleichem burdened this
literary character with a ‘heavy task of consoling where no consolation could be of
help’, which made him ‘not fully consistent as a child character’. Suffering together
with his class, Sholem Aleichem ‘swallowed his tears and uttered his famous
motto: “laughing is healthy, doctors prescribe laughter” ’ (30). Rubin’s interest in
the psychological aspects of the orphan child’s character ref lected the shift of the
focus of attention from bigger social issues to the family, which occurred in Soviet
literature during the 1930s. The Russian Israeli critic Alexander Goldshtein call
this phenomenon ‘new sentimentalism’ and describes it as follows: ‘the literature
of the 1930s [...] was able to visualise the particular ethics of brooding communal
relationships, of a family swarm, the ethics of lower-class proletarian democracy’.25
This does not mean that the socio-economic problems lost their importance, but
now they could be investigated by writers and critics in the different, more intimate
environment of the family.
New Soviet Sensibility

The shift toward ‘new sentimentalism’ affected not only the younger generation of
Yiddish critics. In 1940 Wiener also revised his class-deterministic approach. He
opened his book Vegn Sholem-Aleykhems humor (On Sholem Aleichem’s Humour)
with a remarkable admission that his views had undergone significant changes
according to the new situation:
it is only natural that in our socialist country the full historical significance of
Sholem Aleichem’s works reveals itself more and more clearly. The time has
come to revise the earlier opinions, to study the writer’s works once more, to
understand them more deeply.26
In other words, with the disappearance of the petty bourgeoisie as a class Sholem
Aleichem lost none of his significance — on the contrary, freed from the class-
imposed limitations he emerged as a more important literary figure.
The absence of the adjective ‘social’ in the title of Wiener’s new book signalled a
break with the ‘sociological’ approach of the 1931 study of the same subject. Instead
of checking his every step against the authority of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Wiener
conducted an open dialogue with the great men of the European tradition, such
as Aristotle, Lessing, Hegel, Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel. The true value of a
piece of art, Wiener now proposed, was to be determined by the extent to which
it expressed the ‘tendency of its own time’ (282). A highly sensitive stylistic device,
humour did not tolerate any deviation from the truthful representation of reality
and therefore could serve as a touchstone for the worth of a literary text. If, after
many years, the text could still make people laugh, it had fulfilled its function and
captured the ‘tendency’ of its time. Sholem Aleichem’s works obviously met this
criterion, and his humour revealed the most essential aspects of his epoch. Sholem
Aleichem’s ‘light and elegant’ humoristic style conveyed historical optimism, the
writer’s belief that life would eventually become ‘just, truthful, and bright’. Sholem
Aleichem’s characters, being ‘an original expression of the profound and beautiful
wisdom of the people’, were both natural and symbolic as they contained ‘much
more than a piece of concrete life that the artist himself has originally put in them’
(286).
Wiener rejected the view of Sholem Aleichem as a ‘consoler’ of the petty
bourgeoisie who deliberately perpetrated historical illusions. He viewed the large
number of unhappy endings in Sholem Aleichem’s works as an additional proof
of the writer’s commitment to realism. The lack of ‘reality’ in Sholem Aleichem’s
representations of life, which Wiener previously regarded as the writer’s major
weakness, now turned into his greatest strength. Sholem Aleichem’s humour
was not consoling but critical: ‘The realism of Sholem Aleichem’s images finds
its expression in his unmasking of the “unreality” of conventional truths’ (301).
Now Sholem Aleichem was presented not as a talented imitator of a wide range of
petty-bourgeois speech patterns, but as a creator of original, rich, and resourceful
Yiddish literary language. The formal simplicity of Sholem Aleichem’s works with
their straightforward composition came to be interpreted as a positive feature of his
commitment to the folk world-view.
Tevye the Dairyman replaced Motl as Sholem Aleichem’s central work. Wiener
assigned to humour the structural function of keeping the overall composition of
the entire cycle of stories simple and straightforward. By portraying one poor Jewish
family, Sholem Aleichem created a broad picture of the historical period of great
upheavals, dealing with the major issues of the time: inter-generational conf lict,
marriage for love versus marriage for money, intermarriage. The greatness of
Sholem Aleichem’s talent enabled him to represent the social complexity of his time
using simple, if not banal, plot constructions. Whereas the purpose of Wiener’s 1931
study of Sholem Aleichem’s humour was to show how it ref lected the writer’s petty-
bourgeois worldview, the 1940 book turned humour into the essential characteristic
of Sholem Aleichem’s art. Humour was now treated not as a function of a certain
social condition but as a timeless aesthetic category.27 Sholem Aleichem became
part of the world canon of comic literature along with Aristophanes, Cervantes,
Rabelais, Dickens, Heine, and Gogol. Like Bakhtin, Wiener regarded the comic
genre as the most authentic expression of folk creativity and the foundation of
realism: ‘All genres of European realism grow (in the literary-historical sense) from
the seedbed of the popular-folkloric “satirical” genres’ (321).
The gala commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s birth
in 1939, which is analysed in chapters 4 and 5, cemented his reputation not only as
the greatest of all Yiddish writers but also as a world classic. David Bergelson, whose
previous attitude to Sholem Aleichem had been rather sceptical, expressed the
general mood by placing the four canonical books (Tevye the Dairyman, Menakhem-
Mendl, Motl the Cantor’s Son, and From the Fair) among the masterpieces of world
literature and proclaiming that they ‘revolutionized the Jewish workers and drew
them into the universal struggle for the liberation of their land’. He opined that ‘the
secret of the universal significance of this great humanist and proud democrat lies
in the fusion of the labour of his life with the sufferings of the masses’.28
Bergelson’s essays were part of the series of critical appraisals which appeared as
part of the celebration and focused on various aspects of Sholem Aleichem’s creativity.
Y. Riminik elaborated on Bergelson’s thesis in his analysis of the novella as Sholem
Aleichem’s ‘central genre’. Riminik stressed the realism of his representations of
the economic and material aspects of the life of the Jewish masses under capitalism,
and especially the problem of social inequality and differentiation.29 In accordance
with the official ideological scheme, he portrayed Sholem Aleichem as a staunch
supporter of the revolution and an enemy of the Tsarist regime, whose entire oeuvre
was permeated with ‘deep love of people and humanist compassion’ (224). The
artistic strength of his characters lay in their ‘typicality’ (tipizirung), which reached
its highest degree in the novella genre. This artistic effect was achieved through the
selective and creative use of the folkloric material, a ‘very important component of
Sholem Aleichem’s realism’ (236).
Discussing the formal variety of Sholem Aleichm’s novellas, Riminik noted that
his ‘best novellas were written in the form of monologue’, which he believed to be
an ‘organic component’ of the writer’s realist style (237). Unlike Erik, who criticized
Sholem Aleichem’s use of monologue for the absence of a clearly articulated
authorial position, Riminik believed that the monologue form enabled the author
to ‘merge’ with his characters and fully identify with the Jewish masses. Close to the
monologue was the epistolary form, which found its most accomplished realization
in the Menakhem-Mendel cycle. Sholem Aleichem’s use of humour and satire in his
novellas had two complementary functions: on the one hand, it was an instrument
of ‘anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist critique of reality which created unbearable
conditions for the masses’; on the other hand, it served as a tool of ‘self-criticism and
self-consolation for the masses in their hard situation’ (245). Riminik followed the
general line of the Soviet canonical discourse of the late 1930s by placing Sholem
Aleichem among the classics of European realism: ‘Like Balzac, who created the
“Human Comedy” of the bourgeois society, so did Sholem Aleichem create the
‘Human Comedy’ of the Jewish people at the age of imperialism on the eve of the
socialist revolution’ (249). Invoking Marx’s famous dictum from Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, Riminik concluded that the Soviet Jewish folk masses could now
‘part with their past with laughter’ by reading Sholem Aleichem; yet their laughter
will not be ‘Sholem Aleichem’s broken and sad laughter’, but the ‘healthy, cheerful
laughter’ of a feeling of security and optimism (240).
Boris Volpe supported the thesis of Sholem Aleichem’s significance in world
literature using as evidence the critical reception of the 1910 translation of Motl by
the Russian press. Sholem Aleichem’s writing constituted not only an ‘encyclopaedia
of the life of Jewish masses’ (referring to Vissarion Belinsky’s famous description of

Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin as an ‘encyclopaedia of Russian life’) and a ‘true history of
Russian Jews’, but also a portrayal of ‘general Russian life’.30 Volpe stressed Sholem
Aleichem’s love of Russian literature and its ‘best representatives’, such as Maxim
Gorky. Volpe also openly linked the celebration of Sholem Aleichem’s anniversary
with the current political situation: ‘today, when the fascist cannibals persecute
the Jewish people and create the fraudulent theories of higher and lower races, the
entire Soviet society celebrates Sholem Aleichem’s anniversary’.31
Conclusion: Ideology and Canonization

Unlike Mendele and Peretz, who remained firmly embedded in their socio-
cultural contexts, Sholem Aleichem was turned into a timeless universal figure
of the ‘folk writer’ who could represent all kinds of good things. This image of
Sholem Aleichem, which began to take shape after 1935 and came to completion
on the eve of the Second World War, could be usefully employed for a variety
of political, cultural, and ideological purposes, from the ideological fight against
German Nazism to the rehabilitation of certain aspects of Judaism. Whereas during
between 1925 and 1935 Soviet critics emphasized the inherent contradictions in
Sholem Aleichem’s works and stressed the class-determined limitations of his petty-
bourgeois world-view, the prevailing trend of the later period was towards asserting
the ‘wholesomeness’ of the folk writer and the close unity between the author and
his creation. As we could see, the same critical insights could be interpreted in
very different ways. This change had little to do with Sholem Aleichem’s actual
writing but ref lected the shift in the Soviet ideological and political paradigm.
The period around 1930 was the time of intense ideological debates and active
practical ‘Jewish work’ carried out by the communist institutions in order to turn
Jews, many of whom were still engaged in the private sector, into productive and
obedient Soviet citizens. This required a critical attitude to anything that smacked
of ‘petty-bourgeois ideology’. By the late 1930s this task was largely accomplished,
and the most zealous Jewish activists like Litvakov were disposed of in the ‘purges’.
In 1938 the Yiddish schools and institutions of higher education outside the Jewish
Autonomous area in Birobidzhan were closed down as part of the change in the
general Soviet policy regarding ‘diaspora’ minorities, and the Yiddish cultural
sphere was reduced to literature and theatre. In this new situation Sholem Aleichem
acquired a new symbolic significance as the ‘entry ticket’ of Yiddish into the hall
of fame of world culture. Having lost his potential ideological danger, he could be
safely represented as a member of the immortal family of world classics, alongside
Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, and Gorky.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Yekhezkel Dobrushin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems dramturgye: Pruv fun a foroysforshung’, Tsaytshrift
( far yidisher geshikhte, demografye un ekonomik, literatur-forshung, shprakhvisnshaft un etnografye), 2–3
(1928), 418.
2. Nokhum Oyslender, Grund-shtrikhn fun yidishn realizm (Kiev: Kiever Farlag, 1918), p. 17.
3. Ibid., p. 101.
4. Ibid., p. 111.
5. Ibid., p. 136.
6. Ibid., p. 137.
7. Moyshe Litvakov, In umru (Kiev: Kiever Farlag, 1918), p. 91.
8. Ibid., p. 92.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 95.
11. David G. Roskes, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 147–90.
12. Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Der yunger Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn roman “Stempenyu” (materyaln
tsu der kharakteristik fun Sholem-Aleykhems kinstlerisher antviklung)’, Shriftn, 1 (1928), 6.
13. Ibid., p. 7.
14. Ibid., p. 14.
15. Ibid., p. 58.
16. Dobrushin, ‘Sholem-Aleykhems dramturgye: Pruv fun a foroysforshung’, p. 413.
17. Isaac Nusinov, ‘Er hot gemuzt kumen’, Der shtern, 14 May 1926, p. 2.
18. Ibid.
19. See Meir Wiener, ‘Di sotsyale vortslen fun Sholem-Aleykhems humor’, in his Tsu der geshikhte
fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert, ii (New York: IKUF, 1946), pp. 235–80.
20. Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte verk, i (Moscow: Emes, 1935), p. 22.
21. Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte verk, ii (Moscow: Emes, 1935), pp. 11–16.
22. Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte verk, iv (Moscow: Emes, 1936), p. 20.
23. Ibid., pp. 22–25.
24. Sholem Aleichem, Oysgeveylte verk, vi (Moscow: Emes, 1936), p. 28.
25. Aleksandr Goldshtein, Rasstavanie s Nartsissom (Moscow: NLO, 1997), p. 154.
26. Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert, ii (New York: IKUF, 1946), p. 281.
27. Ibid., pp. 294–98.
28. David Bergelson, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 3–4 (1939), 65–78.
29. Y. Riminik, ‘Sholem Aleykhem der novelist’, Sovetishe literatur, 3–4 (1939), 218–50.
30. Boris Volpe, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, Sovetishe literatur, 3–4 (1939), 254.
31. Ibid., p. 260.
CHAPTER 7
Y
Four English Pots and the Evolving

Translatability of Sholem Aleichem
Gabriella Safran
Facing Sholem Aleichem, translators feel nervous and powerless. His characters’
speech abounds in those elements of Yiddish that are most difficult to render in
other modern languages and especially in English: psycho-ostensive expressions
(blessings, curses, apotropaic expressions that ward off evil); lehavdl-loshn (‘difference
language’) that marks the line between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds;
diminutive noun forms; repetitive grammatical features; words and phrases in
other languages (Hebrew or Aramaic citations from liturgical or rabbinic sources;
Ukrainian or Russian terms that refer to the world of Christian peasants and
officials); and rhetorical and conversational strategies that betray the inf luence
of Talmudic traditions of argumentation.1 Perhaps it makes it worse that Sholem
Aleichem seems to anticipate his translators’ discomfort. The structure of many of
his best-known stories stages something like their dilemma: the oral narrative of
an ‘authentic’ speaker is heard by a frame narrator who, like a translator, faces the
task of making those words accessible to readers elsewhere. In Roman Jakobson’s
terms, the difficulty of ‘interlingual translation’, or ‘interpretation of verbal signs
by means of some other language’, is anticipated by the difficulty of ‘intralingual
translation’, or the ‘interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same
language’, a problem that Sholem Aleichem’s stories thematize.2 In the Tevye der
milkhiker (‘Tevye the Dairyman’) stories, the narrator — ‘Pan Sholem Aleichem’ —
is cheerfully up to this demand. Some of the Ayznban-geshikhtes (‘Railroad Stories’)
feature more frustrated interlocutors, facing speakers whose stories are misleading
(‘Der mentsh fun Buenes-Ayres’, ‘The Man from Buenos Aires’), unfinished
(‘Stantsye Baranovitsh’, ‘Baranovich Station’), or about characters whose very
names refuse to remain in place (‘Funem prizev’, ‘The Automatic Exemption’).3
In Sholem Aleichem’s Monologn (‘Monologues’), we encounter not only speakers
found wanting but also a range of inadequate listeners. One listener actually pushes
a speaker out the door (‘Baym doktor’, ‘At the Doctor’s’) and another is reduced to
sputtering, self-contradictory fury (‘An eytse’, ‘Advice’).
The most vulnerable listener in that volume appears in the 1901 story ‘Dos tepl’
(‘The Pot’), in which a woman comes to a rabbi with the intention of asking whether
her only meat pot has been rendered treyf (‘unkosher’) by the milk that her lodger
114 Gabriella Safran
has splashed on it. Over fourteen paragraphs of talk, she cannot get to the point.
Yente tells the rabbi about her marriage and early widowhood, her poverty, her
business as a poultry- and egg-seller, her difficult lodger Gnesye, her only son, and
his illness. Like fractals, her story consists of seemingly infinitely many segments,
each in the same shape as the whole. Her son, her pot, and her livelihood are all
threatened, on the edge of destruction, kept going, it seems, only by the nervous
force of her words, which she constantly interrupts with formulae signalling her
awareness of the possibility that her own unchecked speech might attract the
attention of the evil eye and thereby lead to destruction: of her clients, she says,
zol zey got gebn gezunt un aldos guts (‘God should give them health and everything
good’); of her husband’s illness, she tells the rabbi, nisht far aykh gedakht (‘it shouldn’t
happen to you’); of her widowhood, nit do gedakht (‘it shouldn’t happen here’).4 Like
the eggs she sells or the glass tops of the lamps she complains about, her well-being
is fragile, likely to break at any moment. But while each paragraph displays her
vulnerability, it also displays the absurdity of her thinking: she cannot add up the
years she lived with her husband, nor can she understand the economics of supply
and demand that govern her brother-in-law’s fish business. At the end of the story,
in spite of all of her warding off, Yente’s words bring trouble to her interlocutor: the
rabbi, overwhelmed by her speech and his own inability to respond, faints.
The rabbi knows he should be able to translate Yente’s disorderly, self-
contradictory narrative into a single, clear utterance of his own — a ruling that her
meat pot is either treyf or kosher — but her endless words prevent him.5 Yente’s real
concern, as we know, is not her pot but her son. When she had brought that case
to a different professional, a doctor, he had offered a prescription that she rejected.
He had told her that her Dovidl should exercise more and spend less time studying
late at night, a recommendation to which she had responded with a mental curse:
Vos es hot zikh mir gekholemt... yene nakht un hayntike nakht un a gants yor! (‘What I
dreamed last night and tonight and for a whole year [should come to pass for you]!’)6
Rational though the doctor’s words may have appeared to Sholem Aleichem or his
readers, they were powerless to change Yente’s situation or her mind. The effects of
the curse on the doctor, whatever they might be, occur outside the bounds of the
story, but the next would-be translator of Yente’s narrative finds the encounter with
her speech so overwhelming that he loses consciousness. The apotropaic formulae
and the curses that Yente uses so regularly ref lect the sense of Yiddish-speakers that
words can cause damage. The ending of ‘Dos tepl’ confirms her archaic belief in
the deliberate or inadvertent power of the spoken word.
This story has prompted a range of reactions that revisit the conf lict between
powerful but seemingly disorderly Yiddish speech such as Yente’s and the impotent
ordering attempts of its would-be interpreters — including a reaction by the author
himself. The year after Sholem Aleichem wrote ‘Dos tepl’, he travelled through
the Russian Empire giving readings. In Alexandrovsk, an enthusiastic audience
trapped him with their questions and applause in a sweltering hall (‘hotter than the
bathhouse’) until past one o’clock in the morning:
Strange creatures in human form kept coming up, asking me to help them
understand the meaning of ‘Dos tepl’, whom Yente and Gnesye represented
Four English Pots and Aleichem’s Evolving Translatability 115
[...]. One person asked why I read to make people laugh and not to make them
cry, and I asked him when his yortsayt [‘anniversary of the day of death’] was.
Then the crowd yelled ‘bravo’.7
Although Sholem Aleichem does not faint, the terrible heat suggests that he was
on the verge of it. In his retelling, the author, a modern verbal professional like the
doctor, is, like the rabbi in ‘Dos tepl’, physically overwhelmed by the spoken words
of non-professionals.
Audiences well beyond Alexandrovsk have been just as intrigued by Yente.
The story has been translated into English four times.8 While only one of these
translations was published in Europe (in Moscow), they were all produced by
translators with ties beyond the United States and the Anglophone world, and thus
it seems appropriate to include an examination of them in a volume on European
translations of Sholem Aleichem. Frances Butwin, a Polish-born American trans-
lator and critic, published ‘The Little Pot’ in her Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories
of Sholom Aleichem in 1949.9 Bernard Isaacs, a British communist who lived in the
Soviet Union and translated actively from Russian to English from the 1940s to the
1970s, published ‘The Pot’ in The Bewitched Tailor, a Soviet volume of c.1958.10 Sacvan
Bercovitch, a Montreal-born Harvard English professor, translated it as ‘The Pot’
for The Best of Sholom Aleichem, a 1979 collection edited by Ruth Wisse and Irving
Howe.11 And Ted Gorelick, an American-born Israeli translator from Hebrew and
Yiddish, translated it as ‘The Pot’ for Nineteen to the Dozen, a collection of stories
from Sholem Aleichem’s Monologn volume, edited by Ken Frieden and published
in 1998.12 Many of the English-language critics of Yiddish who write about the
prose of Sholem Aleichem’s era have commented on this story, including Victor
Erlich, David Roskies, Dan Miron, Ken Frieden, Hana Wirth-Nesher, and Jordan
Finkin.13 And of the scholars who have written about whether Sholem Aleichem
is in principle translatable into English — Maurice Samuel, Jacob Shatzky, Rhoda
Kachuck, Teodor Gutmans, and Jeffrey Shandler — Kachuck mentions ‘Dos tepl’
and Gutmans devotes his entire article to it.14
My examination of ‘Dos tepl’ and its English translations focuses on the unequal
contest between Yente’s words and those of her interlocutor. The story’s set-up
makes it appear that the rabbi should be able to derive an orderly result from his
petitioner’s disorderly speech. Like the doctor whose suggestions she dismissed,
he should have been able to listen carefully to his uneducated supplicant and to
translate her chaotic words into a ruling couched in the phraseology that he has
mastered.15 The story, in thematizing the power struggle between Yente’s language
and the rabbi’s and demonstrating that her spoken words are stronger than his,
raises questions about translatability in general. As I will argue, each of the
available English-language translations of the story treats Yente’s voice somewhat
differently. In this article, I look at the English-language critical literature on ‘Dos
tepl’ (in ‘Critics’) and the four translations (in ‘Translations’), and I compare both
to English-language descriptions of the Yiddish language (in ‘Translatability’), in
order to use ‘Dos tepl’ as a test case to assess the degree to which Sholem Aleichem’s
translatability into English has changed over time.
Critics
In English as in other languages, critics tend to draw attention to three aspects of
Yente’s voice: its quality as ethnographic data; its function as a satirical critique;
or its success as an artistic invention. Dan Miron observes that Sholem Aleichem’s
early monologues such as ‘Dos tepl’ were hailed for their linguistic accuracy, ‘the
“pure” continuity of his idiomatic Ukrainian Yiddish’.16 Some critics stress the
ethnographic quality of Sholem Aleichem’s stories in general, suggesting that they
offer a transcript of the speech of real people like Yente, so accurate that it may have
required some special means of recording. Ruth Wisse observes that:
even sophisticated readers were so amused and dazzled by the natural f low
of the language that they considered the writer to be a ventriloquist, his art
a superior form of realism. As if [Sholem Aleichem] had anticipated the tape
recorder!17
Indeed, the Hebrew writer Yosef Haim Brenner wrote in 1916 that Sholem
Aleichem was an ‘exquisite stenographer’.18 While the reactions of Brenner and his
contemporaries may relate to the relative newness of recording devices in Sholem
Aleichem’s era (stenography had been used in the Russian Empire since the 1860s,
but sound recording was still exciting in the 1910s), they were also sensitive to actual
authentic elements of these characters’ speech.
This linguistic accuracy consisted not only in Yente’s use of diminutives,
apotropaic expressions, and so on, but in larger aspects of Yiddish verbal culture.
Benjamin Harshav, in The Meaning of Yiddish, stresses the continuing effect on the
language of the ‘essential characteristics of “Talmudic” dialectical argument and
questioning’, meaning associative digressions and a readiness to find analogies in
different spheres.19 Michael Wex’s recent popular examination of Yiddish, Born to
Kvetch, insists that Yiddish oral culture is entirely defined by its Talmudic legacy and
by a barely repressed hostility that its speakers express in garrulous complaining.20
Surprisingly, neither Harshav nor Wex mentions ‘Dos tepl’ (which appears to be
a prooftext for precisely their theories), but drawing on original stylistic analysis,
Jordan Finkin persuasively demonstrates the presence of typical elements of Yiddish
speech culture in ‘Dos tepl’. He shows that Yente’s speech uses the ‘associative,
digressive, and oral’ logic and rabbinic rhetorical strategies made familiar to women
in the Tsene-rene.21
Even while the words that Sholem Aleichem gives to Yente can serve the
function of preservation of a culture, or ‘salvage’ ethnography, they also work to
undermine that culture. Critics writing in English and other languages observe that
‘Dos tepl’ is a satirical attack on Yente’s way of life. As Miron points out, Yente is a
victim of a society that makes it appear normal for her to marry a weak, ineffectual
man, slave unsuccessfully to keep him fed and alive, and suffer as she observes the
repetition of this pattern with her son. While she cannot admit this explicitly, her
endless speech is a passive-aggressive attack on the rabbi who represents this system.
Ken Frieden notes that the story ‘dramatizes the tension between impoverished
Jewish life and strict talmudic rules imposed upon Jews regardless of their financial
constraints’.22 But Sholem Aleichem allows the reader to see that Yente is also to
blame for her situation. Dov Sadan comments that Sholem Aleichem ‘received the
monologue by way of a legacy — the legacy of Haskalah literature’. The maskilim
loved to let prejudiced, limited characters speak for themselves so their readers could
see how foolish they were, and Sadan observes that something like this is what is
happening in ‘Dos tepl’ (although of course it would be anachronistic to call the
story maskilic).23 Whether Yente is the target of the criticism or merely its vehicle,
the story, like so much nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction, performed the work of
satire, showing its audience its own faults in the hope of inspiring reform.
Though critics most often stress the ethnographic or the satirical functions of this
text, some also note that it is neither a transcript nor a sermon but an arresting work
of art. David Roskies points out that Sholem Aleichem used folk locutions in ‘Dos
tepl’ and elsewhere not to represent all traditional Jews, but to characterize certain
of them in specific ways. His ‘ethnographic mandate was very narrow indeed’, his
goal neither to preserve nor to attack the old world but rather to draw on folkloric
models in order to produce a compelling experience for Jews who might be inspired
by art to ‘reconstitute themselves into a community of listeners’.24 Where Roskies
sees Sholem Aleichem as producing a new kind of communal art that might
substitute for a lost old one, Victor Erlich stresses Sholem Aleichem’s ability to
create characters who are fundamentally alone: like Ring Lardner, Albert Camus,
and Fyodor Dostoevsky, he uses the monologue to present ‘a subjective, not to say
solipsistic world-picture’.25 Both of these critics, while acknowledging the elements
of authentic Yiddish speech ref lected in the text, step back deliberately from the
assertion that it functions either to preserve that culture — or, in representing it
accurately, to satirize it and urge that it move towards reform. Instead, they draw
attention to the innovative thing that Sholem Aleichem created.
While those critical approaches that interpret the story as ethnography or satire
adopt, in a sense, the stance of the doctor or the rabbi who is tasked with offering a
prescription or a ruling, a rational recasting of Yente’s words that is also a solution
to her problems, Erlich analyses her narrative as a powerful thing in its own right,
whose import is tied to the danger it poses for her interlocutor. The critical debates
about ‘Dos tepl’, then, raise questions that are central to understanding the reception
of Sholem Aleichem’s work in specific and the English-language view of Yiddish
literature more broadly. Is it most important that these texts can represent the
traditional Jewish world accurately? That they can mark the intellectual’s distance
from that world and urge readers to poke fun at it and reform it? Or that they use
a powerful language to draw readers’ attention, to make the author’s dreams of ‘last
night and tonight and for a whole year’ (as used in Yente’s curse of the doctor) real
for them? These questions lead to larger ones about the capabilities of language.
Can the words of Sholem Aleichem or his critics affect the traditional world that
Yente represents, either by preserving or by subverting it? Or does language such as
Yente’s contain its own powerful force, stronger than any of the logical discourses
that might seek to contain it?
Translations
The questions about what language can do that are provoked by the criticism
re-emerge in the English translations of ‘Dos tepl’. Jacob Shatzky argued that Sholem
Aleichem was ‘the most untranslatable of writers’, because of the well-known
difficulty of reproducing the linguistic elements of his characters’ Yiddish speech
in other languages.26 Yente’s voice, as we know, combines all these features. Close
examination of the story’s famous first paragraph in the four English translations of
‘Dos tepl’ (taken chronologically and given in the Appendix) shows how Sholem
Aleichem’s work has been transformed in Anglophone environments. Even just
this single paragraph of the original Yiddish displays the features that make Yente’s
language distinctive — and, presumably, capable of making her listener faint:
repetitive grammatical formulations (ikh vil ... vil ikh, ‘I want ... so I want’; tsi kent
ir mikh, tsi kent ir mikh nisht, ‘do you know me or don’t you know me’; ikh handl ...
handl ikh, ‘I deal in ... so I deal in’); simple repetition (gesezen un gelernt, gezesen un
gelernt, ‘sat and studied, sat and studied’); psycho-ostensive expressions (zol zey got
gebn gezunt un aldos guts, ‘God grant them health and everything good’; meshteyns
gezogt, ‘alas’; olev-hasholem, ‘may he rest in peace’; te-te-te ‘well, well’; zol er mir moykhl
zayn, ‘he should pardon me’); digressions produced by the urge to elaborate on the
significance of a word — usually a noun or verb — that she has mentioned (khotsh
az me vil shmuesn dos eygene tsurik, hob ikh keyn honik far im nisht gelekt, ‘although come
to think of it, I didn’t have it easy with him’); the long description of the mother;
and the attribution of interest and specific questions to the interlocutor, who, it
appears, is actually silent (dos, vos ir zogt: yung geshtorbn, ‘what you said: died young’).
The Butwin translation of 1949 diminishes many of the distinctive, prolonging
elements of the Yiddish original. The first sentence is simply ‘Rabbi, I want to
ask your opinion’, with no repetition, and the second sentence is translated as ‘I
don’t know if you know me or not’. Butwin retains Jewish religious elements such
as the prayer over bread and the fairly long blessing of the customers: ‘May God
grant them health and fortune’. She takes pains to demonstrate the exoticism of
the Russian setting for the American audience, making the drayerl, which is really
three kopecks, into ‘three rubles’, more than Yente would really have had, but
presumably rubles would be a more familiar term to Butwin’s American readers.
And while the Yiddish Yente says that her husband studies (gezesn un gelernt, gezesn
un gelernt), using a verb that implies that he is studying religious texts, probably
the Talmud, Butwin’s Yente describes her husband as studying ‘his holy books’,
a term that makes his reading material into something that might appeal to an
American Protestant audience.27 This translation is somewhat neutralizing (that is,
more stylistically neutral than the original); the powerfully garrulous, non-standard
quality of Yente’s speech in the original is reduced.
In a cautious way, this translation reproduces Yente as primarily an ethnographic
exhibit. If Yente is the ‘Jew’, exposed in translation to the goyish gaze, then Butwin
seems to want to clean her up and make her less disorderly, illogical, and repetitive.
This conclusion is supported by what we know about the translator, who, as her son
Joseph Butwin argues, was inf luenced by the nostalgic attitude towards the past that
she imbibed during an adolescence spent in Charleston, South Carolina. Because

Butwin’s Yente is less repetitive and garrulous than the original, readers are less
likely to see her as illogical or to appreciate the satirical force of the story.
The Isaacs translation of 1958 may have been based on a Russian translation
or the Yiddish original; presumably such a Russian version, whether a literary or
literal translation, would have been produced in the Soviet Union by a translator
responding to imperatives similar to those that motivated Isaacs himself. Like
Butwin’s American translation, this Soviet one is less repetitive and difficult than
the original. It is neutralized and domesticated to Soviet standards: the Jew here is
made less foreign and the religious aspects of the narrator’s speech toned down or
removed. Isaacs’s Yente, like Butwin’s, has no repetition in the first line; a few ‘you
know’s’ stand in for the grammatical reiteration. The repetition in the second line is
made to sound less strange than the original: ‘I don’t know whether you know me
— you may or may not — I am Yenta, Yenta the chicken-pedlar’. Yente’s psycho-
ostensive expressions are shortened, with the translator rendering zol zey got gebn
gezunt un aldos guts simply as ‘God bless them’. Isaacs smoothes Yente out culturally
and makes her speech more uniform. In place of me dreyt zikh, meshteyns gezogt, he
has just ‘we make a living somehow’; instead of volt nisht geklekt di khale af der hamotse,
he has ‘I’d be up the spout long ago’, removing the mention of the traditional Jewish
blessing over bread. Isaacs distances his Yente from what her husband studies, which
she describes as ‘his’ Talmud. Overall, this translation makes the speaker sound less
frantic and repetitive than the original, closer to a typical English-speaker.
Isaacs’s decision to make Yente less religious and less implicated in her husband’s
religiosity makes sense, since his Soviet publisher, the Foreign Language Publishing
House in Moscow, was presumably interested in promoting Sholem Aleichem
as a kind of model for contemporary Jewish readers, who were not supposed to
be religious. Like Butwin, Isaacs made his Yente appear purely ethnographic —
designed as an exhibit not for an American museum (in which Yente’s adherence to
Jewish belief and performance of Jewish ritual would satisfactorily define her ethnic
identity) but for an exhibit of the ethnographic variety of the Soviet Union, meant
for display in an international forum (where her Jewishness would have needed to
be presented as ‘cultural’ and linguistic but no longer religious). Isaacs’s hesitation
about constructing Yente and her society as a target of criticism and satire ref lects
the historical context of the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, in the wake of the
Second World War and Stalin’s anti-Jewish repressions, in which Jews and their
behaviour had been so recently subject to serious attack. Isaacs (or, perhaps, the
person who provided him with a Russian version of the Yiddish) must have wanted
to create an unthreatening, innocently ethnographic Sholem Aleichem, not a fierce
satirist or, necessarily, a provocative artist.
The 1979 Sacvan Bercovitch translation is willing to be stylistically foreignizing
and to translate fully the culturally unfamiliar elements of the original. His Yente
is not quite as repetitive as she is in the Yiddish, but English grammar does not
permit that. Bercovitch deforms English syntax in order more closely to mirror
the Yiddish, as in the object-clefting in the first line and the second: ‘Rabbi! A
question’s what I want to ask you’ and ‘Yente’s who I am, Yente the dairy-vender’.
Bercovitch allows his Yente to be quite repetitive, as in the line about paying loans
(‘grab a groschen here, grab a groschen there, sometimes here, sometimes there, give
a little, take a little’).28 As with Butwin, her expressions are recognizably Jewish
— she talks about buying ‘the bread to make a prayer over’, and she wishes her
clients ‘health and long life’. Like the speaker in the Yiddish original, Bercovitch’s
Yente assumes her interlocutor knows what text her husband would study — she
does not need to identify it. She is both more competent in Jewish culture than
in the Isaacs translation and less competent at telling her own story than in Isaacs
or Butwin.29
While it also has ethnographic elements, the Bercovitch translation makes the
satirical function of the original visible. His Yente is more garrulous and repetitive
than Butwin’s and Isaacs’s, though not as much as the original. This translator’s
willingness to expose the strangeness (from the perspective of standard literary
English) of Yente and her speech — and, by implication, the strangeness of the
Jews — may emerge from its time: in the United States in the 1970s the Jews
appeared less under threat than they did in the American 1940s or the Soviet 1950s,
and thus less internal censorship was needed. As Naomi Seidman observes, by the
1960s, ‘Jewish secrets’ that translators had earlier worked to conceal were now
being released on the page and the stage; just as American Jews were losing their
understanding of Yiddish, the barriers that generations of translators had erected
between Jewish and non-Jewish languages were coming down.30
Bercovitch’s portrayal may also come out of the picture of dialect writing as
clever satire that he offers in his own scholarship.31 He observes that Mark Twain,
the American dialect writer most often associated with Sholem Aleichem, admires
and practises the art of deadpan narration, which draws on the tall tale and the
con game: this ‘uniquely American mode of being funny’ entails the solemn
narration of something absurd, and ‘what’s funny is the listener who believes [...].
In Huckleberry Finn, we are being laughed at for buying into the American belief
system’.32 Huck’s non-standard language makes it easy for the reader to feel superior
to him — and then startled when we realize that we are no better than he is.
Bercovitch uses a Russian term for what he finds in Twain and Sholem Aleichem:
skaz, most concisely defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as ‘an orientation toward someone
else’s speech [...] introduced precisely for the sake of someone else’s voice, a voice
socially distinct, carrying with it precisely those points of view and evaluations
necessary to the author’. Bakhtin argues that skaz produces phenomena that ‘can be
explained precisely by its double-voicedness, by the intersection within it of two
voices and two accents’ — that is, the accent of the ‘other’, the storyteller, speaking
a distinctive and lower-class language, and the accent of the author.33 Following
Bakhtin, Bercovitch claims skaz as ‘characterized by irony, satire, and parody’.34
Like the shaggy dog story — and Sholem Aleichem’s monologues have much in
common with that popular American genre — the butt of the satire is the listener or
reader who takes the whole thing too seriously.35 Extending Bercovitch’s reading of
Huckleberry Finn to his own translation of ‘Dos tepl’, we can argue that he produces
a satirical text whose butt is the listener, both the rabbi who listens within the text
and the audience who listens outside it.
Gorelick offers something quite different from the earlier translations. Stylistically,
his translation is not neutralizing, domesticating, or foreignizing, but rather con-
taminating.36 (As Alexander Burak explains in an article on the translation of
dialect, ‘linguistic contamination of the target text involves the use of recognizable
so-called substandard modes of expression in the target text in order to signal the
presence of substandard language in the source text’.37) Whereas Bercovitch worked
to produce an English that sounded like the ‘Yinglish’ speakers he remembered
from his Montreal childhood, Gorelick told his editor that he wanted to create
something that would sound like a Dickens story, evoking a comical non-standard
language of nineteenth-century England.38 He responded to Sholem Aleichem’s
inventive rhythm with invention of his own: to a contemporary American ear,
his Yente’s speech sounds like a mix of neologisms (‘thrupenny’, ‘chandleress’),
archaisms (‘howsoever’, ‘moniker’), contemporary slang (‘brung’, ‘slim pickens’),
and transcriptions of dialect with elided sounds (‘mebbe’, ‘‘cos’, ‘po’try’, ‘pu’chase’),
and assorted grammatical elements associated with non-standard English (‘I got’,
‘they is’, ‘I picks’, ‘I takes’, ‘all he ever done’, ‘I been’). Anglophone readers have
responded to such translations hesitantly. Given the paucity of translations from
Yiddish into English and the effort that Gorelick clearly put into his work, people
do not want to criticize them openly, but his editor, Ken Frieden, heard critical
voices. Gorelick’s seemingly inadvertent evocation of contemporary American
non-standard English styles may have resulted from his own situation: having lived
in Israel for several decades when he produced the translations, he was immersed in
English literature but had little exposure to American popular culture.39 In cultural
rather than stylistic terms, this translation is domesticating. Specifically Jewish
elements are absent or reduced: of the husband who studies Talmud, we learn only
that ‘all he ever done was set and study, set and study’, English terms that make
no suggestion of the content of his reading. The reference to making a blessing
over bread is transformed into ‘keeps me and mine in meat and drink’. The sense
of this speaker as an incompetent storyteller is retained from the Yiddish original,
and even increased. The Gorelick translation and the Yente it contains are frankly
irritating and outrageously experimental. This translator makes no apologies
for the aggressively difficult quality of Sholem Aleichem’s art. As demonstrated
in this story, Gorelick is not interested in the specifically Jewish ethnographic
content of the text, nor in its potentially subversive nature: he is more interested in
experimenting with language and displaying the result.40
Observing the confrontation between Yente’s unstoppable voice and the rabbi’s
impotent silence, critics, as we saw, responded with three analyses of the story,
emphasizing its ethnographic value, its satirical function, or simply the creative
(and destructive) force of Yente’s words. While the first two approaches adopt the
stance of a translator who works to make order from a disorderly authentic voice,
the third accepts that Yente’s voice may be too strong for any such order to be
imposed. Whereas the story in its original Yiddish prompts all three of these critical
responses — often in a single critic — some of the English translations of the story
limit readers’ potential reactions. Butwin and Isaacs, with their gently ethnographic
approach, make it harder to see the story as satirical. These translators’ urge to
produce an attractive, non-threatening image of traditional Jews must have made it

difficult for them to suggest that these same Jews were terribly in need of reform —
and because they make Yente’s voice less repetitive and self-contradictory and her
psycho-ostensive expressions less numerous, it is not evident why her words would
make the rabbi faint. Gorelick’s contaminating translation gives Yente a stylistically
mixed voice that reproduces some of the frustrating effect of the original — he
appears to be trying to match Sholem Aleichem’s attempt to reproduce in written
form the full, potentially dangerous effect of oral speech — but he chooses to
diminish the ethnographic elements of the original. Only Bercovitch’s translation
creates an English text that could inspire the full range of reactions prompted by the
original — the complete experience of ‘Dos tepl’, in all its strange power.
The differences among these four translations prompt one to wonder how
much Sholem Aleichem’s translators and their audiences have ever wanted the full
experience of ‘Dos tepl’ to be accessible in English. The argument that this text is
fundamentally ethnographic, and the reproduction of that function in a translation,
respond above all to Yente’s vulnerability. The conceit of Sholem Aleichem as a
stenographer or a tape recorder suggests that both Yente and the culture for which
she stands are in danger and in need of preservation. The argument that this text
is fundamentally satirical and the reproduction of that function in a translation
respond to Yente’s limitedness. Like her entire culture, she is f lawed and in need of
reform. These two attitudes, which appear to be opposed, emerge from the same
presupposition: that Yente, and by extension traditional Eastern European Jews,
or the Yiddish language itself, are not modern. Those who hold these attitudes
assume that modernity, as represented by Sholem Aleichem and his translators,
will act on this culture, either by preserving it or by changing it. They assume that
translators, like the doctor and the rabbi in the story, should be able to transform
the contradictory, disorderly words of Yente and everyone like her into some kind
of logical statement that would also resolve their problems. This attitude makes
it difficult for them to acknowledge that Yente’s language is stronger and more
dangerous than that of her interlocutor — and that Yiddish may be able to do things
that English cannot.
Translatability
One of the difficulties in translating ‘Dos tepl’ into English is that different
languages ref lect different world-views and different notions of the abilities of
language itself — and English-speakers do not necessarily believe that language
can function as Yente believes it can. The language philosopher J. L. Austin, the
originator of speech-act theory, expresses an Anglocentric view of the capabilities
and limitations of language when he consigns verbs such as ‘bless’, ‘curse’, ‘wish’,
and so on to the category of ‘behabitives’, words by means of which a speaker
performs ‘reaction(s) to other people’s behavior and fortunes’.41 For Austin, a person
who blesses or curses may be successfully expressing his or her own feelings about
someone, but neither the speaker nor the listener believes that any power is being
invoked that might affect that person positively or negatively — and for speakers
of English living in or near Oxford, England, such as Austin, that is most likely
true. But as Michelle Rosaldo points out, ‘the “force” of acts of speech depends on
things the participants expect’.42 In Anna Wierzbicka’s formulation, the assumption
that the logic underlying the use of words in English should pertain to other
languages as well demonstrates ‘an astounding ethnocentrism’.43 Linguists such
as Wierzbicka argue that words take on functions in specific contexts proper to
specific languages, a situation that poses problems for the translator.44 That is, the
difficulty of translating Slavic diminutive forms into languages that do not possess
diminutives, or the difficulty of translating terms such as the Russian ‘sud’ba’ (‘fate’,
but not exactly), are not only technical but cultural.45 ‘Dos tepl’ stages the tension
between Yente’s certainty that spoken words may accomplish something magic,
perhaps against the will of the speaker, and the rabbi’s duty to produce a logical
utterance in response to her own — and the ending of the story suggests that Yente
is right. To return to Jakobson’s terms, the difficulty of interlingual translation that
Wierzbicka describes is anticipated by the difficulty of intralingual translation that
is thematized in the story.
It may be their resistance to acknowledging the difference in the ways that words
can function in English versus Yiddish that makes English-language critics so likely
to read this story as performing ethnography or satire, rather than focusing on the
dangerous effect of Yente’s words on the rabbi. However, the situation appears to
be shifting. As we saw, more recent English-language translations of ‘Dos tepl’,
when compared to earlier translations, allow Yente’s voice to be more distant from
standard English grammar and less able to communicate information efficiently.
At the same time, increasing attention is being given in English-language writing
on Yiddish to the ways in which it works differently from English, to the whole
complex of psycho-ostensive expressions, lehavdl-loshn, and verbal taboos that
emerge from the fears of Yiddish-speakers that their words might act, and even
cause damage, in ways that they themselves may not even desire. As these works are
published, English grows more receptive to ‘Dos tepl’ and simultaneously more able
to reproduce Yente’s voice — itself a synecdoche for Yiddish — as an occasion for
neither satire nor ethnography, but simply a powerful force that can act on its own.
The last century of translation of Sholem Aleichem into English ref lects shifts
in the techniques and the conceptualization of the Yiddish language and culture.
In a 1991 article, Jeffrey Shandler observes that overall, pre-Second World War
translations are overly literal, use unidiomatic English, and envision Yiddish culture
as ‘remote and alien’, while the translations of the immediate post-war era omit,
revise, or reorder elements of the original in an attempt to produce an appealing,
comprehensible text in English.46 Rhoda Kachuck articulates the impulse behind
these efforts in a 1956 article: ‘a translated work should seem to have been written
originally in a new language’. She cites Hilaire Belloc, who asserted that ‘any hint of
foreignness in the translated version is a blemish [...] the translated thing should read
like a first-class native thing’.47 As David Neal Miller wrote in 1977, ‘the literalness
of earlier translations has yielded to an idiomatic English free of Yiddishisms and of
unglossed cultural referents’.48 This concern for creating a native-like effect in the
target language has justified the search for idiomatic English analogues for Sholem
Aleichem’s expressions. Both Kachuck and Miller assume that an argument for
Sholem Aleichem’s translatability is tantamount to an argument that the effects his
texts produce on Yiddish readers or listeners can be reproduced on an Anglophone
audience, and thus that Yiddish itself is fundamentally translatable. Like Austin,
these writers assume that words can function in the same way in very different
linguistic contexts.
Such an argument does not help translators cope with the possibility that Yiddish
might have simply been experienced as acting on its listeners in ways that English
cannot. While the psycho-ostensive expressions that Yente uses so loquaciously
have equivalents in many languages, they do not have frequently used ones in
English; most native speakers of the twentieth-century standard English in which
Butwin and Isaacs were working to render Sholem Aleichem did not fear that curses
would really hurt them, believe that blessings would help them, make efforts to
avert the evil eye, or carefully observe verbal taboos meant to separate Jews from
Christians.49 Humour also may work differently in different languages, a notion
that Maurice Samuel voiced in a 1948 essay, even while domesticating translations
were being produced:
Jewish humor, or rather, Yiddish humor, of which Sholom Aleichem is the
supreme exponent, has fared as badly at the hands of its translators as the
Jewish people itself at the hands of its apologists; and for the same reason [...].
The translators of Jewish humor, whether they exert themselves or not, make
it appear that Jewish humor is like every other type of humor, the proof being
that it makes some people laugh; and the Jewish joke is one that happens to have
originated or to be current among Jews. To make it Jewish, however, they put
in a few words, in italics, like gefillte fish and shema Yisroel, and invert the order
of subject and verb. The result is not a translation but a pogrom.50
More recent translations of Sholem Aleichem, as of other writers, are more willing
to be ‘foreignizing’, that is, to leave words untranslated and in other ways to
gesture toward the original and to mark its difference from English. As Shandler
observes, such translation ‘acknowledges the extent to which the culture of turn-
of-the-century East European Jewry is, in fact, a distinctive, nonuniversal culture
and is no longer accessible to us due to the obstacles of time, dislocation, and
historical experience’.51 When reading Yiddish literature, as when reading other
translated literatures, Anglophones appear now to be more intrigued than they
were a generation ago by the differences between the source and target languages
and cultures.
As they contemplate the ways in which Yiddish might be fundamentally different
from English, some scholars propose that it is closer instead to a Slavic language.
Teodor Gutmans concludes a 1964 article that analyses translations of ‘Dos tepl’
into German, Hebrew, Ukrainian, English, and Russian with the assertion that the
Slavic translations — especially the Ukrainian — are the most accurate, not because
of the greater skill of these particular Slavic translators, but because of the historical
connections between Slavic and Yiddish cultures.52 Indeed, Ukrainian and Russian
possess some of the linguistic features of Yiddish that are rare in English, such as
diminutives, blessings, curses, and apotropaic expressions, and many idiomatic
expressions in Yiddish exist in Slavic languages as well.
Other scholars point out connections not to Slavic linguistic culture, but to
Russian literature, as signalled by their use of the term skaz. In a number of the
best-known examples of Russian skaz, the depicted characters, such as the narrator
of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the murderer Akulka’s husband in Notes
from the House of the Dead, the overheard plotters in Nikolai Leskov’s Night Owls,
or the Cossacks in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, are unattractive or even
dangerous. Indeed, the term skaz itself was invented by the Formalist theorist Boris
Eikhenbaum in 1918 to describe writers’ attempts to reproduce the voices they
heard among the confusion and violence of revolution and civil war.53 Erlich points
out that Sholem Aleichem, like other modern authors, uses the monologue form
to give readers a glimpse not of a nostalgically tinged lost home but of a tragically
limited world:
By comparison with Dostoevsky’s sado-masochistic Hamlet of the Petersburg
garret [...] a Sholem Aleichem character may seem ‘wholesome’ and ‘rooted’,
closely identified as he is with a [...] folk ethos. And yet, in the works of the
Yiddish master of skaz, the implications of proclivity for monologue are not
altogether dissimilar.54
If Erlich is correct that Yente is cousin to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, then
hostility is fundamental to her personality. And if she is an ethnographic docu-
ment, a representation of Yiddish culture as a whole, then some hostility must be
fundamental to that culture as well. This conclusion, one must assume, was anathema
to the post-war translators such as Butwin and Isaacs, who reacted by producing
apotropaic translations, which warded off the danger inherent in exposing Yente’s
hostility. In contrast, Max Weinreich’s magisterial History of the Yiddish Language,
published in Yiddish in 1973, explains that traditional Jews felt separate from non-
Jews and that Yiddish contains an entire vocabulary of differentiation, in which
terms for Christian things and actions are pejorative and scornful.55 These terms
serve a function similar to apotropaic expressions such as those that Yente uses:
they ward off the danger caused by breaking a taboo. The existence of lehavdl-loshn
and anti-evil-eye expressions in Yiddish indicates that for people such as Sholem
Aleichem’s readers, language could prevent as well as cause damage.
Those aspects of Yiddish that might make it seem especially unusual and even
off-putting have become increasingly part of the discourse about the language in
English, with the publication of Weinreich’s history in English translation in 1980
(and then in an expanded version in 2008), Harshav’s The Meaning of Yiddish in 1990,
and Wex’s Born to Kvetch in 2005. As it is publicly affirmed that English-speakers
are allowed to perceive Yiddish as rife with taboos, it becomes more possible to
translate ‘Dos tepl’ accurately. If the translatability of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish
depends on the state of the target language at a given moment, then English has
grown increasingly receptive to texts such as ‘Dos tepl’.56
This increasing translatability sheds light on the question of the primary function
of Yente’s voice as ethnography, satire, or powerful invention. Both the ethnographic
and the satirical functions of the text assume that traditional Jewish culture could
be affected by Sholem Aleichem’s words — that he could contribute to either
preserving it or changing it. These functions emerge in criticism or translations
by people who assume that Yiddish is at risk, whether justifiably or unjustifiably

so, needing to be either understood and defended, or else criticized and reformed.
Thus the 1968 original edition of Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish works to defend
Yiddish. For example, its definition of the term goyim, sometimes used pejoratively
for non-Jews, remarks,
it is important to note that the idea of respect for others and the values of a
pluralistic society form an old, integral part of Judaism and Jewish tradition.
The rabbis taught that all men are equal in the eyes of God as they do the will
of God.57
(The revised 2001 edition preserves this formulation but adds footnotes that make it
clear that Jewish-Christian interaction has varied over time.58) In contrast, Harshav
notes calmly that Yiddish is ‘no more a living language’, possessing ‘no continuity
in the future’, already unable to be affected by our words, whereas Wex, who writes
in his introduction that Yiddish was ‘born in one massacre and died in another’,
stresses that the language continues to exist among the ultra-Orthodox, who are
unaffected by secular discussions of the language: ‘klal-shprakh (standardized Yiddish,
the language of secular Yiddish revivalists) has adherents; Hasidim have babies’.59
Dovid Katz, as indicated by the title of his 2005 book, Words on Fire: The Unfinished
Story of Yiddish, insists even more powerfully on the continuity of Yiddish.60 And
in a 2006 book, Shandler expands on the implications of the distance between
contemporary American Jewish culture and Eastern European Yiddish culture,
arguing that ‘post-vernacular’ uses of Yiddish have emerged among people for
whom the language no longer serves its original functions.61 What unites all these
scholars is the assumption that Yiddish, whether still alive, definitively dead, or
enjoying a post-vernacular life-after-death, is at any rate not at risk, and their own
words cannot affect its continuity.
For Harshav, Wex, Katz, Shandler, and the contemporary English-language
readers who believe them, Yiddish is not the proper beneficiary of our reformist
or preservationist impulses, but simply an object for our contemplation, in all its
strangeness. We do not act on it; it acts, if it does, on its own. In ‘Dos tepl’, the
translation of Yente’s words into a rabbinic ruling is deferred when the rabbi faints.
In the same way, the translation of Yente’s story into the kind of ‘first-class native
thing’ that Belloc wanted is also deferred. The popularity of Harshav and Wex
indicates that English-speakers need no longer adopt the stance of the doctor or the
rabbi in relation to Yente. They no longer need Yente’s voice to be made orderly,
any more than they need Yiddish to work just as English does. The fact that we
Anglophones might be ready to accept the idea of imperfect translation, which
reproduces a language that does not play by our rules, suggests that it is now time
to translate the rest of Sholem Aleichem’s disorderly and perhaps even dangerous
voices into English afresh.
Appendix: Five Pots

1. The Yiddish original
‘Dos Tepl’, Sholem Aleichem, Ale Verk fun Sholem-Aleikhem (New York: Sholem-
Aleikhem Folks-Fond Oysgabe, 1925), vol. 25, pp. 9-10.
2. Translated by Frances Butwin (1949)

Rabbi, I want to ask your opinion...
I don’t know if you know me or not. I am Yenta — that’s who I am — Yenta
the Poultrywoman. I sell eggs and chickens and geese and ducks. I have my regular
customers, two or three families that keep me going, may God grant them health
and fortune. Because if I had to start paying interest, I wouldn’t have enough bread
to make a prayer over. But this way I borrow three rubles here, or three rubles
there. I take from one and pay back the other, pay this one, borrow from that one
— you twist and turn and keep going! Of course, you understand if my husband
were still alive — oh me, oh my! And yet to tell the truth, I wasn’t exactly licking
honey when he was alive either. He was never the bread-winner, may he forgive
me for saying this, all he did was sit and study; he sat over his holy books all day
long, and I did the work. I am used to hard work, I’ve worked all my life, even as a
child I used to help my mother, Bashe her name was, Bashe the Candler. She used
to buy tallow from the butchers and make candles, she twisted candles from tallow
and sold them. That was long before anybody knew anything about gas or about
lamps with chimneys that crack all the time — only last week I cracked a chimney
and the week before I cracked another chimney...
How did we get around to that? Oh, yes, you say about dying young...
‘The Little Pot’, Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, trans. by Frances
Butwin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949).
3. Translated by Bernard Isaacs (c.1958)

I must have your decision, Rabbi. It’s a very important question. I don’t know
whether you know me — you may or you may not — I am Yenta, Yenta the
chicken-peddler. I sell eggs, you know, eggs, and chickens, and geese, and ducks. I
have my regular customers — you know, two or three houses — God bless them,
they keep me going. If I had to pay interest, God forbid, I’d be up the spout long
ago. As it is, I borrow a couple of rubles here, give it back there, borrow there,
pay back here, and so we make a living somehow. Say what you like, but if my
husband — God rest his soul — was alive today, — te-te-te! I don’t mind telling
you, though, my life with him was not all honey either; between you and me he
wasn’t much of a bread-winner, he wasn’t — may I be forgiven for saying so. He’d
sit poring over his Talmud, sit there learning while I worked my fingers to the
bone. True, I was used to working hard since I was a child, my mother brought me
up that way — may her soul rest in peace; Bassy, her name was, Bassy the Candle-
Maker; used to buy up fat from the butcher, you know, and make candles, thin
candles, you know; those days they didn’t have paraffin, and oil-lamps, and those
glass chimneys that keep cracking — not a week goes by with me without one of
them cracking.
What was I going to say? Oh, yes. You say, dying young...
‘The Pot’, Sholom Aleikhem, The Bewitched Tailor, trans. by Bernard Isaacs (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, c.1958).
4. Translated by Sacvan Bercovitch (1979)

Rabbi! A question’s what I want to ask you. I don’t know if you know me or if
you don’t know me. Yente’s who I am, Yente the dairy-vender. I deal in eggs, see,
and also geese, hens, and ducks. I have my steady customers, two-three households
— may God give them health and long life, because if they didn’t support me, I
couldn’t buy the bread to make a prayer over. I manage, see — grab a groschen
here, grab a groschen there, sometimes here, sometimes there, give a little, take a
little — manage, if you can call it that. Of course, if my husband — may he rest in
peace) was with me now, in the f lesh — well! ... Though to tell the truth, life with
him was not what you’d call milk and honey. A wage earner (you should pardon
the expression) he wasn’t. He’d just sit and study, sit and study, while I slaved away.
That’s what I’m used to, slaving away — ever since I was a child in my mother’s
house (may she rest in peace). Batya was her name, see — Batya the candle-fitter.
She’d buy up tallow from the butchers and braid the candles. Who’d heard then
about gas? Or about lamps with glass tops, that drip all the time? Just last week a
glass top of mine burst, and two weeks before that...
Now, what were we saying? Yes, you said, died young...
‘The Pot’, trans. by Sacvan Bercovitch, The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. by Irving
Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1979).
5. Translated by Ted Gorelick (1998)

Well, now, Rabbi, I got this question, I do, which I’m a mind to be asking you.
Well, you mebbe know me nor mebbe you don’t, howsoever, the name is Yenta.
Only Yenta the Henwife’s the moniker which I gently answers to —‘cos eggs is my
trade, eggs and po’try. That’s to say po’try which they is ducks and geese, mainly.
Well, now I got my steady customers, I do, which they’s two mebbe three ladies
which I enjoys their custom quite regular and which them and theirs keeps me and
mine in meat and drink. And God bless them and keep ‘em for it, too, ‘cos I was
to borrow the money wherewith to pu’chase, and pay innerest, I shouldn’t have
so much as a mouthful of my slim pickens left to bless my bread with. This way I
picks up the odd thruppeny from one or t’other; I takes a bird here, gives it there,
takes another there, gives it here, juggling wares on the f ly (so-called), if you take
my meaning. Eh? Why, o’course! My goodness, sir, but what you think? Why if
my poor late husband (Godrest) was only amongs the living yet? Well, well, well!...
Only mind, now, on second thoughts, I can’t say as I licked much honey whilst
he was alive, nuther, for begging his pardon for saying so, he weren’t much of a
breadwinner that man. No, ‘cos all he ever done was set and study, set and study,
and the one which done the toiling was myself, that’s to say, yours truly. Well, now,
I been toiling from ever since girlhood, I have; that’s to say, from since I was little
and was still with my mother yet Godrest, which her name were Bassia. That be
Bassia the Tallow Chandleress, as she was call, ‘cos she were a tallow chandleress,
which she used to first buy up the tallow at the butcher shops to dip candles with;
“tallow twists” these was, ‘cos there wasn’t no gas lamps back then with the gas
mantle over ‘em, which they’s forever getting cracked anyhow; why, the other
week, one them mantles crack on me when only the week before another done the
same...
Yes, so what brung all this on? Well, now, it’s like you says: Dying young...
‘The Pot’, Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things, trans. by
Ted Gorelick, ed. by Ken Frieden (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
Notes to Chapter 7
I am grateful to the scholars who read this article and helped me improve it: Zachary Baker, Richard
Bauman, Sacvan Bercovitch, Isaac Bleaman, Jordan Finkin, Ken Frieden, and Kerstin Hoge. And I
would like to thank the people who generously spent time helping me understand the art and the
politics of translation: Sacvan Bercovitch, Ken Frieden, Nicholas Jacobs, Cintia Santana, and Ronald
Vroon.
1. James A. Matisoff, Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions in Yiddish
(Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Values, 1979); Jordan D. Finkin, A Rhetorical
Conversation: Jewish Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2010).
2. Roman Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed.
by Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 139.
3. English titles cited from Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. by
Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987).
4. Citations from ‘Dos Tepl’, Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem, 28 vols (New York:
Folksfond, 1925), xxv, 9–10.
5. One might contrast Yente’s speech with that of other women who trade in the marketplace,
whether in fiction or in fact. Her hyperf luent oral performance in the rabbi’s office recalls
the hyperf luency of such women in other Sholem Aleichem stories, such as ‘Konkurentn’
(‘Competitors’) in the Railroad Stories. The author of a study of such female hyperf luency in
Moroccan markets suggests that these performances — and the ways in which women use
the language of magic spells and curses in specific — demonstrate and make possible some
challenges to gender and class hierarchies. Deborah A. Kapchan, Gender on the Market: Moroccan
Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). On
hyperf luency in the market, see Richard Bauman, ‘Performance’, in Companion to Folklore, ed.
by Regina Bendix and Galit Hasan-Rokem (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
6. ‘Dos tepl’, p. 20.
7. Letter of Sholem Aleichem, 1902, cited in I. Klausner, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem der tsionist’, Di
goldene keyt, 34 (1959), 90. Cf. E. R. Malachi, ‘Shalom Aleichem hasofer ha-ivri’, in Masot
ureshimot (New York: Ogen, 1937), pp. 25–31, cited in David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing:
The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 173.
8. These are the only ones, according to Louis Fridhandler, ‘Indexes to the Yiddish Works of
Sholem Aleichem and their English Translations’ (<yiddish.haifa.ac.il/SholAley/indices.pdf>).
Note the earlier study by Uriel Weinreich, ‘Guide to English Translations of Sholom Aleichem’,
in The Field of Yiddish, ed. by Uriel Weinreich (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York,
1954), and David Neal Miller, ‘Sholem Aleichem in English: The Most Accessible Translations’,
Yiddish, 2.4 (1977), 61–70.
9. Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, trans. by Frances Butwin (New York:
Crown Publishers, 1949).
10. Sholom Aleikhem, The Bewitched Tailor (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.).
WorldCat lists publication dates of the 1950s to 1960, and the Stanford electronic reference
mentions a 1942 edition that is not ref lected in WorldCat, and includes a note that the English
is based on a Russian translation by the prolific translator M. Shambadal. However, this note
seems to refer only to the title story, not ‘The Pot’. Isaacs was a British citizen who settled in
Moscow (see note 86 to Chapter 4, this volume), and his publications for International Publishers
(IP) in New York probably came through Lawrence and Wishart in London, according to my
telephone interview with Betty Smith at IP, 12 August 2010. The archives of the IP founders
(with material through the 1970s), Alexander Trachtenberg and George Allen, were donated
to the University of Wisconsin. No scholarly work has been done on the English-language
publishing in the Soviet Union. I learned from an interview with Ronald Vroon (who with
his wife Gail Lenhoff spent a year in Moscow in the early 1970s, doing translation for Progress
Publishers) that until then, those translators had been mostly British communists who had
moved to the Soviet Union. By then, their English had deteriorated, and Progress began to look
for other people — no longer caring whether they were Party members (interview with Vroon,
23 November 2010). Isaacs’s translation may be based on a Russian version provided by another,
but there is no proof of that. The published Russian translation of the story clearly is not the
source of Isaacs’s English version: see ‘Gorshok’, trans. by Ia. Taits, Sholom-Aleikhem, Sobranie
sochinenii, 6 vols (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Khud. Lit, 1961), v, 181.
11. The Best of Sholom Aleichem, ed. by Irving Howe and Ruth R. Wisse (Washington, DC: New
Republic Books, 1979).
12. Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things, trans. by Ted Gorelick, ed.
by Ken Frieden (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998).
13. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 173–75; Victor Erlich, ‘A Note on the Monologue as a
Literary Form: Sholem Aleichem’s “Monologn” — A Test Case’, in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed.,
For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society (The
Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962); Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem,
and Peretz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Dan Miron, The Image of the
Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2000), pp. 327, 334; Hana Wirth-Nesher, ‘Voices of Ambivalence in Sholem Aleichem’s
Monologues’, Prooftexts, 1.2 (May 1981), 170; Jordan D. Finkin, A Rhetorical Conversation
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press), pp. 103–08.
14. On Sholem Aleichem’s translatability into English, see Jacob Shatzky, ‘The Untranslatable
Translated’, in Sholom Aleichem Panorama, ed. by Melech Grafstein (London, Ontario: The
Jewish Observer, 1948); Rhoda Kachuck, ‘Sholem Aleichem’s Humor in English Translation’,
YIVO Annual, 11 (1956–57); and Jeffrey Shandler, ‘Reading Sholem Aleichem from Left to
Right’, YIVO Annual, 20 (1991). Kachuck, who focuses on two other stories, mentions ‘Dos tepl’
(p. 49), and Teodor Gutmans, ‘Sholem Aleykhem in di royvargshprakhn’, in For Max Weinreich
on his Seventieth Birthday, focuses entirely on this story and its translation into English, German,
Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian.
15. The hapless rabbi of the story, as Ken Frieden (p. 187) points out, recalls Sholem Aleichem’s own
experience working as a government-appointed state rabbi in the town of Luben from 1880 to
1883; in other stories in the Monologn series, the place of the rabbi is taken by other professionals
such as doctors and writers.
16. Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination, pp. 327,
334.
17. Wisse, in The Best of Sholom Aleichem, p. xix.
18. Yosef Haim Brenner (1916), ‘On Sholem Aleichem [The Writer and the Folk]’, p. 18, in
Prooftexts, 6 (1986).
19. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990),
pp. 91ff.
20. Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All its Moods (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 2005).
21. Finkin, A Rhetorical Conversation, pp. 103–08 (cited phrase on p. 105). Other critics emphasize
the psychological accuracy of Yente’s voice. Y. Y. Trunk, who saw the monologues as revealing
psychological truths about shtetl Jews that are manifested in their ineffective endless talk, drew
attention to the ‘loquaciousness’ of the characters; Y. Y. Trunk, Sholem-Aleykhem (zayn vesn un
zayne verk) (Warsaw: Kultur-Lige, 1937), pp. 162ff. More recently, Hana Wirth-Nesher analyses
‘Dos tepl’ as ‘an intricately structured muff led cry of pain’, in which ‘language patterns —
clichés, homespun truths, well-worn phrases — mediate between the wavering believer and
his or her despair but cannot heal or entirely console’. Whether in purely linguistic, speech-
culture, or psychological terms, the story appears to preserve something about how real people
who resembled Yente spoke, and critics both in Sholem Aleichem’s own time and later have
recognized that.
22. Frieden, p. 186.
23. Dov Sadan (1959), ‘Three Foundations [Sholem Aleichem and the Yiddish Literary Tradition]’,
Prooftexts, 6.1 (1986), 59.
24. Roskies, esp. pp. 158, 172, 188.
25. Erlich, p. 50.

26. Shatzky, p. 57.
27. Joseph Butwin, ‘Tevye on King Street: Charleston and the Translation of Sholem Aleichem’,
American Jewish History, 93.2 ( June 2007), 129–56.
28. Bercovitch pointed out that he often added ‘see’ in place of the repetition, to convey the rapidity
and urgency of Yente’s speech, the intensity of her desire for the rabbi to understand her words.
Interview with Bercovitch, 20 February 2011.
29. Bercovitch himself explained that rather than thinking consciously about philosophies of
translation — domestication versus foreignization and so forth — he just wanted to convey
Sholem Aleichem, and he was troubled throughout the process of translating this story by
the difficulty of conveying the ‘weight and texture’ of his words, the ways in which Yente’s
intonation in Yiddish produces effects that are crucial for meaning but difficult to convey in
written English. (He compared it to the famous anecdote about Sidney Morgenbesser, who
responds to the allegation that a double negative in English produces a positive but a double
positive does not produce a negative with the phrase, ‘yeah, yeah’ — which, with the correct
intonation, can be negative.)
30. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish–Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 278.
31. Elsewhere, Bercovitch suggests more difference between Sholem Aleichem and Twain. See
Sacvan Bercovitch, ‘Deadpan Huck: Or, What’s Funny about Interpretation’, The Kenyon
Review, 24. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 2002), 127, 129.
32. In an often-retold anecdote, when Mark Twain and Sholem Aleichem met, Sholem Aleichem
said, ‘they call me the Yiddish Mark Twain’, and Twain answered, ‘that’s funny — they call me
the American Sholem Aleichem’. See ‘The Legend of Mark Twain and Sholom Aleichem’ in
Sholom Aleichem Panorama, p. 174; Maks Erik, ‘Sholem Aleichem and Mark Twain: Notes on the
Eighth Anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s Death’, originally published in Tog (Vilna), 23 and
30 May 1924, English translation by Zachary Baker in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers
on his Life and Works, ed. by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Library Classics of the United
States, 2010).
33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 191–92. The Bakhtin definition coincides with two
definitions of skaz that are often cited in Sholem Aleichem criticism, in Erlich, ‘A Note on the
Monologue as a Literary Form’, and Hugh McLean, ‘On the Style of a Leskovian Skaz’, Harvard
Slavic Studies (1954); McLean and Erlich concur on the necessity of the connection of skaz to a
specific narrator, and Erlich notes that the narrative voice shows ‘a deliberately restricted “point-
of-view” [...] a human predicament’ (p. 50).
34. Bercovitch, ‘Deadpan Huck’, pp. 91, 100, 127.
35. See Jan Harald Brunvand, ‘A Classification for Shaggy Dog Stories’, The Journal of American
Folklore, 76.299 ( January–March 1963).
36. This technique is rarely used in English translations from Yiddish. One example of it is the use
of African-American musicians’ slang to represent the language of klezmorim, Eastern European
Jewish musicians. See Sholem Aleichem, ‘Stempeniu: A Jewish Romance’, in The Shtetl: A
Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, trans. and ed. by Joachim Neugroschel (New
York: Richard Marek, 1979). Another example is Gorelick’s Fishke the Lame, in Tales of Mendele
the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third, ed. by Dan Miron and Ken Frieden
(New York: Schocken, 1996). There the editors explain that ‘Ted Gorelick’s rendition of Fishke
the Lame conveys the intricacies of Abramovitsh’s Yiddish diction by echoing the dialects found
in English novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by such authors as Laurence Sterne
and Charles Dickens, whose work inf luenced Abramovitsh.’ (p. lxxii)
37. Alexander Burak, ‘Translating Skaz as Whole-Text Realism’, SEEJ 54.3 (Fall 2010), 458.
38. Interview with Ken Frieden, 22 February 2011.
39. Jan Schwartz observes of Gorelick’s translation of Sholem Yankev Abramovich’s Fishke the
Lame that his decision to imitate Sterne and Dickens makes for a highly readable English text;
however, it also creates a distance from the culturally specific Jewish sources to which the texts
refers and with which it plays.’ (http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/7298/Yiddish.html)
Leonard Prager writes in an obituary for Gorelick in Mendele, the online forum for Yiddish
literature and Yiddish language, ‘those of us who have seen Gorelick’s translations from Yiddish
may or may not have approved of his translation strategy and his phrasal and lexical choices,
but one cannot miss the impulse to freshness and originality that marks his efforts.’ (<http://
yiddish.haifa.ac.il/tmr/tmr06/tmr06003.txt>; interview with Bercovitch; interview with Ken
Frieden)
40. As his editor Ken Frieden told me, Gorelick probably knew that he was mixing styles, but he
did not deliberately set about to create a postmodern translation. Interview with Frieden.
41. J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 160.
42. Michelle Z. Rosaldo, ‘The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act
Theory in Philosophy’, Language in Society, 11.2 (August 1982), 228–29.
43. Anna Wierzbicka, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction (New York:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), p. 25.
44. Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Config-
urations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 18–22.
45. Wierzbicka, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, pp. 50–56; Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition,
pp. 66–75.
46. Shandler, ‘Reading Sholem Aleichem’, p. 317.
47. Hilaire Belloc, On Translation: The Taylorian Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 22, cited
in Kachuck, pp. 45–46.
48. Miller, p. 61.
49. This is not to argue that belief in the evil eye is unknown in the United States. See Wayland
D. Hand, ‘The Evil Eye in its Folk Medical Aspects: A Survey of North America’, in The Evil
Eye: A Folklore Casebook, ed. by Alan Dundes (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, 1981). But it
appears to be more common among recent immigrants than natives, and not to be represented in
the unmarked speech of educated people, the language into which Butwin and Isaacs attempted
to translate Sholem Aleichem.
50. Maurice Samuel, ‘The Humor of Kasrilevkeh’, in Sholom Aleichem Panorama, p. 36.
51. Shandler, ‘Reading Sholem Aleichem’, p. 321.
52. Gutmans, p. 477.
53. B. M. Eikhenbaum, ‘Illiuziia skaza’ (1918), Skvoz´ literaturu: Sbornik statei (Gravenhenge: Mouton,
1962), p. 156.
54. Erlich, p. 49.
55. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, 2 vols, ed. by Paul Glasser, trans. by Shlomo
Noble (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), i, 188, 193–95.
56. Amelia Glaser, making what seems to be an opposing argument to mine, writes that Wex and
Katz defend the ‘untranslatability of Yiddish’. Glaser, ‘From Polylingual to Postvernacular:
Imagining Yiddish in the Twenty-First Century’, Jewish Social Studies, n.s. 14.3 (2008), 152.
However, Glaser means that these writers support (and practise) foreignizing translations from
Yiddish, which I would argue are more successful than the earlier, domesticating ones, and
which thus indicate the translatability of the language.
57. Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York: Pocket Books, 1968), p. 141.
58. Leo Rosten, The New Joys of Yiddish, Completely Updated, ed. by Lawrence Bush (New York:
Crown Publishers, 2001), p. 132.
59. Harshav, p. xii; Wex, p. xi, 51.
60. Dovid Katz, Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
61. Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
CHAPTER 8
Y
On (Un)translatability: Sholem Aleichem’s

Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories)
in German Translation
Sabine Koller
In translation one has to approach untranslatability; only then does one

become aware of the foreign nation and the foreign language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I beg your pardon, but I am convinced that every translation has the right to
be difficult.
Gershom Scholem
When, fifty years ago, Jacob Shatzky spoke of Sholem Aleichem as the
‘untranslatable translated’, he put the finger on a permanent dilemma: Basic-
ally, it is impossible to translate the great Yiddish texts, but nevertheless, the
attempt has to be made again and again!
Gernot Jonas
Introduction: The (Un)translatability of Linguistic Polyphony

‘Di historye fun der geshikhte iz aza mayse ...’ — the opening words of ‘Funem
priziv’ (‘The Automatic Exemption’, 1902), the thirteenth story of Sholem Aleichem’s
Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories, 1902–1910/11), provide an excellent introduction
to the narrator’s passion for storytelling and immediately unfold the panorama of
polyphony that is inherent in the stories.1 They also take us straightaway to the very
abyss of untranslatability. How is one to translate three terms which mean more or
less the same thing, but which at the same time illustrate the linguistic pluralism in
Yiddish and the power of Sholem Aleichem’s narrative art?
Oral redundancy (all three of these words mean ‘story’) and repetition are major
devices in the prose of Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh). But it is not only
aesthetic considerations that make it difficult to translate these key words. What
makes translation almost impossible is that each of these words has different cultural
connotations. Historye resonates with the Russian word istoriia; geshikhte in its turn
derives from the German noun Geschichte. Mayse comes from the Hebrew root
‘ayin-samekh-hey’, ‘to do sth., to produce, to train’, and covers a semantic range
not unlike that of Biblical Hebrew dabar, which can mean ‘word’ as well as ‘event’.
On (Un)translatability 135
Primarily, mayse denotes something that is told, that is the result of oral or written
storytelling (cf. bobe-mayse), but it can also apply to something that has happened
(akin to gesheenish).2 Thus, the three words contain in a nutshell the oscillation
between ‘story’ and ‘history’, between (historical) facts and fiction, which is a key
concept in Sholem Aleichem’s writing.
Sholem Aleichem’s widely recognized ‘art of communication’ (to borrow a term
from Ruth Wisse) has been analysed in great detail.3 He found ‘his vehicle for
expressing Jewish life in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century’ in, as Dan Miron
puts it, ‘an idealized form of spoken Yiddish’.4 His prose is defined by a passion for
talking, rooted in a polyphony of voices and languages. One source of the comic
in Sholem Aleichem’s use of language is the carnevalization of linguistic standards
or, looking at it another way, his predilection for the erroneous use of language.
Tevye’s riveting ‘narrative performance’ contains not only funny malapropisms
that include numerous Hebrew quotes from the Tanakh, the prayer books, the
Talmud, the Midrash and Rashi’s commentaries, but also a considerable number of
Russian and Ukrainian words.5 In Maryenbad (Marienbad, 1912), Meyer, a playboy
from Odessa, offers not only his love but also a lovely (and untranslatable) Yiddish-
Russian ‘mishmash of languages’;6 and in ‘Iber a hitl’ (‘On Account of a Hat’,
1909), the precariousness of Jewish existence and identity in the Russian Empire is
condensed into a Hebrew–Yiddish–Russian narrative.7 Sholem Aleichem continues
with his linguistic fusions and confusions in the New World,8 riddling little Motl’s
speech in the unfinished Motl Peyse dem khazns (The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s
Son) with funny Yiddish-American pseudo-etymologies and macaronisms.
In his Ayznban-geshikhtes, Sholem-Aleichem provides, as elsewhere, a clear
narrative frame. His komivoyazher (‘salesman’) has a double task: the salesman, yet
another of the author’s delightful literary inventions (and another alter ego), lends,
like Sholem Aleichem to Tevye, an ear to his fellow passengers on the train. The
salesman then becomes the storyteller: after having listened to a number of stories,
he buys a booklet in which to write down everything he has heard. Orality turns
into scripture, and Sholem Aleichem’s virtuous mastery of language is concealed
behind the naïve voice of the narrator who is not a shrayber (writer) at all. In ‘Tsu di
lezer’ (‘To the Reader’), the salesman explains his role in the stories. He is travelling
with Jews and listening to them. Consequently, the narrator is, both as a fictional
listener and as a writer, always present.9 Thanks to him we become witness to the
stories, and through him we experience the style and rhythm of the narration.
Almost all of the twenty Ayzban-geshikhtes feature a range of different
communicative situations, mostly involving multiple speakers, and Sholem
Aleichem uses narratological mise-en-abîme to considerable aesthetic effect. In the
speech of the interlocutor to which the salesman is listening, we discern yet other
voices. (Note that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony developed from the
notion of chuzhaia rech’, ‘the other’s utterance’).10 This polyphony of voices is an
important stylistic device in Sholem Aleichem’s use of skaz. Skaz is idiosyncratic; it
may be used as a prism of social and cultural conditions. At the same time, it may
transcend them, go beyond their defined limits.11
To the stylistic polyphony of skaz, Sholem Aleichem adds linguistic polyglossia:
136 Sabine Koller
Sholem Aleichem, the virtuoso of the vernacular, incorporates into his Ayznban-
geshikhtes — on purpose and with a great amount of wit — Hebrew, Ukrainian,
Polish, and especially Russian elements.12 Polyphony creates linguistic tension
between Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian, which is an important aesthetic feature of
Sholem Aleichem’s prose. It is also the source of the comic, ref lecting and giving
expression to the author’s world view.13 In the tale ‘Gimenazye’ (‘High School’;
originally published in 1902 as ‘Tsu der shkhite’, ‘To the Slaughter’), the narrator, a
yid fun mitele yorn (‘a middle-aged Jew’), is under the thumb of his wife, which leads
to a number of comic situations. Another source of the comic in the story is the
attempt by the narrator’s son to master the Russian grammar: dos iz harber vi khreyn
(‘this is stronger than horseradish’, p. 129), especially when the Russian word chesnok
(‘garlic’) has to be declined.
What is more, Sholem Aleichem’s play with different languages is an aestheticized
encounter between Russian and Jewish culture. The Russian vocabulary items,
which constitute a ‘minority’ language in the Yiddish Ayznban-geshikhtes, are used
to reveal the negative attitude of the Russian speakers (which, conversely, constitute
the majority of the population) towards the Jews. Sholem Aleichem alludes with
subtle humour to the limited knowledge of Russian by the simple, uneducated
Jews in his Ayznban-geshikhtes, thus clearly distinguishing them from the assimilated
intellectual Jews who have no difficulty in switching to Russian (cf. ‘Der gliklekhster
in Kodne’ (‘The Happiest Man in Kodno’), 1909; ‘Gimenazye’; or ‘A nisref ’ (‘Burnt
Out’), 1902). The characters’ clumsy attempts to master the Russian language
ref lect the general cultural asymmetry between Jews and Russians. These Jews are
neither linguistically competent in the dominant language, nor do they have the
same political and legal status as their ‘colonizers’. It is no coincidence that a number
of stories deal with matters of registration, conscription, residence certificates, or
wardships. It is here that Sholem Aleichem crosses the border between the comic
and the tragicomic, as praised by Yitskhok Leybush Peretz.14
Sholem Aleichem, who imbibed not only the Jewish literary tradition but also
Russian literature (in particular Gogol and Chekhov left their imprint on him),
describes the situation of Eastern European Jewry from within — or, to put it in
Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial terminology, ‘in between’ Russian and Jewish culture.15
Sholem Aleichem, who started his literary career in Hebrew and Russian, became
a master of Yiddish, fully aware of the Janus-faced Russian–Jewish relationship.
While this relationship restricted his daily life, it enriched Yiddish literature. As we
will see, Sholem Aleichem turns the Yiddish language into a powerful vehicle for
demonstrating the linguistic superiority of the politically inferior.
Deleting Yiddish multilingualism in the course of translating Sholem Aleichem’s
Ayznban-geshikhtes has a doubly detrimental effect: deletion of linguistic difference
levels out aesthetic heterogeneity and its cultural implications. This is all the more
so given Sholem Aleichem’s fundamentally anti-mimetic poetics with which he
conveys the multilingual and (disadvantageous) multicultural situation of Eastern
European Jewry.
Fig. 8.1. Cover of the Sholem Aleykhem’s Railroad Stories in German translation,
edited by Jüdischer Verlag (1995); © Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag
138 Sabine Koller
Translators and their Tasks: Theoretical Ref lections (Friedrich

Schleiermacher and Walter Benjamin)
Gernot Jonas was the first to translate Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-geshikhtes in their
entirety into German. His translation, which successfully masters the linguistic
challenges of the text, appeared in 1995, published by Suhrkamp under the imprint
‘Jüdischer Verlag’. Jonas, a retired Protestant priest, studied Yiddish at Trier Uni-
versity and is the translator of several of Sholem Aleichem’s stories.16 Apart from
two stories translated by Salcia Landmann in 1978 and Leo Nadelmann in 1984,
there are only a limited number of stories translated from Ayznban-geshikhtes, which
were published during the Jewish cultural renaissance (or nostalgia) in the period
from 1900 to 1930.17 Important cultural mediators of that period were Matthias
Acher (nom de plume of Nathan Birnbaum), Berthold Feiwel, Siegried Schmitz
(who in 1921 translated Menakhem-Mendl (The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl) and
Maryenbad), and Alexander Eliasberg (1878–1924). Eliasberg translated an impressive
number of works from Russian literature — ranging from the nineteenth-century
classics Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to the symbolist Dmitri Merezhkovsky
— as well as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, Sholem Asch,
David Bergelson, and Sholem Aleichem, including Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the
Dairyman) and the short stories ‘Keyver-oves’ (‘A Daughter’s Grave’, 1909) and ‘A
khasene on klezmer’ (‘A Wedding without Musicians’, 1909).18 It was Eliasberg who
introduced the German reader to Yiddish literature.19 Notwithstanding the impact
of his translations on the renowned German writers Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann,
and Franz Kaf ka, they were harshly criticized by Gershom Scholem (on which
more below).20
Translation is the ‘agency of difference’.21 In the case of Yiddish and German,
the difference between source and target language assumes special importance.
The cultural-historical and etymological proximity between German and Yiddish
is deceptive; that is, while the differences can be minimal, they are nevertheless
of enormous importance. In his ‘Rede über das jiddische Theater’ (‘Lecture on
the Yiddish Theatre’), Franz Kaf ka, fascinated by the paradox of the simultaneous
proximity and distance between Yiddish and German, insists that the German and
the Yiddish word for ‘death’, Tod and toyt, do not mean the same thing:
The connections between the [Yiddish] jargon and German are so delicate and,
at the same time, significant that they will immediately defy every attempt to
render the jargon in German, i.e. the result of the rendering will have nothing
to do with the jargon but will have lost its very essence. A translation into
French, for example, will be able to convey the jargon to the French, while a
translation into German will destroy it. ‘Toit’, for example, does by no means
mean the same as ‘tot’, nor is ‘Blüt’ synonymous with ‘Blut’.22
Translation is treason: either the translator becomes a traitor to the source language
owing to a lack of knowledge, or the translator sabotages the target language as the
result of a lack of courage. Italian makes this link between translation and treason
obvious, with a single vowel change transforming the translator, traduttore, into
the traitor, traditore.23 According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, only a translation
that is oriented towards production (that is, towards the source language) can be
called an ‘art of understanding’ (Kunst des Verstehens).24 A source-language-oriented
translation makes possible the comprehension of the ’other’ or can convey a ‘feeling
of the other’ (Gefühl des fremden) within one’s own language.25 In the well-known
introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens (1923), ‘Die Aufgabe
des Übersetzers’ (‘The task of the translator’), Walter Benjamin expresses agreement
with Schleiermacher, suggesting that in a translation, mother tongue and foreign
language come into contact.26 Benjamin’s ideas on translatability also provide the
starting point for Wolfgang Iser’s concept of translation. Iser, responding to the
controversial theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ proposed by the political scientist
Samuel P. Huntington and his claim that cultures are fundamentally ‘untranslatable’,
treats translatability as a key concept for understanding intercultural encounters and
interactions. In his view, translatability ‘implies translation of otherness without
subsuming it under preconceived notions’.27
According to Benjamin, a true translation is destined to convey not only the
meaning, but also ‘the way of meaning’ (die Art des Meinens).28 A translation is
successful when it conveys the what and the how.29 This is particularly true for
Sholem Aleichem’s texts, where the how is closely bound to the what. Note that the
title of Benjamin’s essay, ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, is ambiguous. The German
word Aufgabe means both ‘task’ and ‘capitulation’, and is thereby able to express grief
about what is lost in the process of translation. Benjamin is aware of the dialectics
of success and failure in translation. But on the other hand, Aufgabe implies that not
everything needs to be translated. Part of the meaning of the source language needs
to be lost so that other meanings can be discovered in the target language.
A Comparison of the Translations of ‘A khasene on klezmer’ by Alexander

Eliasberg and Gernot Jonas
Sholem Aleichem’s seventh, eighth, and ninth railroad stories form a kind of sub-
cycle within the Ayznban-geshikhtes, featuring the same fictional narrator (Sholem
Aleichem’s komivoyazher) and protagonist (the so-called leydikgeyer, (‘idler’), first
introduced in the eponymous story). The stories also share plot and stylistic
elements.30
It is the voice of a Haysiner soykher (‘a tradesman from Haisin’) that tells us
about the ‘Der nes fun heshayne-rabe’ (‘The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah’) and
‘A khasene on klezmer’ (‘A Wedding without Musicians’).31 Nes (‘miracle’) is
a keyword that links these three stories, and to omit it in translation not only
changes the reader’s impression of the author’s intention but also the comic effect
of the story. Interjections (such as zol zikh aykh dakhtn, ‘just imagine’), rhetorical
questions, and Russian words form important additional stylistic links between
the stories. The story ‘Der nes fun heshayne-rabe’ depicts much more than the
confrontation between a galekh, a Christian-orthodox priest, and a yid, a Jew.
As Sholem Aleichem illustrates by means of his story, the railway symbolizes
the very clash of the dynamic Russian culture and the static world of the shtetl.
Lexically, the railroad system is Russian through and through: the railway station
140 Sabine Koller
is called vokzal or stantsye. There are pasazhirn (cf. Russian pasazhiry, ‘passengers’), a
natshalnik (cf. Russian nachalnik, ‘station master’), and a kochegar (cf. Russian kochegar,
‘stoker’).32 The Jew Berl Esikmakher knows the meaning of the words tormaz (cf.
Russian tormoz, ‘brake’), and ritshog (cf. Russian rychag, ‘piston’).33 He understands
the workings of a locomotive, applying his knowledge of machines in a zavod (cf.
Russian zavod, ‘factory’).34
The Russian railway system, revolutionary for the Eastern European Jews of the
shtetl, also leaves its imprint on the Yiddish language — and on Sholem Aleichem’s
style. To describe the new Jewish ‘secular’ custom of meeting somebody at the
railway station, Sholem Aleichem creates the Russian-Yiddish amalgam vstretshaen
dem poezd (derived from Russian vstrechat poezd, literally ‘to meet the train’).35 Not
a single one of the German translations is able to preserve this Russian–Yiddish
hybrid. Is it really (un)translatable?
Words like natshalstve (Russian nachal´stvo, ‘authority’), tshinovnikes (Russian
chinovniki, ‘officials’), ispravnik (‘district chief constable’), or podratshik (Russian
podriadchik, ‘entrepreneur’) transfer the world of the Russian upper class from reality
to the text.36 Words relating to violence provide yet another layer of Russicisms.
As I. B. Singer mentioned in his Nobel lecture in 1977, Yiddish has no words
for weapons.37 Russian, however, does: the khevre (‘group’) of pogromists, which
Sholem Aleichem ‘russifies’ by also calling them kampanye (cf. Russian kompaniia,
‘company’), approaches with dubinkes (cf. Russian dubina, ‘truncheon’) and rezinkes
(cf. Russian rezina, ‘rubber truncheon’).38 German translations of these stories
cannot represent the cultural and linguistic inf luence from Russian. In contrast
to the fusion language Yiddish, which adopts elements from foreign (for example
Slavic) languages with great ease, German lacks this linguistic openness.
On the Russian side, the Russian-Orthodox priest, the galekh, who readily
invokes anti-Semitic clichés, is unable to remember any Jewish proper name. In
‘Der nes fun heshayne-rabe’ the priest calls Berko (Berl) Esikmakher ‘Yudko’,
‘Hershko’, ‘Moshko’, ‘Leybko’, and, finally, ‘Yitsko’, before he takes his leave with
the Russian proshtshay (‘goodbye’). For him, Berko is not an individual, but merely
a representative of the (hated) species zhid (a pejorative term for evrei, the politically
correct Russian word for ‘Jew’).
The full impact of the Russian elements and Russian-Yiddish hybridizations
mentioned above becomes clear when considering the text as a whole. Plot and
style are closely connected. Hence, wherever a Russian keyword is omitted in the
translation of Ayznban-geshikhtes, the aesthetic and intentional balance of the story is
disturbed. Consider ‘A khasene on klezmer’. In the wake of the railroad system,
pogroms and violence entered the Pale of Settlement. In particular, following the
1905 constitution, terrible pogroms began to ravage Jewish life in the shtetl and in
cities with a significant Jewish population like Odessa.39 (This is the reason why
Sholem Aleichem left Russia that very year.) In ‘A khasene on klezmer’, the Jews
of Haisin face one of these pogroms. Preparing to save their lives, they enter a race
against time. The pogromshtshiki have announced their arrival by telegraph — in
Russian: yedyem (cf. Russian edem, ‘we are on our way’).40 Phrased in the language
of the perpetrators, the message becomes even more frightening.
Eliasberg casually omits this fact. By using wir kommen (‘we are coming’), he
translates the content of the telegram, but not its Russian form. By contrast,
Gernot Jonas preserves the ‘otherness’ of the message within the German context
by keeping the Russian:
Vos-zhe stheyt in depesh? In depesh shteyt mer nisht vi ayn vort: ‘Yedem’ — a mies
vort! (p. 98)
Und was steht in der Depesche? Nichts weiter als ein Wort: ‘Jedjem!’ ‘Wir
kommen’. Ein schreckliches Wort! (p. 112)
[And what does it say in the telegram? Only a single word: ‘Jedjem!’ ‘We are on
our way’ — what a terrible word!]
Jonas highlights Hebrew or Russian elements either by italicizing the corresponding
German or by quoting the text in the original language. For example, vayehi
biymey (‘now it happened in those days’) is translated as und siehe, es geschah in jenen
Tagen, which is set in italics, with explanatory notes given to alert the reader to
the biblical origin of the phrase.41 Noyekh Tonkonog, who finds out about the
pogrom, keeps his honorary title istotshnik (cf. Russian istochnik, ‘source’) in the
German version, accompanied by a German translation. By consistently giving the
‘foreign’ Russian words and their German equivalents, Jonas maintains the rhythm
of Sholem Aleichem’s prose, recreating the repetitions that are a prominent feature
of his stories.42
Take again the word yedyem in the quotation above. It creates its own rhythm,
with the Russian phrase signalling like a shot that the culprits are approaching.43 At
the same time, it draws attention to the tension between the tragic events about to
happen in Haisin and the comic ending of the story. The pogrom fails to take place
since the engine driver (der mashinist, another Russian adopted word) is a ‘socialist
avant la lettre’. And there is yet another reason why the pogrom does not take place:
the passengers are completely and stereotypically drunk.
According to Dan Miron, Sholem Aleichem’s monologues have a comic effect
when the knowledge of the reader exceeds that of the narrator.44 In ‘A khasene on
klezmer’, this effect extends to the lexical level. In the eyes of the (naive) narrator,
a ‘miracle’ (nes) has occurred, a term which is repeated three times in the course of
the story.45 The man from Haisin, like the other characters in the Ayzban-geshikhtes,
believes in the divine, which is indicated by the use of religious vocabulary. Thus, at
the end of ‘A khasene on klezmer’, we find expressions like a gepilder, himl efn zikh (‘a
noise, good heavens’), the interjection mekhile (‘forgive’), and the biblical quotation
ukheyn hayi (‘and it came to pass’).46 The pogromists are oyle regl (‘on a pilgrimage’),
arrive besholem (‘in peace’) at Haisin (to harm the Jews), and sing vi got hot gebotn
(‘following God’s commandment’). Finally, a quotation from the story about
Bileam, uksomim beyodem (‘with divination in their hand’; Num. 22. 7) glorifies the
Cossacks who brandish whips to disperse the mob. Any reader aware of Tanachic
intertextuality will understand this to be a reward for Tonkonog’s prophecy.47
The keyword nes is omitted twice in Eliasberg’s translation of the story.48 Eliasberg
leaves it out at the beginning of the story and thereby destroys the narrator’s ‘frame
of the miraculous’. He avoids Hebraisms more generally, particularly when they are
142 Sabine Koller
used as interjections, and thus removes the biblical intertextuality inherent in the
original. By getting rid of both Russian and Hebrew elements in ‘A khasene on
klezmer’, Eliasberg weakens the linguistic tension between loshn koydesh and ‘the
colonial language’ that Sholem Aleichem introduced into in the text. The aesthetic
tension between the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’, which Schleiermacher and Benjamin
understand to be the essence of translation, is lost. Eliasberg’s disregard for Sholem
Aleichem’s aesthetics also negates the tension between God’s omnipotence and
human limitations (or stupidity). Consequently, a vital source of the comic in the
stories is shattered. It is difficult to laugh about any of Sholem Aleichem’s Ayznban-
geshikhtes once the translation has reduced them to a monolingual text.
In Gernot Jonas’s translation, the word Wunder’ (‘miracle’) is consistently used.
Yet Jonas does not translate every single religious term and allusions. For example,
vi got hot gebotn is ‘neutralized’ to wie sich’s gehört (‘as is right and proper’).49
However, he nevertheless succeeds in recreating the Hebrew and Tanachic context
that is necessary to counterbalance the elements in fonye (‘in Russian’).50 Quoting
uksomim beyodem towards the end of his translation of ‘A khasene on klezmer’,
he provides the closing to vayemi biymey and thus succeeds in giving the story a
Hebrew-language frame.51
Conclusion: Translation in Evolution: An Approach to Sholem Aleichem

In his foreword to a collection of Yiddish tales translated by Eliasberg (1916), Max
Brod wrote, ‘Europa soll von den Ostjuden lernen’ (‘Europe ought to learn from
the Eastern Jews’).52 Brod was an assimilated ‘Westernized’ Jew enchanted with
Eastern European Jewish culture. His praise concerns the content of the tales, and
he seems to have failed to pay attention to the poetics of the original and those of
the translation.
Not so Gershom Scholem. In his review ‘Zum Problem der Übersetzung aus
dem Jiddischen. Auch eine Buchbesprechung’ (‘On the Problem of Translation
from Yiddish: A Book Review’) in the German weekly Jüdische Rundschau of 12
January 1917, Sholem identifies serious mistakes in Eliasberg’s translations.53 It may
thus be argued that Brod glorified the spirit of the Eastern European Jew, based on
a translation which, according to Sholem, goes ‘against the spirit’ of the Yiddish
language.54
Comparing Sholem Aleichem’s ‘A khasene on klezmer’ with Jonas’s and Eliasberg’s
respective translations, it appears that Sholem was justified in his criticism. Eliasberg
shows little awareness of the polyphony and polyglossia of the story (and the resultant
cultural critique). He appears similarly ignorant of Sholem Aleichem’s deliberate use
of linguistic puns and mistakes. The German translator Armin Eidherr puts his
finger on the problem by describing Sholem Aleichem’s art as a Verschreibkunst (‘art
that results from slips of the pen’ — itself a pun) and by pointing out Eliasberg’s
misdirected need for grammatical and logical correctness: ‘In conclusion, one
might say that Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish was, all things considered, much more
progressive than Eliasberg’s stylistic sensitivity could or rather wanted to accept
when it came to [his own] German language’.55 Not to translate the untranslatable
is a venial sin. But not to convey the translatable, as Eliasberg did, is unforgivable.
Translating literature always implies translating culture. If the translator does not
convey an author’s literary style, he or she will fail to convey the sense of the source
culture. Jonas, for his part, succeeds in both respects. Eliasberg’s omission of the
Hebrew and Russian vocabulary which is an integral part of the original text is part
of a general tendency to omit rhetoric and stylistic elements that are characteristic
of Sholem Aleichem’s writing. For example, Eliasberg frequently omits insertions
and rhetorical questions and thus destroys Sholem Aleichem’s skaz and the orality
of his texts.56
The linguistically coarse and superficially comic ‘surface’ of the Ayznban-
geshikhtes at first sight diffuses Sholem Aleichem’s focus, but even a structuralist
analysis of these texts could not divorce the writing from the creator (contra Roland
Barthes). Sholem Aleichem and his very vivid interest in Eastern European Jewish
affairs become clearly visible in his style. The author’s linguistic crossovers between
Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, whether stemming from the author (polylingual
puns, mistakes, and autotranslations) or not (linguistic borrowings into modern
Yiddish), neatly illustrate the complexity of Eastern Jewish and Slavic intercultural
relations. In ‘Gimenazye’ Jews have to learn the zakon bozhii (‘God’s law’; that is, the
Russian-Orthodox Bible);57 in ‘Stantsye Baranovitsh’ (‘Baranovich Station’, 1909)
the difference between nash bog, vash bog (‘our God, your God’) is stressed;58 and
in the pogrom stories (for example, ‘Der nes fun heshayne-rabe’ or ‘A khasene on
klezmer’) Sholem Aleichem alludes to the all-but-omnipresent divide between Jews
and Russian Christians. His comical descriptions of Jews speaking broken Russian
are much more than a mere polyphonic play. They have a political dimension,
revealing the disadvantageous situation of the Jewish minority.59 In view of their
linguistic clumsiness, there seems to be only one choice; that is, the only real chance
for Eastern European Jews to survive is to give up their yidishkayt and to assimilate
(cf. ‘Gimenazye’).
However, in the last story of the cycle, ‘Drite klas’ (‘Third Class’), Sholem
Aleichem presents a pro-Yiddish(ist) manifesto (the narrator calls it an eytse fun a
gutn fraynd, ‘an advice of a good friend’). The (fictional) reader is advised to avoid
first- or second-class travel, since in these classes he will have to face assimilated,
Russian-, Polish-, or Ukrainian-speaking Jews. These Jews, caricatured by Sholem
Aleichem, make the reader feel tvishn eygene a fremder (‘a stranger among his own
people’).60 Worse yet, the reader will not hear a single good story. The real masters
of storytelling are the Jews speaking a Yiddish that is enriched by bits and pieces
of broken Russian, who are squeezed into the crowded third-class carriages.
Yiddish is the only adequate vehicle to express Jewish identity since it facilitates
and encodes its unique culture and mindset.61 For Sholem Aleichem, Yiddish is also
the vehicle of his comic mastery. His wit is primarily a linguistic one. He is neither
didactic nor mimetic but aesthetic through and through. Making full use of the
aesthetic potential of the Yiddish language, including polylingual humour, Sholem
Aleichem reveals that the politically and legally inferior are linguistically superior.62
Neglecting the polyphonic and polyglossic texture of the Ayznban-geshikhtes,
Eliasberg makes void this complex interplay of cultures. He addresses himself to the
144 Sabine Koller
German reader, providing a translation that is oriented towards the target language,
and that considerably changes, if it does not deform, Sholem Aleichem’s syntax.63
(Note that for Benjamin, syntactic faithfulness was of crucial importance.) Eliasberg
does not avail himself of the rhythmic and dynamic features of Sholem Aleichem’s
style, which Manès Sperber dubbed Kunst der individualisierenden Sprachmusik (‘art
of an individualizing music of language’).64 For example, Sholem Aleichem makes
extensive use of the paratactic conjunction un (‘and’), and accelerates the narrative at
the end of ‘A khasene on klezmer’ by inserting parenthetical material. At the same
time, his use of un subverts the use of the coordinating conjunction in Tanakhic
discourse (Hebrew v or u): instead of the divine miracle (the Hebraic subtext),
the un in Sholem Aleichem’s story structures the story of an ‘anti-miracle’. This is
Sholem Aleichem at his very best, and Eliasberg unfortunately proves himself to be
an aesthetic ignoramus.
Gernot Jonas handles the balance between content and form far more carefully.
Invested with profound philological sensibility, his translation preserves Russian
and Hebrew elements in most instances (only occasionally does Jonas explain them
in the text, which is somewhat clumsy).65 Jonas is aware of the oral and rhythmic
quality of Sholem Aleichem’s prose and takes care to retain the aesthetic and
cultural-hermeneutic dimensions of the text. His translation is located at the very
crossroads of languages, cultures, aesthetics, hermeneutics, philology, and intuition.
Reading Sholem Aleichem’s original, the reader becomes aware of the rhythm of the
train, which in turn shapes the rhythm of the narrator’s voice. In Eliasberg’s case,
reading his translation on a train is no means of improving it. Jonas’s translation, on
the other hand, is good — no matter whether you read it on a train or not.
* * * * *
Comparing the translations of ‘A khasene on klezmer’ by Alexander Eliasberg
and Gernot Jonas shows the progress made in translation since the beginning of
the twentieth century. Eliasberg’s translation focuses on content and is primarily
concerned with its reception in the target language, frequently obfuscating Sholem
Aleichem’s style. Early exclusive focus on content gave way to a practice that pays
attention to both content and form in the source language. This practice is followed
by Jonas, who never becomes enslaved by the original. (Armin Eidherr, the above-
mentioned translator, gives equal weight to form and content.)66 Jonas’s recent
translations succeed in preserving the aesthetic and comic potential of Sholem
Aleichem’s Yiddish. Readers of these translations will agree with Bal-Makhshoves
(Isidor Eliashev) that Rabinovitsh farkisheft mit zayn shprakh (‘enchants with his
language’).67
Notes to Chapter 8
I would like to thank the Volkswagen Stiftung for the Dilthey-Fellowship, which makes it possible
for me to explore the representation of Eastern European Jewry in literature and art. My special
thanks go to Petra Huber for lending me a hand in translating this article into English.
1. I am quoting from Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, x: ershter bukh: Ayznban-geshikhtes; tsvayter Bukh:
Yidishe shrayber (Buenos Aires: YIKUF, 1955), p. 142. Translations are my own unless otherwise
stated. For an analysis of the cycle, see esp. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and
Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000),
pp. 109–15; and David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 172–76.
2. In Hebrew, ma’ase has (according to its root asa) the meaning ‘deed’, ‘act(ion)’, ‘work’ (of a
craftsman or an artist)’. In Yiddish, it can mean ‘(invented) story’ (pl. mayses) as well as ‘deeds,
events’ (pl. maysim). It might prove an interesting etymological task to reconstruct when and
under what inf luences (cf. Latin exempla) mayse acquired the primary meaning of ‘story’.
3. Dan Miron, ‘Bouncing Back: Destruction and Recovery in Sholem Aleykhem’s Motl Peyse dem
Khazns’, YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 18 (1978), 119–84; Ruth Wisse, Sholem Aleichem
and the Art of Communication: The B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies (New York: Syracuse
University Press, 1979); Hana Wirth-Nesher, ‘Voices of Ambivalence in Sholem Aleichem’s
Monologues’, Prooftexts, 1.2 (1981), 158–71; David. G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of
Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 147–90; Ken Frieden,
Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1995), pp. 95–224.
4. Miron, ‘Bouncing Back’, p. 134 and Wirth-Nesher, ‘Voices of Ambivalence in Sholem
Aleichem’s Monologues’, p. 158.
5. Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 368, and Armin Eidherr, ‘Nachwort’, in Scholem Alejchem,
Tewje, der Milchmann (Zürich: Manesse, 2002), p. 338. See esp. the chapter Lekh-lekh... (Get Thee
Out...), in Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, iii (Buenos Aires: YIKUF, 1952), pp. 352–56.
6. Cf. Kerstin Hoge’s chapter in this volume concerning the notion of komponenten-visikayt.
7. Cf. Joseph Sherman, ‘The Non-ref lecting Mirror: Gogol’s Inf luence on Sholem Aleichem’,
Essays in Poetics, 28 (2003), 101–23.
8. When Motl and his brother Elye discuss the severity of supervisors in American shops, they
‘analyse’ the etymology of the word ‘boss’: ‘bos’ iz a loshn-koydesh-vort un shtamt funem vort
“balebos”. Azoy zogt Elye, un Pinye muz opshvaygn. vorem af loshn-koydesh iz Elye bal-mitsre
fort a khazns zun’ (‘ “boss” is a Hebrew word and derives from balebos [‘proprietor’, ‘owner’.
‘boss’]. That’s what Elye says and Pinye cannot contradict him — since Elye has the right of
priority — he is, after all, a cantor’s son’); Sholem Aleichem, Ale verk, iv: Motl peysi dem khazns
(Buenos Aires: YIKUF, 1953), p. 268. David G. Roskies gets to the heart of the matter in stating:
‘A systematic reading of Sholem Aleichem provides, perhaps, uniquely, an appreciation for the
textures of languages within a cycle of destruction’ (Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 172).
9. Thus, the monologues he presents are framed by a concrete ‘dramatic’ situation, cf. Miron,
‘Bouncing Back’, pp. 133–41. For a discussion of Sholem Aleichem’s ‘mastery of monologues’ cf.
Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction, pp. 203–24.
10. Michail Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki: Issledovaniia raznych let (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
literatura, 1975). Genette’s narratology serves as the basis for this analysis, cf. Gérard Genette,
Die Erzählung, 2nd edn (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998).
11. Skaz (derived from Russian skazat’), a device introduced to Russian literature by Nikolaj Leskov
and widely used by Sholem Aleichem, produces the illusion of oral speech, cf. Victor Erlich,
‘A Note on the Monologue as a Literary Form: Sholem Aleichem’s “Monologn” as Test Case’,
in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society,
ed. by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Alexander Erlich, Rachel Erlich, and Joshua A. Fishman (The
Hague: Mouton & Co, 1964), pp. 44–50; Robert Hodel, Betrachtungen zum skaz bei N. S. Leskov
146 Sabine Koller
und Dragoslav Mihajlovitsh, (Berne: Peter Lang, 1994); Wirth-Nesher, ‘Voices of Ambivalence in
Sholem Aleichem’s Monologues’, pp. 158–59; Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity, p. 364; and
Gabriella Safran’s article in this volume. A detailed analysis of Leskov’s Russian skaz (he plays
with archaisms and Old Church Slavonic) and Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish variant would in my
opinion constitute an interesting endeavour.
12. Particularly the last story ‘Drite klas’ (‘Third Class’) ends on such a polyphonic note. Another
example is ‘Bashert an umglik’ (‘Fated for Misfortune’, 1902), where Sholem Aleichem plays
with the phonetic proximity of Russian opekun (‘guardian’) and Hebrew afikomen (‘a piece of
bread hidden on the occasion of Pesach’, p. 183). The German translator Gernot Jonas explains
this pun to the interested reader (Scholem Alejchem, Eisenbahngeschichten (Frankfurt am Main:
Jüdischer Verlag, 1995), p. 261). Of course, Sholem Aleichem is not the only one to use this
device: one needs only think of Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s Kitsur masoes Binyomin ha-shlishi
(The Travels of Benjamin the Third, 1878).
13. In his study on Sholem Aleichem, the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Y. Y. Trunk stresses the
relation between the comic, Sholem Aleichem’s creative imagination and his world view:
‘Sholem Aleykhems humor kumt fun zayn dikhterisher fantazye, shtamt gor fun zayn
kinstlerisher naivitet. Di khitre shkotseray fun dem vitsling bashaft bloyz dem anekdotishn
humor. Der ekhter, tiferer humor, ober, der humor vi a velt-gefil, iz durkhoys an eygnshaft fun
der kinstlerisher fantazye.’ (‘Sholem Aleichem’s humour derives from his artistic imagination,
stems, moreover, from his artistic naiveté. The cunning humour of the joker generates nothing
but an anecdotal kind of humour. The real, profound kind of humour, humour as a world view,
is in its entirety a quality of the artistic imagination.’; Y. Y. Trunk, Sholem Aleykhem: Zayn vezn
un zayne verk (Varshe: Kultur-Lige, 1937), p. 39).
14. Y. L. Perets, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem’, in: Ale verk, vi (New York: CYCO, 1947), pp. 301–04.
15. Homi Bhabha provides a general outline of postcolonial theory and its aims in The Location of
Culture (London: Routledge, 2000).
16. Cf. Gernot Jonas, ‘Den “Unübersetzbaren” übersetzen. Scholem-Alejchems “Tepl” — Ein
Versuch’, in Jiddische Philologie: Festschrift für Erika Timm, ed. by Walter Röll and Simon Neuberg
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), pp. 243–57; Scholem Alejchem, Ein Omelett wie bei den
Reichen: Monologe und Zwiegespräche (Berlin: Edition Dodo, 2003); and Scholem Alejchem, Die
Tochter des Rebben: Kindergeschichten (Berlin: Edition Dodo, 2010). At present, Gernot Jonas is
working on a translation of some of Sholem Aleichem’s Kasrilevke stories.
17. For a survey of German translations of the Railroad Stories, see Scholem Alejchem,
Eisenbahngeschichten, pp. 275–76.
18. Cf. Scholem Alejchem, Hochzeit ohne Musikanten, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1999),
pp. 155–62 and 130–39; Eliasberg changes the title ‘Keyver oves’ to ‘Im Monat Elul’ (‘In the
Month of Elul’), Jonas translates it more precisely as ‘An den Gräbern der Lieben’ (‘At the Graves
of the Loved Ones’).
19. Andreas Kilcher, ‘Alexander Eliasberg’, Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur, ed. by
Andreas Kilcher (Stuttgart J. B. Metzler, 2000), p. 136.
20. Cf. ibid., pp. 135–37.
21. Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Zwischen den Sprachen: Einleitung’, in Die Sprache der Anderen, ed. by
Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), p. 7.
22. Franz Kaf ka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlass in der Fassung der
Handschrift (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994–95), p. 152. Following his
encounter with the Yiddish theatrical company centred on Yitskhok Levy, Kaf ka’s Yiddish
‘renaissance’ was triggered by his interest in the language, cf. Marek Nekula, Franz Kafkas
Sprachen: ‘... in einem Stockwerk des innern babylonischen Turmes...’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 2003), pp. 31–39. As a consequence of his analysis of how Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Dos tepl’
(‘The Pot’) was translated into German, English, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Russian, Teodor
Gutmans comes to the conclusion: ‘nisht gekukt af ir etimologisher noentkeyt tsu yidish iz daytsh
efsher di shprakh vos ir gayst iz tsum vaytstn fun yidish’ (‘though German is etymologically close to
Yiddish, the spirit of the German language is the most remote from Yiddish’); Teodor Gutmans,
‘Sholem Aleykhem in di royvargshprakhn’, in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies
in Jewish Language, Literature, and Society (London: Mouton, 1964), pp. 447–49, esp. p. 478.
23. Cf. Wolf Lepenies, ‘Die Übersetzbarkeit der Kulturen: Ein europäisches Problem, eine Chance
für Europa’, in Die Sprache der Anderen, ed. by Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), p. 98.
24. Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher‘s ‘Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’ (1813), in
Das Problem des Übersetzens, ed. by Hans Joachim Störig (Stuttgart: Henry Goverts Verlag, 1963),
pp. 38–70.
25. Ibid., p. 54.
26. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977),
p. 55. Benjamin ref lects the dynamic interaction between the original and its translation for
messianic reasons, cf. Samuel Weber, ‘Un-Übersetzbarkeit: Zu Walter Benjamins Aufgabe
des Übersetzers’, in Die Sprache der Anderen, ed. by Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt a. M.:
Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), pp. 121–45. As Samuel Weber points out, Walter Benjamin
regards language, translation, and translatability from the point of view of (the overcoming of )
historicity.
27. <http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol4/iser.html> (August 2010).
28. Benjamin, Illuminationen, p. 55.
29. Samuel Weber explains this tension between meaning and form, between content and its
aesthetic representation, by using the terms ‘the semantic’ and ‘the syntactic’ (pp. 138–39).
30. Geyn leydik in Yiddish means to ‘have nothing to do’, ‘to idle’, ‘to loaf ’. Sholem Aleichem plays
with the words leydik (‘empty’) — since the train is almost empty — and ‘lazy’ (since the train
is going very slowly). This ambivalence makes the term difficult to translate: Jonas chooses
Langweiler (‘bore’, which highlights the aspect of idleness), while Eliasberg’s choice Leergänger
(‘empty’) puts the focus on the emptiness.
31. See pp. 83–94 and 95–101. In Yiddish, the seventh day of Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles) is
called heshayne rabe (Hebrew hoshana rabbah, ‘great Hoshana’). Its name derives from the prayer
hoshana (‘help us’) and it is supposed to incur God’s blessing for the next year and, in general,
for redemption in the future.
32. Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-geshikhtes, p. 101.
33. Ibid., p. 90.
34. Ibid., p. 87.
35. ‘Vstretshaen dem poyezd, darft ir visn, iz bay undz a minheg umetum in undzer gegnt’ (‘meeting the
train’ is, you must know, a standard tradition in our parts’). Gernot Jonas translates the hybrid
expression as die Bahn empfangen (‘meet the train’) and, consequently, preserves the strangeness
of the original. See Kerstin Hoge’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of how the Russian–
Yiddish amalgams that occur in Maryenbad are preserved in German and English translation.
36. Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-geshikhtes, pp. 96–98.
37. Nobel Lecture (London: Cape, 1978), p. 14.
38. Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-geshikhtes, p. 101. Every translation into Russian will unfortunately
lose the entire tension arising from the juxtaposition and intermingling of the language of the
oppressors and the language of the oppressed. For a discussion of Sholem Aleichem in Russian
translations, see Gennady Estraikh’s chapter in the present volume.
39. Pogrom is, by the way, a Russian word that can look back on an inglorious career in many
European languages.
40. Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-geshikhtes, pp. 98f.
41. Scholem Alejchem, Eisenbahngeschichten, pp. 108 and 250. The traditional Yiddish introductory
formula goes back to the Book of Ruth 1.1 resp. the Book of Esther 1.1, which is the archetext
of Jewish persecution. In other stories, Jonas keeps the Hebrew elements from the Tanakh and
explains them in his appendix.
42. For example, in ‘Gimenazye’, asife (‘meeting’) and its Russian (!) translation-cum-explanation
[a] sovyet heyst dos (‘which means [Russian] council’) are repeated four times (p. 133). The
Russianisms in ‘A khasene on klezmer’ are emphasized by aptronyms like ‘Noyekh Tonkonog’
(from Russian ton’kii, ‘thin’, and nog, ‘foot’) and ‘Nokhem Kasoy’ (from Russian kosoi, ‘slanted’,
‘squinting’).
43. The repetition of naplyevat (Russian naplevat’, ‘not give a damn’) in the seventeenth story,
‘Bashert an umglik’ (’Fated for Misfortune’, 1902; pp. 182–95), has a similarly rhythmicizing
148 Sabine Koller
and defamiliarizing effect. It is used to characterize Daniel, who costs the narrator, the good-
for-nothing’s guardian, a lot of nerves as well as money.
44. Cf. Wirth-Nesher, ‘Voices of Ambivalence in Sholem Aleichem’s Monologues’, p. 160.
45. Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-geshikhtes, pp. 96, 99.
46. All words listed in this and the following sentence can be found in Sholem Aleichem, Ayznban-
geshikhtes, p. 101.
47. Hebrew kesem means ‘charm’, ‘enchantment’, ‘magic’, ‘divination’, ‘spell’, (biblical) ‘oracle’. In
Num. 22, the elders of Moab and Midian come to Bileam to inf lame him against the Israelites
and to deliver Balak’s message that is to curse them — uksomim beyodem. In Sholem Aleichem’s
story, the magic is replaced by the concrete. David G. Roskies concludes: ‘A more ironic gloss
on the story than this Hebrew–Yiddish wordplay can hardly be imagined. [...] Beyond the
incongruity of translating ‘ksomim’, a word denoting magic, by the Slavic word ‘kantshikes’,
‘whips’, lies a haunting analogue: to be rescued from a pogrom by Cossack’s whips is not unlike
being caught between Balak’s curse and Balaam’s equivocation’ (Roskies, Against the Apocalypse,
p. 175). As I see it, Sholem Aleichem alludes ironically to the (however minimal) possibility of
self-defence.
48. Scholem Alejchem, Hochzeit ohne Musikanten, p. 160.
50. Gennady Estraikh suggests that in fonye — a phrase designating both the Russian language and
the Russian empire — derives from the Russian name ‘Afonya’ (a nickname for ‘Afonasy’).
Initially, the term was widely used in Russia and not restricted to New York Yiddish.
51. In order to elucidate the linguistic possibilities of the German text, the French and the Russian
translations ought to be taken into consideration: L. Judkevich translated ‘A khasene on
klezmer’ as ‘Byt’ by svad’be, da muzyki ne nashlos’ (literally ‘No music could be found for the
wedding’), Sholom-Aleychem, Zapiski kommivoiazhera, pp. 78–83). In French, the short story
was published as ‘Une noce sans musiciens’ in the translation of Jacques Mandelbaum (Sholom
Aleikhem, Contes ferroviaires, pp. 111–18). In the description of the mob’s arrival, Mandelbaum
maintains in his translation — with the exception of the Hebrew words from the Bible — the
religious lexicon (pèlerinage, ainsi que Dieu l’ordonne). Semantically, they are conveyed, but they
do not appear as a(n ironic) quotation, like uksomim beyodem. Judkevich, with the exception of
kak sam Bog i velel (Yiddish vi got hot gebotn, ‘as God commanded’), in his Russian translation
fails to recreate the religious subtext. His zashagali po shpalam (‘approach with rapid strides’), for
example, conveys the pogromshtshikis’ fast arrival, but not the religious connotations. Judkevich’s
translation, however, successfully conveys the colloquial quality of the original and recreates the
oral quality of the original, the principle of skaz.
52. Max Brod, ‘Wie soll man diese Geschichten lesen?’, in Dreibuch: Jüdische Geschichten von Sch.
Gorelik, I. L. Perez, Scholem Alejchem (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1916), p. 2.
53. Scholem in particular criticizes Eliasberg’s tendency to omit Hebrew elements altogether or to
convey their meaning only vaguely, cf. Jüdische Rundschau, 12 January 1917, p. 17, and 26 January
1917, pp. 35–36. In order to be able to preserve the essence of the Yiddish language, particularly
the tension created by the juxtaposition of elements of different languages in the translation,
Scholem demands that the translators have a command of Hebrew (p. 16): ‘otherwise, the
translation is in danger of losing its soul and of turning cold; that is, of losing that very specific
kind of heat that is caused by the friction of Hebrew and German within the Yiddish language’
( Jüdische Rundschau, 12 January 1917, p. 16). Scholem does not argue from an aesthetic point of
view. Nevertheless, his requirements are the same: A translation has to maintain the otherness of
Yiddish. In this, he comes close to the concept of translation that Walter Benjamin is to develop
some years later.
54. Jüdische Rundschau, 26 January 1917, p. 36.
55. Eidherr, ‘Nachwort’, p. 340. Armin Eidherr, born in 1963, is an Austrian writer, translator,
and Associate Professor of Yiddish language and literature at the Paris-Lodron-University
in Salzburg. In 2000, he was awarded the ‘Johann-Heinrich-Voß-Preis für Übersetzung’ by
the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. He has translated, among others, Sholem
Aleichem, Peretz and Yoysef Burg into German.
56. Eliasberg neither translates nor vos-zhe den? (‘What’s up?’, p. 101) at the end of ‘A khasene on
klezmer’ nor loz zikh aykh dakhtn (‘just imagine’), which is repeated several times in the story.
58. Ibid., p. 37.
59. Cf. Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1965), ii, 19–54, esp. pp. 37–38. Following Ruth Wisse, Dan Miron explains
how Sholem Aleichem and Franz Kaf ka are linked by the pogroms in 1903 and 1905 and the
Beilis ‘blood libel’ trial which shook the Jewish world (Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity,
p. 364).
61. For this reason, Jacques Derrida, undoubtedly the twentieth century’s most famous Algerian-
French philosopher of Jewish origin, draws attention to the ‘identificatory quality’ of Yiddish in
his ref lections about his mother tongue: ‘As far as language in the narrower sense is concerned,
the Jewish [Algerian] community lacked even the opportunity to retreat to a language like
Yiddish that could have guaranteed an inner seclusion, serving as a means of protection against
the official culture and language as well as in various socio-semantic situations.’ ( Jacques
Derrida, ‘Die Einsprachigkeit des Anderen oder die Prothese des Ursprungs’, in Die Sprache der
Anderen, ed. by Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), p. 31).
With this quote I do not intend to support essentialist identity constructions, but want to stress
the role of Yiddish within the complex quests for identity which Sholem Aleichem pursues in
literature.
62. This polemic plea for the art of Yiddish storytelling is, of course, ambivalent. Is it an (admittedly
entertaining) strategy for coping with the failure to act, as Y. Y. Trunk, Victor Erlich, or Dan
Miron in his analysis of Tevye’s interlocution with Sholem Aleichem suggest? Cf. Trunk, pp.
161–224, esp. p. 199; Erlich, ‘A Note on the Monologue as a Literary Form’, pp. 49–50; Miron,
From Continuity to Contiguity, p. 386.
63. In his answer to Gershom Scholem, Eliasberg justifies his translations with the claim that they
are meant for a non-Jewish reading public; Jüdische Rundschau, 26 January 1917, p. 35. Eventually,
Nathan Birnbaum became involved in the heated debate between the translators, cf. Kilcher,
‘Alexander Eliasberg’, p. 136.
64. Die Wasserträger Gottes (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1974), p. 108.
65. Occasional inaccuracies are of little consequence (see Scholem Alejchem, pp. 186–87).
Unfortunately, Jonas at times deletes the linguistic mistakes that Sholem Aleichem lets his
characters make; for example, Jonas replaces dentirist in ‘Keyver oves’ (p. 85) with the correct
word dentist.
66. Eidherr pays close attention to the specific style of the Yiddish author to be translated and is
sufficiently experienced (and creative) to experiment with the German language. He makes
skilful use of different varieties of German to create aesthetic equivalences in the target
language. His German translation of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is a re-creation.
67. Bal-Makhshoves, ‘Sholem Aleykhem’, in Geklibene verk (New York: CYCO, 1953), p. 173.
CHAPTER 9
Y
Laughing Matters:
Irony and Translation in
‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’
Alexandra Hoffman
It is impossible to translate, but we must. It is possible to fail (in an infinite

variety of ways), impossible to succeed (in the one true way). Augustine called
it the overcoming of despair through fortitude, but the continuing need for
fortitude speaks of continuing despair and even suggests that fortitude might
itself, in its desperate attempts to overcome despair, generate despair.
Douglas Robinson1
Doktoyrim heysn lakhn. Lakhn iz gezunt.
Sholem Aleichem 2
Introduction
Humour is often talked about as being untranslatable. ‘It sounds better in ...’ is a
universal truism; any language may replace the ellipsis. A text comes from a system
of meaning, and the reader of a translation lacks either access to this system or
f luency, thus not being able to read the humorous original, requiring a translation
instead. Different languages are markers of cultures that are particular, different
from each other, embedded in distinct historical contexts and widely differing
social and political conceptions of community.
Yiddish as a source language provides a fruitful challenge for the translator. Its
literature bears the markings of goles, ‘diaspora, exile’, as the language carries within
it the history of Jewish migrations in and beyond Europe, and its development
has been driven by various ideological aspirations, which were associated with
locales just as varied. Sholem Aleichem’s figure looms large in most accounts of
Yiddish literary history, no doubt in part because of his own efforts at canonization
through the construction of a genealogy in which Mendele Moykher-Sforim was
the grandfather and Sholem Aleichem himself the grandson. Thus the work of
translating Sholem Aleichem is also the work of establishing the contours of Yiddish
literature and its role in Jewish communities.
Sholem Aleichem was an ironic humorist, and ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’,
which provides the focus of this chapter, is an ironic monologue. Rendering
Laughing Matters 151
the humour of the source language in the target language presents a significant
challenge to translating Sholem Aleichem from Yiddish. The irony of the text,
I propose, both facilitates and impedes the translator’s work, providing widely
varied possibilities of translation while, at the same time, drawing attention to the
inadequacy of the target-language text. The inherent ambiguity of irony allows
for different, even opposing interpretations of the political thrust of the text. This
is crucial for both the Soviet and the Western context considered in this chapter
(although the repercussions for offering an interpretation that does not conform to
state ideology are much more dangerous in the Soviet context). The Soviet critic
and translator, working in a socialist multicultural environment, will emphasize the
strands in Sholem Aleichem’s work which refer to class consciousness and struggle,
while minimizing the particularistic aspects which may be deemed nationalistic.
The Western critic and translator, working within a capitalist, liberal multicultural
society, is quite free to emphasize the ethnic particularity of the work, especially if
it is relegated nostalgically to politically innocuous spheres, but likely to minimize
the potentially radical strands of Sholem Aleichem’s work.
In Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious, Freud writes of irony that:
Irony can only be employed when the other person is prepared to hear the
opposite, so that he cannot fail to feel an inclination to contradict. As a result
of this condition, irony is exposed particularly easily to the danger of being
misunderstood. It brings the person who uses it the advantage of enabling him
readily to evade the difficulties of direct expression.3
Irony is inherently dialogical, inviting argument, and it is the operation of irony
which allowed Soviet Yiddishists to keep Sholem Aleichem’s texts in circulation,
and which allows one to read these texts as subversive today. Translations of Sholem
Aleichem illuminate the ways in which irony reveals varied, shifting political
standpoints. Central to the present inquiry are the Soviet Yiddish translators and
critics who rejected non-communist interpretations of Sholem Aleichem while
ensuring the afterlife of the great humorist’s work in the Soviet Union.
An interesting case of a Soviet English-language translation of Sholem Aleichem
is the translation of his story ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’, published in the late
1950s. Addressed to the ‘world proletariat’ reader, it was presented as part of
the international communist oeuvre. The peculiarity of this translation is one
of the main inspirations for this chapter. While the Soviet translation seeks to
reify politically sanctioned attitudes concerning religious, ethnic, national, and
class identifications, Sholem Aleichem’s irony eludes these constraints, revealing
transnational, particularist Jewish traces. This chapter is divided into three sections.
In the first (‘ “It Sounds Better in Yiddish”: The Difficulties of Irony’) I explore the
intersections of irony and translation; in the second (‘Sholem Aleichem is (not) Red:
The Irony of Politics’) I identify the ideological loyalties that Soviet and Western
translations needed to maintain, as facilitated by the irony of the original; and
finally in the third (‘On Time and Happiness: Translated Irony’) I provide a close
reading of three English translations, focusing on the ironic conceptualization of
‘human’ and ‘happiness’.
Irony draws attention to the dual nature of the translator’s task. The translator
152 Alexandra Hoffman
must guide the target-language reader in a foreign system of meaning by means of

creating a common language; she must turn a ‘no man’s land’ into a safe meeting
place. In spite of affirming boundaries and difference, translation points to a
moment of a shared experience as if to say: I want to tell this to you, I want to share
this with you, even if the meaning is not ‘quite so’ when I translate all the words and
sentences and write countless footnotes explaining the associations of a particular
word or turn of phrase (‘countless’ not because I am an expert on the source
language, but precisely because my own associations would not be enough because
meaning is more often than not unstable, slippery, confusing, or ambiguous). This
is the ‘ambiguity’ in which literary scholars delight in primary sources but tend to
deny in their own and each other’s writing. Translation might fail, but it constructs
a common space, however contested.
‘It Sounds Better in Yiddish’: The Difficulties of Irony

The irony in the Yiddish text of ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ resists translation,
relying on linguistic and cultural specificity. That is, irony requires the reader not
only to understand the original context but also to grasp that something is missing,
that the apparent meaning hides behind another meaning which is equally context-
specific. Irony is linked to agency; it makes use of translators, writers, and readers
by motivating a multiplicity of echoing meanings that continually fold and twist.
Irony is a repetition of the same word with changed meaning, whereas translation
is meant to reproduce the same meaning while changing the word, and both may
be considered ‘echoes’. In Echoes of Translation, Rainer Nägele suggests that an
echo requires not only an original utterance to be repeated, but also walls from
which the sound can bounce off.4 An echo is thus wholly dependent on boundaries
and obstacles, and it is through its bouncing return that we orient ourselves in
an environment, know our position. The challenge of translating an ironic text
consists in creating the ‘echo effect’, a discourse of contesting and complementing
interpretations.
‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ derives much of its meaning from its status as a story
heard and retold by a storyteller. The plot as such is driven not by action but by
the interaction between three participants: the folksy autobiographical narrator, the
travelling salesman to whom the story is relayed, who is also the author Sholem
Aleichem,5 and the implied audience/reader. ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ is related
by the storyteller and commercial traveller Sholem Aleichem, who has encountered
yet another unusual fellow, Reb Alter, a yidl (literally a ‘little Jew’), on one of
his third-class train trips. Reb Alter’s son is very ill, most likely consumptive.
Nevertheless, the yidl is glowing with excitement; his happy countenance is the
reason why Sholem Aleichem chooses him for a conversation partner. The reason
for his happiness appears to be that he is accompanying a physician from Kashe-
varevke (sitting in first class), whom he was able, albeit with great difficulty, to
snatch from the doorstep of one of the town’s assimilated wealthy Jews. Most of
the story is taken up with Reb Alter recounting the trials and tribulations faced by
his family (the son’s illness, his not being able to go to high school, conscription,
poverty). And this, we are told, is the happiest man in Kodno.
Reb Alter is certainly not the only odd character that the narrator-interlocutor
encounters. In 1909, when ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ was published, the cycle of
Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railroad Stories) had already been conceived by Sholem Aleichem.
In the framing pieces of this cycle, ‘Tsu di lezer’ (‘To the Reader’; 1911) and ‘Drite
klas’ (‘Third Class’, 1902), the travelling salesman Sholem Aleichem’s voice is more
audible than in the other stories, where he serves as a non-intrusive interlocutor in
the tales of others. Both stories, however, use irony to reveal economic concerns.
The opening story, announcing the railway series, introduces the narrator-
interlocutor, who claims to have hidden his name from the critics by calling himself
a komi-voyazher, ‘travelling salesman’ — a word which plays on ‘comic’, thereby
connecting humour and economy. The introduction of the narrator-interlocutor
ends with an emphatic, manifesto-like statement, giving a pre-emptive defence that
ikh bin nit keyn mekhaber, keyn melamed, keyn batlen, — ikh bin a yid a soykher (‘I am
no author, no teacher, no idler, — I am a merchant Jew’).6 The text markets itself
as a product to be sold, since the interlocutor is a travelling salesman. This view
of the creative process may be somewhat cynical but lends credibility to the tragic
lives of the various character-storytellers. Sholem Aleichem ‘delivers’ a particular
kind of entertainment: he is a humorist, and makes his readers laugh. To deal in
laughter is a particular kind of trade, and the reader may not quite get what she
has bargained for; as, for example, by not being permitted to empathize fully with
the suffering characters. Since the stories resemble tragedies in their structure
(humorous descriptions of sad events come to a yet sadder conclusion), the reader
cannot feel unconf licted about her amusement, ‘paying up’ for every laugh.
‘Drite klas’, which closes the Ayznban-geshikhtes, portrays the first-class compart-
ments as ‘linguistic hell’: they are filled, to use Leah Garrett’s words, with ‘bour-
geois silence’. The second class is depicted as a terrifying middle ground, the home
of Jews who aim to ‘pass’ as gentiles and tell anti-Semitic jokes. The third class,
however, is like home, perhaps even too much like home, with constant talking,
prying, pushing, sharing of food, and a deluge of free (and often bad) advice. Garrett
reads this ironic idealization of the third class as a symbol of the disenchantment
with modernity, which has destroyed the traditional way of life in the shtetl:
[On the train, t]he Jewish community has become a community only in the
negative sense of the word. To be sure, in the third-class car you may be
entertained, but the narrative suggests that the price is too dear: so many of
the stories are fraught with profound suffering that only a sadist, or someone
seeking to utilize them in some way, could ‘enjoy’ them.7
Sholem Aleichem’s aesthetic, however, involves grappling with the author’s potential
position as sadist, and he does not hesitate to share this position with the reader. If
he is offering a sadistic type of entertainment, it is to satisfy the implied demand of
the modern reading audience for benevolent pain or controlled suffering. However,
the humour of the work promotes an aesthetic where pain and pleasure are inter-
mixed, offering discomfort rather than catharsis. Sholem Aleichem is mourning not
the loss of a perfect, past community but, crucially, the poverty that characterizes
the contemporary one.
Denise Riley is one of the few scholars who sees irony not as ‘an effect of any
leisurely distance, but of the strongest and most serious engagement with hurt’.8
The question arises of what constitutes the hurt in ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ and
how the reader is meant to engage with this hurt. Both storyteller and reader enter
into a kind of pact, which distances them from the reality of Reb Alter’s life while
enjoying his story. The storyteller is (ab)using his power to reveal a story which
the dispossessed protagonist has been trying to keep secret. (Reb Alter’s last words
to Sholem Aleichem are ‘please don’t tell anybody whom I’m riding with’.) The
aesthetic may be best understood as masochistic rather than sadistic (contra Garrett)
since reader and storyteller are both complicit in the exchange of guilty pleasure.
In Jerry Aline Flieger’s analysis of Freud’s retelling of the Oedipal myth, the
writer functions as the ‘desiring subject-joker’, the Oedipus-child providing one
angle of the joking triangle.9 In ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’, the ‘desiring subject-
joker’ is split, multiplied, and evasive: it is Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Rabinovitsh,
Solomon Rabinovitsh, komi-voyazher, and many others. As for the butt of the joke,
it is the yidl or der gliklekhster. The reader is the hearer of the joke and, following
Flieger, a culpable accomplice in the joke, recruited as an ally while the butt of
the joke is supposed ‘to leave the room’.10 The joke lingers with the reader who is
left with the pang of having been recruited as an ally — a hurt which can only be
relieved through the joke’s perpetuation, through its retelling. The reader is thus
coerced to change position from a passive (in Flieger’s terminology) father-figure,
who sets the tragedy in motion, to the discomforting and creative role of the child,
who sets the trap for someone else. The joke is a kind of marketing hook in the
economy of humorous literature; it assures that the story will remain in circulation
through its retellings.
Translation too is a type of retelling, and the question of whether a faithful
translation is possible presents a particular problem when dealing with an ironic
text. Walter Benjamin views translation itself as an ironic project, for ‘the task
is this: to find in the translator’s language that latent structure which can awake
an echo of the original’.11 The echo, previously conceptualized as automatic,
unmotivated repetition, becomes active here: it can be woken up, thus ensuring
the perpetuation of the original.12 If irony is repetition of the same word with
different meanings, then translation is the inverse of irony, namely repetition of
a different word with the same (intended and desired) meaning. Considering the
ever-changing, ever-self-destructing quality of irony, how is any kind of loyalty to
the text possible? While loyalty relies on following a set of contractual rules — be
it the prioritizing of content or form, of foreignizing or domesticating translation
strategies — the lack of stability that is noticeable and perhaps inherent in ironic
texts makes contracts highly suspect. And yet, irony, by its very instability, offers
pleasurable rewards, viz. multiplicities of meaning, for those who ‘get’ it.
In Nägele’s formulation, the echo transcends direct repetition, it is
a complex figure that cannot be reduced to the simple repetition of a stable
entity. The echo rhymes of baroque poetry, for example, break up words into
their syllables and produce new meanings with each return of the fractured
word.13
The echo thus necessarily points to the arbitrariness of the ‘original’ by decomposing
it into its constituent elements. With Sholem Aleichem, however, there is no

stable entity in the original to begin with, and so there must be a re-rendering
of something that is already ‘speaking double’, already drawing attention to the
arbitrariness of language.
While Sholem Aleichem’s writing in Yiddish was directed at a Jewish reader-
ship, the expectation of translation into Russian must have guided the editing of
the Yiddish original. The first Tevye story (later known as ‘Dos groyse gevins’)
was translated into Russian even as it was written, and two hundred copies of
the Russian version were published simultaneously with the Yiddish.14 Sholem
Aleichem expressed anxiety about the translation of his works, imagining himself
drowning in the ocean of Russian literature. The first volume of the multi-volume
Russian edition of Sholem Aleichem’s works was published in 1910, translated by
Yulius Pinus. ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ first appeared in Russian translation in
1911, with Pinus using Russian schastlivetz as the title; der gliklekhster thus becoming
a universally fortunate/happy/lucky figure, no longer limited by a town within the
Pale of Settlement which is known to us only because a railway passes through it.
By erasing the particularity of Russian Jewish geography, which was established and
policed through systematic and arbitrary violence, the limitation on playful irony
that is present in the original is removed in the translation.
Sholem Aleichem was actively involved in translation, translating into Yiddish the
works of Tolstoy, Korolenko, Chekhov, and Gorky, with whom he corresponded.
In a letter ubiquitously cited by Soviet critics, Gorky, after reading Motl Peyse dem
khazens (Motl the Cantor’s Son, or Malchik Motl in Russian), complained to Sholem
Aleichem that the Russian text was not transmitting the full emotional charge that
he imagined was present in the original, writing
I received your book, read, laughed and cried — a wonderful book! The
translation, it seems, is done skilfully and with love to the author, although at
times one can feel that in the Russian language it is difficult to transmit the sad
and soulful humour of the original. I say — one feels it!15
The difficulty of translation is closely tied to the affect that is supposedly available
in Yiddish, but not in Russian, and the f low of the emotional charge of the original
is an echo of the original, or, perhaps, but an echo of the original. An echo can be
both fading and resounding, and in this case it is the former; that is, it is the lack
(‘it is difficult to transmit’) that perpetuates the original, inf lating the subtext of
Yiddish as a minority language and culture within the Russian Empire.
Sholem Aleichem himself expounded a different theory of translation in his
foreword to the first volume of the collection, Deti cherty (Children of the Pale),
writing:
The occasional contradictions between the external conditions of life of the
gloomy ‘Pale’ and the pure movements of the soul create at times comic
situations, which sometimes invite a silent smile, and sometimes loud laughter.
And this phenomenon at times is attributed by the readers not to the life itself,
in which it is inherent, but to the fantasy of a jocular writer. And the writer,
owing to a misunderstanding, is listed with the humorists.16
He sets himself up as a mirror to ‘life itself ’ within the Pale, erasing his role as a
translator of that reality into a literary text. What is more, the minority humorist
emphasizes the boon of misunderstanding in translation; misunderstanding is not
a loss but makes the translation more interesting since it promises a reading exper-
ience that involves a confrontation with linguistic and cultural difference.
On 12 September 1909, Sholem Aleichem wrote to Noyekh Zabludovski, asking
him to collect roy-materyal (‘raw material’) when travelling through the Pale, and to
send it to him unedited so as to help with the production of more Ayznban-geshikhtes
for publication in the periodical Di naye velt (The new world): dos lebn iz raykh mit
faktn [...] a yam trern, velkhe, az zey veln durkhgeyn durkh mayn prizme, veln zey shoyn
bemeyle vern lakhndik, mat’amim ka’asher ahavti... (‘life is rich with facts [...] a sea of
tears, which, going through my prism, cannot but turn into laughter, delicacies
such as I love....]’.17 Misfortune is turned into laughter by distance and by being
filtered through the prism of a tear. The prism erases Sholem Aleichem, making
him a ‘tool’ of humour. Choosing both suffering and laughter, the reader is invited
to observe Sholem Aleichem’s genius as he transforms suffering into laughter.
Sholem Aleichem is (not) Red: The Irony of Politics

The translation of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction provided a continuous reference point
to Jewish tradition in the ambivalent Soviet context. All description of oppression
and inequality could easily be projected onto the past by Soviet critics; and Soviet
commentators on the various translations generally present outspoken optimism
for the present and future of Soviet Jewry. For example, in his introduction to
Neunyvaiuschie (Those Who Don’t Despair), a 1965 collection of Sholem Aleichem
stories, Moisei Belenkii situates the oppression described by Sholem Aleichem
entirely in the past: ‘in all his works that were saturated with great social meaning,
[Sholem Aleichem] represented the difficult life of the people in the conditions of
the Tsarist regime, capitalist exploitation and national persecution’.18 This approach
allows Belenkii to identify Sholem Aleichem as a writer of the people, and deny that
his critique of oppression has any relevance in the contemporary Soviet context.
(Note that this endeavour does not completely succeed, with ‘national persecution’
and ‘capitalist exploitation’ remaining distinct concepts.) Indeed, the Soviet criticism
of Sholem Aleichem shows the mechanisms of oppression to be continuous in the
Tsarist and Communist regimes.
In the 1930s, two Russian editions of Ayznban-geshikhtes were published in Kiev.
The first one appeared in 1935 and was edited by L. Myshkovskii; the translator
was not named. It included an introduction by Max Erik (the pen-name of Zalman
Merkin, author of Di geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur: fun di eltste tsaytn biz der haskole-
tkufe, The History of Yiddish Literature: From the Earliest Times to the Haskalah Period),
who moved to Soviet Russia from Poland in 1929. The second translation appeared
in 1937; the translator is named as B. Marshak, but the introduction by Erik is not
included. Both artwork and translation appear to be largely identical in the two
publications.19 Following Max Erik’s death in prison in 1937, the omission of his
introduction in the second edition cannot be accidental. In the 1930s, which saw the
establishment of ‘autocritique’ as well as the Commission on Yiddish Literature at
the Organizational Committee of the Soviet Writers Association and an All-Union

Conference of Yiddish Writers, a ‘denationalized’ Jewish reader was to read ‘Soviet
Yiddish literature [which] became the first and only (worldwide) Jewish literature
liberated from the Jewish question’.20 In conformity with the party line, Erik wrote
an autocritique, confessing his inadequacy for the Communist project. However, as
the then-director of the World Jewish Congress, Wolf Blattberg, put it in his 1953
polemic, ‘Erik’s confession and repentance could not [...] obliterate his past sin, that
of having been a Poale Zionist’.21 As with most victims of Stalin’s violent regime,
Erik’s name was to be erased and forgotten, and so Izrail Serebryani, a Yiddish
literary critic writing in 1971, needs to include a biographical introduction of Erik
(including the year of his death, 1937) as he credits him with the preservation of the
correspondence between Sholem Aleichem and Yulius Pinus.22
Erik’s recent autocritique clearly informed his introduction to the Ayznban-
geshikhtes. The stories, he writes, ‘are primarily a ref lection of the life of the Jewish
petty bourgeoisie in reactionary years, following the year 1905, uniquely broken
through the prism of Sholem Aleichem’s humour’.23 The mighty talent of the great
Jewish humorist is arrested by the limitations of his middle-class consciousness,24
but Sholem Aleichem’s use of humour justifies Erik’s endorsement of his works,
which, in spite of their bourgeois limitations, are good enough to be saved in the
new world of communist internationalism. Erik notes that ‘in all these stories, the
laughter sounds sadder, angrier, more thoroughly sarcastic, than in other works of
Sholem Aleichem. Here, tragic irony abounds, which, erasing the smile, leaves a
bitter taste in one’s mouth’,25 and sees this aesthetic operating not only in the plot
structure of individual stories, but also in details, such as Sholem Aleichem’s play
with contrasting images and dark scenery, which allude to the author’s illness and
the aftermath of the 1905 revolution. The tragic irony comes out, according to
Erik, ‘despite, finally, all attempts by the author to gild the bitter pill with humour,
to weaken through humour the horror represented’.26 For Erik, irony is thus self-
generating and explosive to the degree that it can do away with the author himself,
going against his best intentions.
Erik draws a distinction between irony and humour, understanding the latter
to work as a veil or coating. In his evaluation of the Ayznban geshikhtes, he
distinguishes between ‘wonderful things’ and ‘stories that are insignificant, con-
structed mainly on joke’.27 ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ is one of the stories that
Erik cites in support of his claim that the Ayznban-geshikhtes are to be classified as
‘the most sorrowful of Sholem Aleichem’s works’ (Erik repeats skorbnyi ‘sorrowful’
several times), since it tells the story of ‘a Jew whose son is dying/has died’ (Evrei,
u kotorogo umiraiet syn).28 Death is not mentioned in the original story, and Erik
supplies his own interpretation of the story’s ending here, in which the narrator
takes a final glance at der gliklekhster. The narrator’s inability to capture fully Reb
Alter’s appearance brings to mind f leetingness, and by thematizing f leetingness, it
may be suggested that once Reb Alter arrives back in Kodno, he will not find his
son among the living.
The dark quality which Erik finds in the Ayznban-geshikhtes contrasts starkly
with David Roskies’s reading of these stories, as is most clearly seen in the authors’
analyses of Sholem Aleichem’s reduction of ‘history’. Unsurprisingly, Erik views

this as a deficiency: while he appreciates Sholem Aleichem’s ability to use the
monologue genre to expose the pathologically nervous character of the storyteller,
revealed through the storyteller’s reaction to ‘large/significant political events’, he
regards the genre as limiting since ‘the events themselves suffer greatly, become
narrow and small, refracted through the narrow social perspective of the [bourgeois]
strata’.29 For Roskies, on the other hand, the reduction of history is a sign of Jewish
perseverance against the trauma of historical events: ‘[i]t was a communal release, a
temporal means of turning chaos into comedy’.30
It seems that the two critics differ in their definition of happiness. According
to Erik, Sholem Aleichem sets out in Ayznban-geshikhtes to show that ‘capitalistic
competition, having sunk to the very bottom of meshchanstvo [‘petty bourgeoisie’],
becomes wholly pathological’.31 One of the symptoms of this pathology is a
corrupted understanding of happiness:
A poor Jew’s only son is in his death throes, but this same Jew is still ‘the most
fortunate person [chelovek] in Kodno’, he radiates with happiness and exults
from the fact that he was able to snag a professor who came to a cheapskate
rich man. Here, again, the joy stems not so much from the fact that a famous
professor will examine a mortally ill son, but more from the satisfaction of a
person who, in spite of obstacles, was finally able to get what he wanted.32
The behaviour that Erik considers pathological is termed a ‘miracle’ by Roskies.
Writing of ‘Stantsye Baranovitsh’ (‘Station Baranovich’) (which may be taken as
representative of the entire collection), Roskies remarks:
the real miracle of the story is that stories can be told at all; that out of
‘bankruptcies, expropriations, military emergencies, executions, starvation,
cholera,’ there can emerge a teller of antitraditional tales who has the audience
eating out of the palm of his hand. True, he is only fully engaged when telling
the story, and for all we know he is as much a con artist as everyone else who
travels this route. But for a brief moment he is able to suspend time and to
reshape historical experience, no matter how bleak, into a spellbinding story
that eclipses anything you could read in the papers.33
The pleasure that the two critics derive from Sholem Aleichem thus has different
sources. For Roskies ‘playing with reality’ is a pleasurable reprieve,34 however
f leeting, whereas for Erik this kind of play is self-deluding and pathological;
temporary delight is not and cannot be enough.
On Time and Happiness: Translated Irony

Translations of Sholem Aleichem occur in a temporal, spatial, and political context,
revealing different conceptions of translation, of Yiddish literature, and of Jewish
society. What emerges, irrespective of all tensions and disputes, is a medley of voices
within a new, shared space. The translation of Sholem Aleichem’s works creates a
new kind of linguistic diaspora, which I will explore in this section by looking at
three English-language translations of ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’: Bernard Isaacs’s
Soviet translation for the Foreign Languages Publishing House,35 Hillel Halkin’s
1987 translation for the American market,36 and the abridged translation by the
Canadian translator Isidor Goldstick.37

It is useful to begin by comparing the translation of the title. The Yiddish
adjectival noun der gliklekhster would be most accurately translated as ‘the most
fortunate one’, since glik means ‘good fortune, good luck, happiness’, -est is the
superlative suffix, and -er is a masculine nominative adjectival suffix. Der gliklekhster
thus wholly designates the character’s identity; his masculinity is inseparable from
his fortune. Given the unavailability of simple adjectival nouns in English, all
three translations opt to insert the noun ‘man’ in the title, making explicit both his
masculinity and his humanity. The first two translations delimit the scope of the
connotations of the original glik. Isaacs has ‘The Luckiest Man in Kodno’, which
is etymologically justified since English ‘luck’ is cognate to Yiddish glik (both
derive from Germanic geluk), while Halkin has ‘The Happiest Man in All Kodny’.
Halkin’s title is funnier: by inserting ‘all’ before the place-name ‘Kodny’, he uses
to a comic effect the reader’s expectation of the name of a bigger town or at the
very least a town with whose name they are familiar. Isaacs’s translation is very
clearly inf luenced by N. Bruk’s translations of Sholem Aleichem into Russian (first
published in 1940).38 Russian does not use different lexemes for the concepts of ‘luck’
and ‘happiness’, so that ‘gliklekhster’ is suitably translated as schastlivets, and Isaacs
may in fact understand ‘lucky’ to mean ‘happy’ in his Soviet English, inf luenced by
Russian. The third translation, prepared by Goldstick, removes irony from the title
altogether, opting for maximum brevity with ‘The Man from Kodny’. Both Reb
Alter’s ‘happiness’ and his ‘humanity’ are ironized in the story, and the various titles
of the translations fail to render the uneasy ambiguity of the original.
Sholem Aleichem’s multilingualism presents another translational challenge.
In the Yiddish text of ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’, there are two instances of
untranslated Russian. First, the concierge of the wealthy Jew asks Reb Alter Cho
nado (‘What do you want?’, lit. ‘What’s needed?’). Second, the doctor begins the
conversation with Reb Alter with the question Chto takoe, golubchik? Nichevo (‘What
is it, dovey? There, there.’). The 1959 Soviet edition of the Yiddish text leaves these
phrases unexplained, not including them in the appendix, which glosses words and
expressions of Hebrew–Aramaic origin. In the Russian translations of the story
mentioned above, the original Russian phrases are not visually marked in any way,
they are simply part of the monolingual text. Isaacs’s English translation adopts a
similar strategy, distinguishing these phrases from ‘native’ Yiddish simply in the
use of different registers: the phrase spoken by the concierge is rendered as ‘What
d’yer want?’,39 and the phrases uttered by the doctor are translated as ‘What’s the
matter [...] my dear man’ and ‘never mind about that’.40 In the Goldstick translation,
the bilingual phrases are italicized and followed by a translation: ‘Chto nado, want
anything?’; ‘Chto takoe, golubchik, what’s the matter, my dear fellow?’; and ‘Nichevo,
never mind’ (the only other italicized word in the text is sh´vuos).41 Halkin gives the
Russian text, italicizing the respective phrases and glossing them in footnotes as: ‘Is
there something [that you want]?’, ‘What is the matter, my pigeon?’, and ‘There’s
no need’.42
‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ begins with the storyteller ref lecting on the luxury
of travelling in third class. This luxury is contrasted with the sight of an overworked
man on a cart, who abuses his horse. Both the man and the horse are referred to
as gots bashefenish (‘God’s creature’), but the storyteller’s fellow travellers on the
train are called mentshn, translated as ‘human beings’ by Halkin and Goldstick. In
Isaacs’s Soviet translation, mentshn is translated as ‘living souls’, thereby making
them somewhat less superior to ‘God’s creatures’ than ‘human beings’ and lessening
the storyteller’s hierarchization, which perhaps corresponds to a socialist motif
detectable in the original text. The storyteller’s exclamation of bin ikh mir a kayzer
(‘I am an emperor (to me)’) upon finding a window seat is translated as ‘I feel myself
a king’ by Isaacs, with the first-person subject pronoun distanced in space from
the predicate noun, especially as compared to Halkin’s translation of ‘I’m king!’
Goldstick’s abridged text, which formats the text into shorter paragraphs, does not
include this sentence.
Isaacs’ translation of ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ de-emphasizes religious
references by foreignizing them, italicizing, for example, Succos, the name of the
Jewish holiday. The italics may be read as suggesting that the word can be skipped, is
too difficult to pronounce, or simply irrelevant for the reader and the understanding
of the text. In Goldstick’s translation, we find ‘Feast of Booths’, which emphasizes
the biblical origins of the holiday, while Halkin uses ‘Sukkos’, adopting a more
current spelling (his translation also includes a fairly detailed explanation of the
holiday in the appendix, while Isaacs’s translation simply glosses Succos as ‘Feast of
Tabernacles’). Isaacs’s translation may be read as constructing an ideal reader who
will not understand any religious references. This is similar to what Sander Gilman
has argued concerning a German collection of Jewish jokes published in 1907,
where the ideal reader is ‘removed from any language which could be classified as
Jewish’.43 Isaacs’s translation, intended for export, not only fixes an ideal readership
for Sholem Aleichem’s story but also serves as an outward representation of Soviet
scholarship.
It is appropriate to finish this chapter by considering the ending of ‘Der
gliklekhster in Kodne’. Here, the author expresses his disappointment for not
having a camera to photograph the protagonist:
a shod, vos ikh bin nisht keyn fotograf, un fir nisht mit zikh keyn aparat. Es volt
geven a yoysher aroptsukhapn funem yidl a portret. Loz di velt zen, vos heyst
a gliklekher mentsh. Der gliklekhster mentsh in Kodne.44
The renderings of this sentence in the three English-language translations of Isaacs,
Goldstick, and Halkin follow.
‘The Luckiest Man in Kodno’ (Isaacs): ‘It’s a pity I am not a photographer and
don’t carry a camera about with me. My companion would have made a fine
picture at that moment. Let people see what a lucky man looks like — the
luckiest man in Kodno’ (p. 157).
‘The Man from Kodny’ (Goldstick): ‘What a pity that I am not a photographer
and do not carry a photographic apparatus. It would have been interesting to
snap the little Jew’s picture and show the world what a happy man looks like
— the happiest man in Kodny’ (p. 119).
‘The Happiest Man in all Kodny’ (Halkin): ‘It’s a pity I’m not a photographer
and don’t travel with a camera. It would have been a great thing to have taken
that Jew’s picture. Let the world see what a happy man looks like — the
happiest man in all Kodny’ (p. 152).
Isaacs’s translation markedly differs from the other two: while a happy man may
look happy in a variety of ways (in this case, Reb Alter’s face shines and his eyes are
protruding), a ‘lucky man’ is not discernible from his physical appearance. All of
the translations fail to render Sholem Aleichem’s expression es volt geven a yoysher (‘it
would have been justice’). The phrase evokes his earlier article, ‘A por verter vegn
undzer balmelokhe’ (‘A few words about our tradesman’),45 which closes with a
critique of the current ‘aristocracy’, chastising maskilic writers for their inability to
help or enlighten owing to their ignorance of the plight of the poor workers: s’volt
geven a yoysher az undzere yidishe shrayber, vos af zeyer mazl iz oysgefaln tsu zayn lerer
farn folk, zoln zikh nemen tsu der shayle (‘it would have been just, should our Yiddish
writers, who are fortunate to be teachers of the folk, take up this question’).46 As
argued by Nokhum Oyslender, Sholem Aleichem’s aesthetic raises the folk from
objects to subjects by recognizing the hidden creative power within them: from
yidelekh he makes mentshn.
In Sholem Aleichem’s words, Yiddish is ‘a popular, incredibly simple, and,
at the same time, an image-filled language’.47 He often creates (or, suspending
disbelief, recreates) verbal twitches for his characters, and his device of a ‘story-
within-a story’ emphasizes ironic repetition. The story-within-the-story, just like
a joke, is meant to be told and retold again and again: ‘Repetition is never an inert
affair, despite its mechanical fidelity. Say it, read it, echo it often enough and at
short enough intervals, and the word suffers a mutation, its thingness abruptly
catapulted forward’.48 The storytelling mode points consciously at this repetition,
and at the failure of representation. The story’s end is the story’s disappointment,
and a breaking down of the storyteller: all that he had told us is meaningless in
comparison with a photograph of his protagonist. The disappointment is also an
awakening of sorts, a representation of happiness as a f leeting moment, lasting only
long enough to be captured by a camera. The mention of photography in the text
draws attention to the limitations of verbal representation in general and translation
in particular.
‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’ begins with the storyteller ref lecting on his privileged
standing and the differences between being (human) in a train and being (a God’s
creature) in a cart. The storyteller places himself and other passengers above the
two ‘God’s creatures’ outside the train. Ironically (and appropriately), it ends with
the author shown to be lacking the privilege of having a camera. ‘Der gliklekhster
in Kodne’ self-destructs. The view of humour as a weapon — whether defensive or
offensive, wielded toward the self or the ‘other’, toward the Jewish community or
international communism — haunts the interpretation and translation of Sholem
Aleichem’s comic works, and particularly the Ayznban geshikhtes. Sholem Aleichem
uses humour ironically, positioning the traditional, local storyteller within an
increasingly technological modernity; the storyteller does not fail to catch the
train. The fact that varied and in fact opposing political and critical positions can
be attached to Sholem Aleichem’s humour accounts for his popularity. The humour
and irony in the Ayznban-geshikhtes depend in part on the interaction between the
storyteller, other Jews, and technology. The story ends by stripping the storyteller
of his technological privilege. At the end of the story, the technological hierarchy
is reversed. Outside the train is now the place to be, whereas the storyteller and the
other passengers are trapped within it. The storyteller fails doubly, for he cannot
convince the reader that the story comes up short in comparison to a photograph.
After all, the reader has read to the end.
Notes to Chapter 9
1. Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991), p. 167.
2. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Der farkishefter shnayder’, Ale verk verk fun Sheolem Aleykhem: Oreme un
freylekhe, ershtes bukh (New York: Folks-fond, 1920), p. 68.
3. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. by James Strachey
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 174.
4. Rainer Nägele, Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), pp. 9–10.
5. See Dan Miron, Sholem Aleykhem: Person, Persona, Presence (New York: YIVO, 1972) concerning
the complexity of the construct of ‘Sholem Aleichem’.
6. ‘Tsu di lezer’, in Ale verk verk fun Sholem Aleykhem: Ayznban-geshikhtes (New York: Folks-fond,
1923), p. 8.
7. Leah Garrett, ‘Trains and Train Travel in Modern Yiddish Literature’, Jewish Social Studies, 7.2
(2001), 77.
8. Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), p. 162.
9. Jerry Aline Flieger, ‘The Purloined Punchline: Joke as Textual Paradigm’, MLN 98.5 (1983), 941–67.
10. Ibid., p. 944.
11. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, trans. by James Hynd and E. M. Valk, Delos 2
(1968), 88.
12. Cf. Denise Riley’s comments on this process: ‘The effectivity I propose for Echo is that of
initiator of the ironic [...] It is hearing something said all too much, and that makes it uneasy.
Unease, rather than boredom, grips it, as if irony must have some opinion of its own, to be alert
to something which sounds to it in a wrong register’ (Riley, The Words of Selves, p. 157).
13. Nägele, Echoes of Translation, p. 10.
14. Briv fun Sholem-Alykhem (Tel-Aviv: Y. L. Peretz Farlag, 1995), p. 298. For a comparison of
the 1894 version (published in Hoyz-fraynd 4, p. 63–80) and the 1897 version of ‘Der groyser
gevins’, see Khone Shmeruk in Ayarot u-kherakhim: Perakim bi-yetsirato shel Shalom-Alekhem, ed.
by Chava Turniansky ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2000), pp. 14–16. Shmeruk argues that it
is translation into Russian that motivated the revision, based on the author’s marginalia in the
manuscript of 1897, which included translations of idiomatic phrases (p. 15).
15. David Volkenshtein, ‘Tvorchestvo Sholom-Aleikhema. (Kratkaia kharakteristika)’, in Sholem
Aleichem, Rasskazi dlya vzroslyh i detei, 2nd corrected edn. (Kiev: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo
natsionalnikh menshinstv USSR, 1939), pp. 5–6, n. 1.
16. Sholem, Aleichem, ‘Predislovie avtora k russkomu izdaniiu’, in Sobranie sochinenii, tom pervyi:
Deti ‘cherty’, kniga pervaia, trans. by Yu. I. Pinus (Moscow: Sovremennye Problemy, 1910), pp.
5–6; emphasis added.
17. Briv fun Sholem-Aleykhem, pp. 510–11. Sholem Aleichem is quoting Genesis 27.4, where the
elderly and blind Isaac asks Esau to go out and hunt and feed him on his deathbed, so that he
may in turn bless the elder son. The story continues with Rebecca and Jacob successfully fooling
Isaac into bestowing the blessing on Jacob, the younger twin, instead. Sholem Aleichem appears
to compare Isaac’s declining health to his own, writing from a sanatorium in Switzerland, but
may also allude to other parallels (as, for example, concerning trickery). The line further echoes
Mendele Moykher-Sforim’s Kitser masoes Benyomin ha-shlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the
Third): ‘hakitsa, mendele, khap zikh uf, mendele, un krikh aroys fun untern oyvn! Gey nem
a fule hoyfns gevirts fun binyomins oytser un makh derfun potraves tsu dayne brider, azoy vi
zey hobn lib’ (‘Arise, O Mendele! Get thee from thy cozy corner by the hearth, and take thou
a pinch of Benjamin’s spices, and whip up a dish for they Jewish brothers such as they relish!’;
Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Kitser masoes Benyomin ha-shlishi in Geklibene Verk, 5 vols (New York:
Ikuf, 1946), ii, 163; Mendele Moykher-Sforim, The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third, trans.
by Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1996), p. 304. I am grateful to Anita Norich for this
reference.
18. Sholom-Aleykhem, Pisatel’ i chelovek: Stat’i i vospominaniia, trans. by M. S. Belenkii (Moscow:
Sovetskii Pisatel, 1984), p. 5; see also Volkenshtein, ‘Tvorchestvo Sholom-Aleikhema’, pp. 13–14.
19. My word-for-word comparison of the two translations of ‘Tsu di lezer’, shows only one word
to be translated differently, viz. bavornt, which is rendered as garantirovan (‘guaranteed’) and
obespechen (‘settled’); all explanatory footnotes are exactly the same throughout.
20. Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2005), pp. 138–39.
21. Wolf Blattberg, The Story of the Hebrew and Yiddish Writers in the Soviet Union (New York:
Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1953), p. 17.
22. Izrail Serebriani, Sovremenniki i klassiki: Statii i portreti, trans. by A. Belyi (Moscow: Sovetskii
Pisatel, 1971), p. 290. See also Max Erik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn iberzetser’, Tsaytshrift 5
(1931), 79–88.
23. Erik, ‘O “Zapiskakh kommivoiazhora” Sholom-aleikhema’, in Zapiski Kommivoiazhora (v vagone
zheleznoi dorogi) (Kiev: Ukrgosnacmenizdat, 1935), p. 7.
24. Ibid., p. 14.
25. Ibid., p. 4.
26. Ibid., p. 5.
27. Ibid., p. 3.
28. Ibid., p. 4.
29. Ibid., p. 14.
30. David Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 178.
31. Erik, ‘Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn iberzetser’, p. 8.
32. Ibid.
33. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, p. 181.
34. Ibid., p. 182.
35. Sholom Aleikhem, The Bewitched Tailor (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.),
pp. 147–35 (henceforth referred to as ‘Isaacs’); the probable publication date is 1958. With some
of Stalin’s crimes being admitted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 and in time for the inter-
nationally celebrated centennial of Sholem Aleichem’s birth in 1959, the collection appeared
at a particularly advantageous time, showcasing Soviet tolerance and celebration of minority
cultures.
36. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. by Hillel Halkin (New York:
Schocken Books, 1987), pp. 143–52 (henceforth referred to as ‘Halkin’).
37. In Sholom Aleichem Panorama, ed. by Melekh Grafstein (London, Ontario: The Jewish Observer,
1948), pp. 117–19 (henceforth referred to as ‘Goldstick’). The volume also contains Jacob
Shatzky’s essay ‘The Untranslatable Translated’, which surveys translations of Sholem Aleichem
into German, Romanian, French, Dutch, Spanish, and English; Shatsky struggles with defining
the universality and particularity of Sholem Aleichem’s folksiness, noting that all translations
into English were done by women. Note that Shatzky considers none of the translations to be
fully satisfactory, only the Butwins’ effort is deemed ‘adequate’ (pp. 57–59).
38. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Samyi schastlivyi chelovek v Kodne’, trans. by N. Bruk, in Sholom-Aleykhem:
Rasskazy, comp. by R. Rubin and ed. by L. Iudkevich (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura,
1940), pp. 24–34.
39. Isaacs, p. 154.
40. Isaacs, p. 156.
41. Goldstick, p. 119.
42. Halkin, pp. 149, 150–51, 303.

43. Sander Gilman, ‘Jewish Jokes: Sigmund Freud and the Hidden Language of the Jews’,
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 7 (1984), 594.
44. ‘Der gliklekhster in Kodne’, ‘Tsu di lezer’, Ale verk verk fun Sholem –Aleykhem: Ayznban-geshikhtes
(New York: Folks-fond, 1923), p. 38.
45. Sholem Aleichem, ‘A por verter vegn undzer balmelokhe’, Yidishe folksbibliotek 2 (1889), section
3, pp. 103–11.
46. Quoted from Nokhum Oyslender, ‘Der yunger Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn roman “Stempenyu”
(materyaln tsu der kharakteristik fun Sholem-Aleykhems kinstlerisher antviklung)’, Shriftn 1
(1928), 25. I am grateful to Mikhail Krutikov for this connection.
47. Quoted from Serebryani, Sovremenniki i klassiki, p. 281. (See n. 22.)
48. Riley, The Words of Selves, p. 158.
C H A P T E R 10
Y
Lost in Marienbad:
On the Literary Use of the
Linguistic Openness of Yiddish
Kerstin Hoge
Introduction: Voices Lost and Left Behind

The readers’ comments section of The Economist website is an unlikely place to find
a reference to Yiddish literature. Nevertheless, nestled amongst the responses to an
article about linguistic variation, there is a mention of both Sholem Aleichem and
his 1911 novel Maryenbad (Marienbad):
I think the truly heroic feat is Shalom Aleichem’s epistolary Marienbad; I
read it in English translation. Here we have letters written in Polish, Yiddish,
Ukrainian, Russian and perhaps another language or two. Rich Warsaw Jewish
mothers wrote these letters from Marienbad while vacationing there and trying
to marry off their daughters to prospects in neighboring countries. I think it
amazing that there was a market for that kind of book. People must have read
more languages then than they do now.1
While thoroughly justified in praising the artistry of Sholem Aleichem’s novel, the
writer of this post is mistaken in identifying the letters, love notes, and telegrams
that make up the book as being written in various languages, for Maryenbad is in
Yiddish throughout.
The erroneous belief that the original novel is composed in more than one
language might have been inspired by the introduction to the English-language
edition, in which the translator, Aliza Shevrin, comments on the linguistic openness
of Yiddish and the challenges this brings to translating Sholem Aleichem’s fiction.
Noting that Yiddish not only incorporates elements of the neighbouring languages
Russian, Polish, and German, but that Yiddish speakers used these languages ‘to
convey nuances of meaning, educational level, degree of assimilation, one-upman-
ship’,2 she likens rendering Sholem Aleichem into English to ‘translating into
French a conversation between an American Southerner and an Irishman, with the
latter throwing in some Gaelic for good measure’.3 Akin to the Irishman being able
to draw on knowledge of Gaelic, whether this is limited to a few words or amounts
to true bilingualism, a speaker of Yiddish can extend the linguistic landscape which
he or she traverses by ‘moving in and out of its component languages and absorbing
more or less of their vocabularies’.4
166 Kerstin Hoge
With utterances communicating meaning both by virtue of what is said and

how it is said, the f luid linguistic boundaries of Yiddish make possible rich stylistic
diversity. This diversity is evident in both how speakers represent themselves in
their linguistic interactions and how they are represented in literary texts. When
‘one can speak several languages in the same sentence’,5 the skewing of the linguistic
balance and appropriation of Slavisms, Germanisms, or Hebraisms not only responds
to but also shapes the discourse context, indexing genre, audience, and topic. By
necessity, all these linguistic manoeuvres take place in a space defined by cultural
expectations, and the connotative meaning contributed by the different languages
with which Yiddish has been in contact is highly conventionalized: if a Yiddish
peppered with Hebrew–Aramaic phrases communicates (genuine or spurious) piety
and learnedness, the use of Slavic can serve as a shorthand device for expressing
folksiness, and adopting a Yiddish that edges toward German or Russian betrays
assimilatory aspirations, if not pretentiousness.
For an author like Sholem Aleichem, whose literary reputation is built on his
mastery of skaz-type or oral folk narrative,6 on the artistic use of the spoken word
fun folks moyl, ‘from the mouth of the people’, linguistic stylization forms the
foundation for character depiction and development. The monologues of Tevye
the Dairyman, Sholem Aleichem’s best-known creation, could not succeed in
portraying a protagonist whom the reader can identify as representational of ‘all
traditional fathers trying to make sense of a changing world’,7 while simultaneously
serving as an ‘exegetical humorist’,8 if they did not incorporate a considerable
number of Hebrew–Aramaic phrases and quotations, juxtaposed with (mis)trans-
lations and commentary in Yiddish of a more humble provenance. Arguably, far
from being a mere stylistic handmaiden used to position the protagonist in the
universe of the text, language is itself thematized in Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the
Dairyman), with Tevye’s continuous practice of citation and subversion providing
either ‘proof of the saving power of language in a world bent on self-destruction’,9
or, on a more critical interpretation, ‘a parody of a world based on talking and of
a culture steeped in quotations and commentaries of texts rather than in facing
realities’.10 The focus of the text on language both as a means for characterization
and as an object to comment upon is noteworthy, especially as it occurs in what
David Roskies has called a ‘closed’ narrative form.11 Closed narrative forms employ
a ‘fixed, predictable structure’,12 and Sholem Aleichem’s oeuvre may be viewed as
defined by the retrieval (and reinvention) of rigidly conventionalized text types
such as the letter, the monologue, and the maskilic chapbook.
In Maryenbad, written in 1911 and serialized before first being published in book
form in the twelfth volume of the Jubilee Edition of Sholem Aleichem’s collected
works in 1912,13 the author uses the epistolary format, which, alongside monologist
fiction, Dan Miron argues, had become ‘Sholem Aleichem’s major vehicle’ by
the end of the nineteenth century.14 A series of letters and telegrams unfolds the
story of the encounters and involvements between various members of the Jewish
nouveau riche vacationing in the Bohemian spa town of Marienbad. With farcical
elements in abundance, Maryenbad ostensibly satirizes the social mores, pretensions,
and niggardliness of this newly emergent stratum of society, but, as argued in
Lost in Marienbad 167
this chapter, it may also be read as an exploration of the loss of Yiddish linguistic
polyphony as an inevitable result of Jewish entry into modernity.
The notion of polyphony, that is, the coexistence of multiple voices and
perspectives, can be applied to a number of distinct contexts which span the literary
and linguistic domains. For Mikhail Bakhtin, who introduced the term into
literary theory, polyphony describes a defining characteristic of novelistic discourse
and arises when fictional characters are granted maximum independence from
authorial control.15 The independence and ‘interaction of several consciousnesses’16
can perhaps most easily and effectively be signalled by linguistic means: different
characters can be rightly expected to speak in different ways. This is nowhere
more evident than in epistolary fiction, where no attempt is made to reconcile the
different voices of the protagonists. Novels of letters thus are ‘polyphony’s most
visible form’.17
For an epistolary novel in Yiddish, the linguistic stylization of different characters
is bound to exploit the susceptibility of Yiddish to cross-linguistic borrowing or
hybridization, on which Aliza Shevrin comments. This will be the case not only
because letters are overtly conversational texts mirroring real-life discourse (albeit
admittedly to varying degrees), and because real-life Yiddish discourse navigates
a linguistic space wide open to other languages, but also because in the inherent
polyphony of the epistolary genre, stylization along language lines will provide a
means to categorize and supply additional description for the various characters,
thereby taming an unruly cacophony into a more organized polyphonic ensemble.
Yiddish readers, well versed in the recognition and interpretation of the Yiddish
linguistic mosaic, given their komponenten-visikayt, ‘component consciousness’,18
will glean meaning from the language mix that they encounter in the text just as
much as from the text itself.
The question then arises as to what happens when Yiddish epistolary fiction
is rendered in translation. How can multilingual polyphony be given form in a
language that lacks the intrinsic openness of Yiddish? How can the linguistic and
cultural connotations of the Yiddish text be preserved and made accessible for
readers far removed from the context in which it was written and first read? Is it
possible to move the readers into the world of the text and author, or is moving
text and author into the world of the readers the best that can be achieved? This
chapter considers these questions in relation to Sholem Aleichem’s Maryenbad,
arguing that the available English- and German-language translations of the novel
are characterized by an unavoidable loss of linguistic openness or multilinguality.
Moreover, the chapter will put forward the thesis that this loss of multilinguality
is already foreshadowed in the novel itself, which ends with a set of telegrams
that obliterate all linguistic differentiation between the characters. As in Tevye
der milkhiker, Sholem Aleichem both instrumentalizes and thematizes the Yiddish
language in Maryenbad. In its instrumental use, the language facilitates and shapes
interpretation of the novel’s characters; in its thematic use, the language is depicted
as an object that loses its defining characteristic the further it is displaced in space
and time from its traditional homeland. Maryenbad, written only five years before his
death, reveals Sholem Aleichem expressing considerable doubt as to the continuing
168 Kerstin Hoge
viability of the Yiddish language and his own self-styled role as folksshrayber ,‘writer
of the people’, and spokesman in Yiddish.19
Plot, Themes, and Structure in Maryenbad

The epistolary novel Maryenbad consists of a collection of letters, love notes,
and telegrams exchanged by eighteen characters, nine of whom are on summer
holiday in Marienbad, which is not only the destination for mentshn vos got hot zey
gebentsht mit a sakh gelt un geshtroft mit a sakh fleysh, ‘those whom God has blessed
with an abundance of money and punished with an abundance of f lesh’,20 but also
a marriage market and quite simply the place to be seen.21 The majority of the
dramatis personae hail from Warsaw’s Nalewki Street, one of the main commercial
arteries of the Jewish quarter,22 and they know and are related to each other
in manifold ways. At the centre of the plot is Beltzi Kurlander, the second and
considerably younger wife of a Nalewki Street property developer and owner, who
is the recipient of most of the letters and love notes in the novel and who herself
has penned the majority of letters originating from Marienbad (all of which are
addressed to her husband).23 When beautiful Beltzi arrives in town, following a
week’s stay and shopping spree in Berlin, it does not take long before she is courted
by three different men: Chaim Soroker, who is a close friend of Beltzi’s husband and
entrusted by him to keep an eye on Beltzi and dole out additional funds as needed;
Meyer’l Mariomchik, who is married to the sister of Chaim Soroker’s wife and
widely known as the Odeser sharlatan, ‘Odessa womanizer’;24 and Alfred Zeidener,
a dentist from Kishinev, who is revealed in the last third of the book to be married
with children, a fact that he has kept utterly quiet in Marienbad, where he is much
sought after as a potential husband.
Beltzi’s f lirtations, along with news of the shifting social constellations and
thwarted matchmaking attempts of the other characters, provide the subject matter
of the letters. A picture emerges of visitors in Marienbad enjoying themselves rather
more than they let on in their letters home and than is welcome to their respective
families. There is plenty of scandal as the characters trade news of love affairs,
gambling habits, blackmail, threats of a duel, plagiarism, and the Tenth Zionist
Congress.25 The story ends with a number of newly formed couples, including
Beltzi and the dentist from Kishinev, allegedly leaving Marienbad and travelling to
Ostend, which leads to a frenetic and farcical chase across Europe in which most of
the book’s characters are involved before returning home.
At first sight, Maryenbad presents a departure from Sholem Aleichem’s previous
works in both topic and form. While Sholem Aleichem may have always had a
dual audience, as argued by Frances and Joseph Butwin, writing primarily not for
‘the common folk’ (among whom he asked to be buried) but for ‘a society that
was already uprooted, no longer living in the villages, rarely in the big towns, but
mostly in big cities both within the Pale and beyond, in Warsaw and in America’, 26
it was nevertheless shtetl life that provided his recurrent subject matter. By contrast,
the characters we encounter in Maryenbad are closer in social status to the readership
identified by Frances and Joseph Butwin. Yet, irrespective of their economic and
social privilege, the residents of Nalewki Street, as depicted in the novel, do not
come across as vastly different from their shtetl brethren. Marienbad, as Beltzi
writes, iz Barditshev, Maryenbad iz Varshe, Maryenbad iz di Nalevskis, ‘[Marienbad]
is Berdichev, Marienbad is Warsaw, Marienbad is the Nalewki Street’.27 Sholem
Aleichem here draws an equivalence between different locales of Jewish life and
cultural imagination: Berdichev, synonymous with insular and backward shtetl
life and widely known to have provided the model for the fictional town Glupsk,
the ‘focal point’ of the literary universe created by Sholem Yankev Abramovich
(Mendele Moykher-Sforim),28 is in essence identical to the metropolis Warsaw,
which in turn reduces to the embodiment of di yidishe gas, the Jewish Nalewki
Street. What Beltzi’s comparison suggests is that size does not matter as long as the
same mindset governs Jewish life in street, town, and city — you can take the Jew
out of Berdichev, but can you take Berdichev out of the Jew?
The characters in Maryenbad attempt to assimilate to the world of the Western
bourgeoisie in dress and language, but even in each other’s eyes, they do not fully
succeed in masking their perceived uncouth origins. When describing Beltzi’s dress
and appearance, Chava’le Tchopnik, a distant cousin of Beltzi’s who is much feared
as a corrupting inf luence by Beltzi’s husband, comments that Beltzi is ongeton [...]
mit azoy fil shmuk un brilyantn, az di daytshn meynen az dos iz oder a rusishe firshtin,
oder a shansonetin, ‘adorned with so much jewelry that the Germans think she must
certainly be a princess or a chanteuse’.29 With the reference to the demi-monde
chanteuse, Chava’le denies Beltzi full respectability; Beltzi’s place in society remains
indefinable for the Germans.
Linguistic pretensions and pretentiousness are similarly perceived as suitable
objects of mirth and ridicule by the characters in the novel. Chaim Soroker pokes
fun at the hoity-toitiness of his Nalewki Street neighbours when he relates to his
wife their Marienbad transformation: unzere Nalevker vayber, vos koym forn zey ariber
di grenets, azoy vern zey damen un fargesn unzer Varshever loshn un heybn on tsu redn oyf
daytsh, oyf Komenetser daytsh, ‘our Nalevkis women who, the minute they cross the
border, become ladies, forget our Warsaw language and start speaking German,
pidgin German’.30 The ‘pidgin German’ in Aliza Shevrin’s translation is ‘German
from Kamenetz’ in the Yiddish original, and just as Kamenetz-Podolsky, deep
in the Ukraine, is far away from the German cultural centres, the women from
Nalewki Street are a far cry from the prospects of modern Jewish life. In Maryenbad,
male and female characters alike are trapped by rigid societal expectations and petty
financial preoccupations, and notwithstanding Beltzi’s appeal to her husband that
s’iz haynt an ander velt, Shloyme, a velt an ofene un fraye, ‘it’s another world today,
Shlomo, a world that is open-minded and liberal’,31 the openness and freedom of
the new life outside the shtetl have not transformed the characters’ lives but translate
only to temporary dalliances away from home.
What is more, it is not altogether clear whether the amorous dalliances alluded to
in the letters actually take place, for the letter writers are fundamentally unreliable
narrators. Whether in Marienbad or in Warsaw, the recipients of the letters are
never able to piece together an accurate picture of events — news is withheld,
letters supposedly exchanged in confidence are passed on to third parties and even
170 Kerstin Hoge
falsely readdressed for the overt purpose of causing trouble and marital strife. In
short, Sholem Aleichem fully exploits the acknowledged ability of epistolary fiction
to provide an allegorical treatment of ‘the misleading materiality of the signifier’
and ‘the triangularity of communication’.32 The fictionality of the exchanged letters
is commented on at length in the text, with characters proclaiming the events
and their retelling of them to be aynfakh a roman, ‘simply a novel’,33 or a mayse fun
toyznt-eyn-nakht, ‘a tale from The Thousand and One Nights’.34 The letters serve to
obfuscate and confuse, and the reader can only empathize with one of the characters
who complains in exasperation to her husband, ikh leyn [...] un leyn un ver shier nisht
meshuge! Vorem ikh heyb den on tsu farshteyn, vos du meynst?, ‘As I read [your letter]
and reread it, I almost go crazy. I can’t begin to figure out what you are talking
about’.35
The confusion about events which is experienced by the readers inside the text is
shared by the readers outside the text. We too are left wondering about the nature
of the relationship between Beltzi Kurlander and her dentist suitor, and whether
the two truly ever set out on a journey together to Ostend, as Sholem Aleichem
presents conf licting evidence on this issue. On the one hand, there seems to be
unanimous agreement among the other characters that this is what happened, on
the other hand, Beltzi and Zeidener themselves send telegrams and write of events
that place them on separate journeys back home rather than on an elopement to the
sea resort where men and women ‘swim together in the same ocean and even hold
hands’.36 Did Beltzi and the dentist leave for Ostend and then turn back, or was this
journey never undertaken nor planned?
Confusion also reigns when it comes to the question of how the collection
of letters has been put together. Maryenbad differs from Sholem Aleichem’s most
famous experiment with epistolary fiction, Menakhem-Mendl (The Adventures of
Menakhem-Mendl), in that the persona of the author does not himself appear as a
character in the text. There is no ‘Pani Sholem Aleichem’ in Maryenbad and no
indication of who is responsible for the selection of letters that is presented to the
reader. However, references in the letters leave no doubt that what is available for us
to read is only a selected few of the letters sent. Just like the reader inside the text,
the reader outside the text is denied access to the complete correspondence. The
sense that there are pieces of information missing is heightened by the mismatch
between the number of letters that is stated on the title page and the actual number
of letters contained in the book. Sholem Aleichem describes Maryenbad as nisht keyn
roman, nor a farplontenish tsvishn tsvey shtet: Varshe un Maryenbad, durkh 36 brivlekh,
14 libetsetelekh un 46 depeshn, ‘not a novel but an entanglement between two cities:
Warsaw and Marienbad, told through 36 letters, 14 love notes and 46 telegrams’,37
when in actual fact, there are 37 letters, 14 love notes, and 47 telegrams in the
book. The numbers as well as the facts do not quite add up, which renders the task
of constructing a final, conclusive narrative difficult, if not impossible, leaving the
different voices and accounts unreconciled.
While different linguistic styles add to the polyphonous character of the novel,
they also provide much-needed fixed points in a text characterized by such a
kaleidoscopic f lux and f lurry of events. Sholem Aleichem allows the reader to
identify the status and aspirations of the letter writers by virtue of the language
employed. Thus, Meyer’l Mariomchik, the ‘Odessa womanizer’, writes in a
Yiddish–Russian amalgam, which immediately designates him as somebody
lusting after and consciously striving for urbanity. Another character keen to
impress is Alexander Svirsky, the land-shadkhn or ‘international matchmaker’.38 The
daytshmerish, highly Germanized Yiddish of the letter shows him to be as pompous
and vain as is suggested by his top hat and his claim to run a more up-market
business than the average matchmaker. In contrast, the letters written by Itche-
Meyer Sherentzis and Itche-Meyer Pekelis, which the reader is told have been
iberzetst fun hebreish, ‘translated from Hebrew’,39 are in a Yiddish replete with words
and expressions from Hebrew and Aramaic, leaving no doubt as to the status of
these Itche-Meyers as observant Jews.40
In his characterization of the various letter writers, Sholem Aleichem thus
relies on the komponenten-visikayt of Yiddish speakers. Komponenten-visikayt and
multilinguality are also intermittently thematized within the text. When Chava’le
stops Beltzi from making a scene for being charged for a glass of water in a
restaurant, she ‘explained to her in Polish that she should pay quietly’,41 that is, she
switches to a language that is not likely to be understood by the German-speaking
waiters. The same strategy is exploited by a pair of Jewish card-sharpers so that
Alfred Zeidener, the dentist from Kishinev, can only protest, kinderlekh, vilt ir, mir
zoln [...] shpiln in ‘finef-hundert-eyns’, zolt ir redn oyf vos far a shprakh ir vilt, [...] nor nisht
keyn loshn-koydesh, vorem ikh bin [...] nisht keyn tsionist, ‘Boys, if we are going to play
Blackjack, you can speak any language you like but not Hebrew because I’m not
a Zionist’.42 As for Alexander Svirsky and Meyer’l Mariomchik, the Germanized
and Russified language of their respective letters matches their embarrassment
about Yiddish: Svirsky ‘refuses to speak Yiddish, only German’,43 and Meyer’l
Mariomchik instructs his wife to get his poem published anonymously, as it will
not help his reputation vayl s’iz oyf zhargon, ‘because it’s written in Yiddish’.44
The subplots and events in Maryenbad take place against the backdrop of Yiddish
multilinguality, and ref lection on the connotative power of linguistic choice is
second nature to the novel’s characters.
The uses of language as a stylistic means and as a theme in the novel become
closely interrelated in the last part of the book. Likening Maryenbad to a midsummer
night’s dream, Salcia Landmann identifies a four-part structure: a slow, sprawling
beginning, which sets the scene in long, chatty letters, precedes a ‘firework’ of love
notes, which in turn provokes a hail of telegrams, leading to calm resolution.45
Landmann correctly draws attention to the quickening pace and tempo changes
that structure the novel. Less convincing is her claim that the book ends in calm
resolution. In fact, Maryenbad ends rather abruptly. The last two telegrams in the
book show Beltzi and Shlomo Kurlander to have traded places. Beltzi wires Shlomo
from Warsaw to let her husband know the news that her purchases from Berlin were
seized at the Polish border and that at home all is far from well, with two divorces
underway, Chaim Soroker’s wife seriously ill, and the existence of more than one
legal threat against Shlomo. Shlomo’s telegram from Marienbad, which concludes
the book, announces his return and sends curses on various characters, including his
172 Kerstin Hoge
good friend Chaim Soroker. Possibly, the calamities relayed by Beltzi are nothing
out of the ordinary on Nalewki Street — a storm in a teacup, soon to be forgotten
when new scandals befall its residents — but all the same they are the result of the
(real or surmised) events in Marienbad. The characters’ actions have shaken up
Nalewki Street, they have altered the existing structures, and life on this Jewish
street is not quite the same as it was at the beginning of the summer.
Sholem Aleichem gives literary form to the whirlwind that engulfs Nalewki Street
by turning to the telegram, a decidedly modern(ist) means of communication.46
Scraps of information are exchanged at great speed, and there is no space for
linguistic stylization. Having laboriously created linguistic identifiers for the
different characters and social types featured in the novel, Sholem Aleichem levels
out the different voices in the final part of the book. The condensed language of
the telegram does not encourage multilingual diversity; its confined space reins in
the linguistic openness of Yiddish. Compare, for example, the opening of the letter
by Alexander Svirsky, the ‘international matchmaker’, to the telegram that he later
sends from Ostend.
Gnedige froy!
Ikh habe di ere, inen mitsuteyln, dass ikh in Bazel oyf den tsentn tsionistn-
kongres gliklekh ongekumen bin.
[Gracious Madam,
I have the great honor and privilege to inform you that I have arrived
happily and safely in Basel for the Tenth Zionist Congress.]47
Gekumen Ostende. Zaydener Kurlender nisht getrofn. Filaykht Maryenbad?
Dratet postrestant.
[Arrived Ostend. Didn’t find Zeidener Kurlander. Perhaps Marienbad? Wire
Poste Restante.]48
While the former shows somebody who expresses himself in as Germanized a
Yiddish as possible in order to bolster his social status, the latter betrays little con-
scious imitation of German. The language in Svirsky’s telegram does not differ to
any considerable extent from that in the telegram sent by the two Itche-Meyers,
which crucially does not make use of the Hebrew–Aramaic elements that charac-
terize their letter:
Antwort ayngetsolt. Tshapnik gedratet vu Sherentsis Peklis. Dratet oyb Sheyntsi
Kreyntsi nishto Maryenbad. Forn Ostende? Unruhig!
[Answer collect. Tchopnik wires where Sherentzis Pekelis. Wire if Sheintzi
Kreintzi not in Marienbad. In Ostend? Anxiously.]49
It appears that the fast-paced modern age of which the characters are now part, as
signalled by the form of the telegram, does not allow them to be immediately and
uniquely identifiable by their language. Yiddish multilinguality does not survive
translation from the letter into the medium of the telegram. The price of admission
into modernity is the relinquishment of the inherent diversity of Yiddish.
For Sholem Aleichem, who spoke Russian at home with his family,50 the
future of Yiddish was undoubtedly an object of concern and contemplation, and
he must have foreseen the possibility of losing his Yiddish-speaking readership

when he left explicit instructions in his will that at his yortsayt his stories should be
read in whatever language was best understood by those present.51 Like his will,
Maryenbad betrays anxiety about the status of Yiddish, presenting the reader with
a recognizable change in language in the course of the novel. More specifically,
the change in textual and linguistic form happens at the point in the story when
a number of the characters have made their way from Marienbad to Ostend,
travelling to the very place that Beltzi Kurlander describes to her husband as an
example of how the world has changed. A possible reading of the novel is then
that moving west — whether understood literally, as in the characters’ departure
to Ostend, or in its metaphorical extension, as when referring to the rise of new
Jewish centres in the Americas and, more generally, Jewish integration into
modern secular life — requires a different linguistic code which lacks the means
for multilingual expression. Accordingly, Maryenbad may suggest that once Eastern
European Jews leave behind the sociocultural landscape of Berdichev, the Nalewki
Street, or Marienbad, they will also leave behind the multilinguality or linguistic
openness that defines their language. But leaving behind Yiddish multilinguality
is the equivalent of leaving behind Yiddish so that in Maryenbad, Sholem Aleichem
can be understood to consider, if not forecast, the decline of the Yiddish language
for a growing sector of Jewish society.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Source- and Target-Oriented

Translations of Maryenbad
For today’s readers of Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Berdichev, Warsaw’s Nalewki
Street and Marienbad are historical locations of Yiddish culture, and the book
is in all probability more widely read in translation than in the Yiddish original.
Much hinges on a successful translation of the multilingualism in the source
text, as failure to convey the array of stylistic diversity that resides in the Yiddish
original will leave the modern reader with no linguistic clue as to the different
social identities of the various characters and no idea that the story of the book is
also a story of the linguistic consequences of the Yiddish speakers’ experience with
secular modernity. To put it simply, a translator of Maryenbad must put language as
an instrument to good use so that it is possible for language to emerge as a theme
in the novel. This task constitutes not only a ‘knotty translating problem’, as stated
by Sholem Aleichem’s English translator Aliza Shevrin,52 but it may in fact prove
impossible, requiring the translator to admit defeat, as Salcia Landmann, one of
the German translators of Maryenbad, acknowledges.53 Even so, the English and
German translations of Maryenbad make interesting reading, since they illustrate
different translation strategies and provide insight into how a translation is shaped
and delimited by the target language.
What English and German have in common is that neither language has the
same f luid linguistic boundaries as Yiddish. Plenty of loanwords have entered the
lexical inventories of English and German (and continue to do so), but English
and German speakers do not perceive multilinguality, the simultaneous openness
174 Kerstin Hoge
vis-à-vis a number of different languages, to be the defining characteristic of their

respective languages. While it is possible to distinguish between Germanic and
Latinate strata of English vocabulary, and while words from the different strata,
such as, for example, manly and masculine, will differ in their connotative meaning,
an English utterance does not readily absorb just any quantity of Latin or Romance
words without losing its English-language character. As for German, its present-day
tendency to borrow freely from English has been much commented upon, but even
if for some speakers German has become increasingly open towards English, it is
a linguistic openness towards a single language; that is, there is no language other
than English which German speakers can conventionally turn to for lexical loans in
order to indicate their societal position, roles, and aspirations. What distinguishes
Yiddish from English and German is that from its very inception Yiddish existed
in the context of societal multilingualism, in the form of both internal (Yiddish
and Hebrew–Aramaic) and external (Yiddish and the non-Jewish co-territorial
languages) bilingualism.54 Neither English nor German has been immersed in a
comparable multi-language culture for most of its history.
In the absence of societal multilingualism in the target culture, translation can
have recourse to languages other than the target language only at the expense
of making the text appear distinctly foreign and rendering it (at least partially)
incomprehensible to its monolingual readers. The problem is mentioned by
Umberto Eco in his discussion of intercultural translation, using the example of
War and Peace:
In the first chapters of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (written in Russian), the characters
(Russian aristocrats) speak at some length in French, as if it were their ordinary
language. Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it should
remain so for readers of other languages too, and every translation should keep
those sentences in French. Clearly the intention of the text is to show that for
Russian aristocrats at that time it was fashionable to talk in French [...] even a
reader who does not understand a single French word can guess what is going
on. However, I think that the Model Reader of these pages (in every possible
translation) should at least realize that the French sentences are in French (and
not, let’s say in Swahili). [...] I wonder if, in a Chinese translation, to render the
snobbish aspect of the dialogue, one would not have had to render it in Russian,
thirty years ago, or in English, today.55
In this quote, Eco alludes to the two distinct translation strategies of source- and
target-oriented translation, which form a dichotomy that has ‘permeate[d] the
literature on translation’.56 Source- or text-oriented translation brings the reader to
the text. In a source-oriented translation, the French dialogue in War and Peace will
be left in French, conveying the historical situation to the reader, with the possible
risk that both denotation and significance of the foreign-language material will
remain obscure. By contrast, target- or audience-oriented translation brings the
text to the reader. In a target-oriented translation, the French dialogue in War and
Peace will be updated, as, for example, when given in English for the contemporary
Chinese reader. Target-oriented translation removes the text from the cultural
context in which it originated and provides a reading experience that might in part
mislead the readers in their understanding of the foreign culture.
Source-and target-oriented translations can then be regarded as the two poles

between which any translation has to be negotiated. It is illuminating to look at
the extant German- and English-language translations of Maryenbad against this
background as they fall on opposite sides of this divide: the two German translations
of Maryenbad are source-oriented, while Aliza Shevrin’s English translation of the
novel qualifies as target-oriented. As argued below, this is not an accidental outcome
but ref lects the fact that the choice between source- and target-oriented translation
is constrained by the structure of the target language, with German exhibiting
closer structural similarity than English to the Yiddish source language.
The first German-language translation of Maryenbad was prepared by Siegfried
Schmitz and published in 1921 in Vienna.57 Schmitz (1886–1941), who was born in
Moravia but resided in Vienna for most of his adult life, worked in the Viennese
Jewish theatre and made a name for himself as a theatre and literary critic (under the
pseudonym E. G. Fried) as well as a translator of Yiddish literature.58 He translated
not only works by Sholem Aleichem but also Sholem Asch, Joseph Opatoshu, and
Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, in addition to publishing collections of Yiddish folk tales
and legends. His 1921 translation of Maryenbad was republished in a second edition
in 1935, which suggests that there must have been a sizeable German readership
for Sholem Aleichem’s novel in the inter-war years. Schmitz’s translation may be
classified as source-oriented on the basis of how it deals with the Russian element in
the Yiddish-language text, which is left largely, although not entirely, untouched.
The parallels between the Yiddish original and Schmitz’s German text are clearly
seen when we consider the opening sentence of the second love letter to be found
in the novel, which is written by Meyer’l Mariomchik, the ‘Odessa womanizer’,
to the wives of Itshe-Meyer Sherentzis and Itshe-Meyer Pekelis. The Yiddish text
includes three straightforward borrowings from Russian: otshen rad ‘I thank you’,
oshibay- ‘err’, and prinimay- ‘interpret’, with the latter two words fully integrated
into Yiddish morphology, that is, they appear in inf lected form together with the
native, German-derived second-person plural verb endings.
Otshen rad, vos ir hot mikh farshtanen nor ir oshibayet zikh oyb ir prinimayet
es far a kompliment.59
In Schmitz’s German translation, only two of the three linguistic markers of Meyer’l
Mariomchik’s Russification survive. The phrase otshen rad, which unlike the verb
forms otshebayet and prinimayet remains unintegrated in the Yiddish text, set off with
a comma from the remainder of the sentence, has been fully translated into German
and is thus no longer recognizable as a Russian loanword in the German text.
Ich danke Ihnen, dass Sie mich verstanden haben; doch Sie oschibajen, wenn
Sie es als Kompliment prinimayen.60
The two Russian verbs, on the other hand, occur with standard German verb
endings, akin to the Yiddish model. However, while the Yiddish text presents
oshibayet and prinimayet as fully nativized lexical borrowings, Schmitz’s translation
provides glosses in footnotes for (nearly all) Russian-language elements in the
letters, thereby visually marking them as foreign-language material. The reason
why the translator (or his publisher) decided to do so can easily be reconstructed:
176 Kerstin Hoge
the German readers cannot be assumed to have sufficient knowledge of Russian, and
hence a gloss of the Russian words must be given so as to ensure the understanding
of the text on the denotative level.
The second available German translation of Maryenbad, undertaken by the writer
and scholar Salcia Landmann (1911–2002) and first published in 1977, styles itself as an
adaptation (‘Nachdichtung’) and contains a glossary of terms and explanatory notes
in an appendix.61 The inclusion of the additional material indicates that Landmann
writes for a post-Second World War German readership which is considerably
further removed from the Yiddish source culture than what would have been
the likely and intended readership of Schmitz’s 1921 translation of Maryenbad. In
Landmann’s rendition of the opening sentence of Meyer’l Mariomchik’s letter, all
three Russian-language elements are kept in the text. However, as reproduced
below, they are made to stand out from the other text, being italicized and
accompanied by glosses in parentheses.
Otschen rad (sehr erfreut), daß Ihr mich verstanden habt. Aber Ihr obishajet [sic]
Euch, wenn Ihr es als ein Kompliment prinimajet (auffaßt).62
The exception is oshibayet, which, although italicized, is not glossed. The
appearance of the misprint obischajet (in the second edition) suggests that for
German readers, including the book’s proofreader, the Russian-language elements
of Meyer’l Mariomchik’s idiolect may perform a largely paratextual role and are not
meaningfully understood. Similar to Eco’s example of a translation of War and Peace
that leaves the French sentences in French, Landmann’s source-oriented translation
prioritizes the connotational value of a linguistic expression over its denotation.
The German readers will glean from the text that Meyer’l Mariomchik ‘foreignizes’
his language to bask in the prestige of Russian, but they grasp the content of
the letter only because of the German glosses provided. The fact that not all of
Meyer’l’s Russian is glossed (an example is oshibayet) suggests that the exact nature of
what is said in Russian is, in the words of Eco, ‘more or less immaterial, [...] a simple
boutade’.63 Landmann moves the reader to the text at the expense of intelligibility
and naturalness. Her translation invites the reader on a journey in time, as seen
also in her choice of the archaic second-person plural as the polite form of address,
rather than the contemporary third-person plural; and as when travelling abroad,
one cannot expect to understand everything encountered on the way.
Accordingly, the German source-oriented translations must provide a very
different reading experience from the Yiddish original for the respective canonical
readers. Readers of Landmann’s translation may find themselves in a position
where they have to skip chunks of text, while at the same time they are alerted
to the foreignness of the material by visual means, which may be likened to being
presented with the array of raw linguistic ingredients rather than the thorough
amalgam of Yiddish. Schmitz’s translation, too, amplifies the foreignness of the
Russian element by strewing footnotes in the reader’s path, which will inevitably
break the pace of reading. That both German translations are nevertheless workable
translations of Maryenbad is because of the close relationship that exists between
German and Yiddish, and that makes it possible for German translators to use the
same morphological and syntactic structures as in the Yiddish original. This allows,
for example, oshibayet and prinimayet to remain as conjugated verbs in the translated
text, but conversely means that their appearance does not necessarily contribute to
the reader’s understanding of the literal meaning of the text.
English differs more substantially than German from Yiddish in both word
order and verbal morphology and requires a different approach to the translation
of Yiddish multilinguality. In Aliza Shevrin’s version of Maryenbad, the opening
sentence of Meyer’l Mariomchik’s love letter shows no trace of any Russian.
I am very happy that you feel you understand me; however, you are mistaken
if you take my sentiments as mere f lattery.64
There is no otshen rad and no hybrid verb form that corresponds to the Yiddish
oshibayet and prinimayet. What Shevrin’s text gains in intelligibility, it loses in
pragmatic signification and melody, failing to convey the tight integration of the
Russian lexical material into the Yiddish morphology. Shevrin provides a target-
oriented translation; she adapts the Yiddish text to the English reader’s linguistic
universe, with only minimal concessions to the inherently multilingual mode of
communication used by the Maryenbad characters. Acknowledging that Meyer’l
Mariomchik ‘writes in a Yiddish that can be understood only by one who knows
Russian well’, she refers in her introduction to her attempts ‘to convey this by
making his English include a few “foreign” elements’,65 but in practice this amounts
to no more than the occasional use of dushinka, ‘my little soul’, a Russian term of
endearment, in some of Meyer’l’s letters.
Shevrin’s strategy of creating distinct stylistic signatures by employing different
strata of vocabulary and different degrees of syntactic complexity, which she
outlines in the introduction, must be considered to be of only limited success.
Many English readers will find the differences between these stylistic signatures to
be minimal and can only detect them if they are alerted to their existence by the
translator’s introduction. Take, for example, the opening lines of one of the love
letters sent by Chaim Soroker to Beltzi Kurlander.
Worthy Madam,
I cannot understand why you had to send a go-between. If you need money,
you could have told me yourself yesterday at the restaurant. I told you as soon
as you arrived in Marienbad that I and my purse are at your disposal always and
at any time.66
For Shevrin, Chaim Soroker is a garrulous character who ‘loves to embroider his
Yiddish with elaborate details in an attempt to show how good a writer he is’, which
she proposes to translate by using a ‘more expansive English vocabulary’.67 But it
seems doubtful that this strategy readily allows the English reader to locate and
appreciate the difference in the styles of Meyer’l Mariomchik and Chaim Soroker,
which is so immediately obvious in the Yiddish original. Shevrin’s laudable effort
at creating stylistic signatures (almost) exclusively from English-language material
must ultimately fail because it seeks to make Sholem Aleichem write as if he were
writing today in a monolingual English speech community, when Maryenbad itself
thematizes multilinguality. A target-oriented translation of Maryenbad cannot
178 Kerstin Hoge
succeed where the target language does not facilitate linguistic hybridization and
polyphony.
To sum up, both source- and target-oriented translation come up short when it
comes to multilinguality. The source-oriented translations of Maryenbad sacrifice
intelligibility and succeed only partially in impressing upon the reader that Yiddish
multilinguality was an everyday phenomenon rather than a strange, unintegrated
linguistic conglomerate. The target-oriented translation of Maryenbad removes
Sholem Aleichem’s multilingual linguistic identifiers (which are more difficult to
meld with the target language, the greater the structural difference between the
target language and Yiddish), making no clear linguistic differentiation between
the speech of, for example, Meyer’l Mariomchik, the Russianized ‘Odessa
womanizer’, and Chaim Soroker, who is stylistically ambitious in a non-Russified
way. In the absence of multilingual linguistic identifiers, readers will have difficulty
appreciating Sholem Aleichem’s instrumental use of language so that the thematic
use of language in the novel will remain equally obscure.
Conclusion
This chapter has considered Sholem Aleichem’s epistolary novel Maryenbad from
a variety of different perspectives. Its central thesis is twofold. First, the linguistic
stylization, which Sholem Aleichem employs as a pragmatic operator in the aim of
literary categorization, cannot survive translation from Yiddish, since translation,
irrespective of whether it is source- or target-oriented, will inevitably result in the
loss of multilinguality. Second, Maryenbad addresses its own future in translation,
thematizing the loss of multilinguality, which equates to the loss of Yiddish, as
an unavoidable outcome of Jewish engagement with modernity. If, as argued by
David Lodge, the rise of the polyphonic novel goes hand in hand with an increased
lack of trust in our ability to understand the world,68 the linguistic polyphony of
voices in Maryenbad is ideally suited to accompany Sholem Aleichem’s snapshot
of the rapidly changing world of Jewish middle-class life at the beginning of the
twentieth century. That Maryenbad continues to have a readership attests to the
artful construction and sheer enjoyability of the novel — even in translation.
Notes to Chapter 10
1. ‘Readers’ comments on “Difficult languages: Tongue twisters — in search of the world’s
hardest language” ’. The Economist website, <http://www.economist.com/node/15108609/
comments?page=1>.
2. Aliza Shevrin, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Sholom Aleichem, Marienbad, trans. by Aliza
Shevrin (New York: Perigee Books, 1982), p. 13.
3. Ibid., p. 14.
4. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990),
p. 28.
5. Benjamin Harshav, ‘Chagall: Postmodernism and Fictional Worlds in Painting’, in Marc Chagall
and the Jewish Theater (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), p. 18; cited from Marc Caplan,
‘The Hermit at the Circus: Der Nister, Yiddish literature, and German Culture in the Weimar
Period’, Studia Rosenthaliana, 41 (2008), 191.
6. For a fuller discussion of skaz, see Hugh McLean, ‘On the Style of a Leskovian Skaz’, Harvard
Slavic Studies, 2 (1954), which defines skaz as a ‘stylistically individualized inner narrative
placed in the mouth of a fictional character and designed to produce the illusion of oral speech’,
p. 299.
7. David G. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 153.
8. Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (New York:
Free Press, 2000), p. 38.
10. Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish, p. 104. The idea that for Sholem Aleichem’s ‘monologists’
talk is a substitute for action can be traced back to Y. Y. Trunk; see Victor Erlich, ‘A Note on
the Monologue as a Literary Form: Sholem Aleichem’s “Monologn” as Test Case’, in For Max
Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, and Society, ed. by Lucy
S. Dawidowicz, Alexander Erlich, Rachel Erlich, and Joshua A. Fishman (The Hague: Mouton
& Co, 1964), p. 49.
12. Ibid., p. 154.
13. An earlier treatment of the story appears as ‘Fun vayte medines’, published in Sholem Aleichem,
Ale verk, 3 vols (Moscow: Emes, 1948), i, 156–64.
14. Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), p. 250. Note that the Yiddish literary critic Shmuel
Niger credits Sholem Aleichem with introducing the epistolary form into Yiddish literature, see
Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 108–09.
15. Note, however, that Bakhtin’s conception of polyphony underwent several changes; see
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. by Irena R. Makaryk
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 610.
16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 18.
17. Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), p. 185.
18. The term and concept of komponentn-visikayt derives from Max Weinreich; see Max Weinreich,
Geshikhte fun der yiddisher shprakh, 4 vols (New York: YIVO, 1973), i, 37, ii, 318–20, which is
available in English as Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish language, 2 vols, ed. by Paul Glasser,
trans. by Shlomo Noble (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
19. For Sholem Aleichem’s views as to what it means to be a folkshrayber, see Sholem Aleichem,
Shomers mishpet, oder der sud prisyashnykh oyf ale romanen fun Shomer, stenografirt vort am vort fun
Sholem-Aleykhem (Berdichev: Yankev Sheftel, 1888), p. 57.
20. All quotations in Yiddish are from Maryenbad, vol. xii of Ale verk fun Sholem Aleykhem (Vilna:
B. Kletzkin, 1925); English translations are from Marienbad, trans. by Aliza Shevrin (New York:
Perigee Books, 1982). Maryenbad, p. 143; Marienbad, pp. 48–49. All character names are given as
they appear in the English-language translation of the novel.
21. Salcia Landmann comments on the spa visit as status symbol amongst East European Jews: ‘Jede
Gesellschaft hat ihre festen Statussymbole, die im allgemeinen je willkürlicher, künstlicher und
sinnloser sind, desto mehr sich die betreffende Schicht ihren einstigen Traditionen und der
Kultur ihrer Väter entfremdet hat. [...] In Osteuropa mußte die Gattin eines jüdischen Parvenus
unbedingt einen Karakulpelz tragen und sich in teuersten internationalen Kurorten einer
komplizierten Behandlung unterziehen, nachdem sie zuvor — selbst bei eiserner Gesundheit!
— eine medizinische Kapazität mit Professorentitel konsultiert hatte.’ Every society has its own
fixed status symbols, and the further a particular class has moved away from its own traditions
and the culture of its ancestors, the more arbitrary, contrived and pointless these status symbols
will be. [...] In Eastern Europe, the wife of a Jewish parvenu simply had to wear an astrakhan fur
coat and visit an expensive spa town for a complex treatment after having consulted a medical
expert with a professorial title, even if she was in the best of health. (‘Nachwort’, in Scholem
Alejchem, Marienbad, 2nd edn, trans. by Salcia Landmann (Munich: Herbig, 1992), p. 241)
180 Kerstin Hoge
22. Alfred Döblin, who visited Warsaw in 1924, provides a vivid description of the hustle and bustle
to be found on inter-war Nalewki Street; see Döblin, Reise in Polen (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1968),
pp. 74–76.
23. There are five letters and four telegrams from Beltzi to her husband, Shlomo Kurlander. Beltzi
receives four letters and three telegrams from her husband, as well as four love notes each from
Chaim Soroker and Mayerl Maryamchik.
24. Maryenbad, p. 193; Marienbad, p. 101. See Shevrin, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 16, concerning
her decision to translate Odeser sharlatan as ‘Odessa womanizer’.
25. The reference to the Tenth Zionist Congress in Basel situates the story in August 1911, the same
year in which Maryenbad was written.
26. Frances Butwin and Joseph Butwin, Sholom Aleichem (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1977), p.
117; cited from Victoria Aarons, Author as Character in the Works of Sholom Aleichem (New York
and Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1985), p. 71.
27. Maryenbad, p. 180; Marienbad, p.88.
28. See Mikhail Krutikov, ‘Berdichev in Russian Jewish Literary imagination: From Israel
Aksenfeld to Friedrich Gorenshtein’, The Shtetl: Image and Reality, ed. by Gennady Estraikh and
Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 91–114.
29. Maryenbad, p. 190; Marienbad, p. 98.
32. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, p. 205.
33. Maryenbad, p. 272; Marienbad, p. 187
36. Marienbad, p. 87; Maryenbad, p. 180: ineynem geshvumen un afile far di hent gehaltn zikh.
40. Shevrin (‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 15) draws attention to the use of the name Itche-Meyer as
a ‘derogatory colloquialism for dunce or oaf ’. Choosing this and, what is more, one and the same
name for both characters, Sholem Aleichem holds their observance up to ridicule: as learned as
the Itche-Meyers may be, they are slow to learn the news that their wives hobn aropgevorfn [...]
di pariklekh un viln genisn Maryenbader fargenign un veysn nisht vi azoy ‘have cast off their wigs and
long to enjoy the pleasures of Marienbad but don’t know how’ (Maryenbad, p. 194; Marienbad,
p. 103). Alfred Zeidener, the dentist from Kishinev, bears another telling name, given his smooth
as silk demeanour.
41. Marienbad, p. 98; Maryenbad, p. 190: hob ikh ir oyf poylish oyfgeklert, zi zol batsoln un makhn a
shvayg.
43. Marienbad, p. 51; Maryenbad, p. 145: nor er redt nisht keyn zhargon, khotsh gib im a krenk. Nor
daytsh.
45. ‘Da ist am Anfang die breite, gemächliche Exposition durch erzählende Plauderbriefe, aus
denen die Situation und die Hauptfiguren plastisch sichtbar werden. Dann das Feuerwerk der
Billetdoux. Hernach, als sich durch den dummen Streich des alten Narren und aus allerlei
albernem Tratsch haarsträubende Komplikationen ergeben, die stilistisch und menschlich
so unterschiedlichen Briefe der vielen gekränkten Ehemänner: Mißverständnisse, Prozeß-
drohungen, Scheidungklagen. Ein Hagel von Telegrammen. Schließlich, immer noch in
Telegrammform, mit nur einem einzigen ausführlichen Orientierungsbrief dazwischen, Auf-
klärung, Abklärung, Glättung der Wogen. Mit dem Sommer zusamen ist der aufregende,
wirre, fidele Sommernachtstraum verf logen...’ At the beginning, there is substantial, slowly
unfolding exposition, telling the story in chatty letters which make background and main
characters come alive. Then the firework of the love notes. Thereafter, when a number of
hair-raising complications arise due to the silly prank of the old fool and various silly gossip,
we have the letters of the offended husbands, displaying such diversity in style and personality:
misunderstandings, threats of lawsuits, divorce proceedings. A hail of telegrams. Finally, still in

telegrams, interrupted by only a single, detailed letter, solution, clarification, smoothing of the
waves. Along with the end of the summer, the weird, jolly and exciting mid summer night’s
dream has passed... (Landmann, p. 240)
46. See Jennifer J. Sorensen Emery-Peck, ‘Modernism’s Material Forms: Literary Experiments in
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1945’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009) for a study of
the telegram as a vehicle for experimentation in modernist fiction.
50. Marie Waife-Goldberg, My Father, Sholom Aleichem (London: Gollancz, 1968), p. 166.
51. Sholem Aleichem’s last will and testament was published by the New York Times, 17 May 1916.
52. Shevrin, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 14.
53. Landmann, p. 240, writes ‘Hier muß der Übersetzer resignieren’.
54. See Max Weinreich, ‘Internal Bilingualism in Ashkenaz’, trans. by Lucy Davidowicz, in Voices
from the Yiddish, ed. by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken, [1959]), pp.
279–88.
55. Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 19–20.
56. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ‘Speculative approaches’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed.
by Mona Baker (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 239.
57. Scholem Alejchem, Marienbad, trans. by Siegfried Schmitz (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1921).
58. Brigitte Dalinger, Verloschene Sterne: Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien (Vienna: Picus,
1998), p. 212.
59. Maryenbad, p. 196; see p. 177 in this chapter for Shevrin’s English translation.
60. Schmitz, Marienbad, p. 101.
61. Scholem Alejchem, Marienbad: Ein Roman in Briefen, trans. by Salcia Landmann (Munich:
F. A. Herbig, 1977). All page numbers given refer to the second edition of the book (1992).
The back cover of Landmann’s translation advertises the book as follows: ‘Das köstliche Werk
wird in der kongenialen Nachdichtung von Salcia Landmann vorgelegt, die dem Buch ein
ausführlich kommentierendes Nachwort sowie Namenserklärungen und ein Glossar beigegeben
hat.’ The delightful work is presented in the congenial adaptation by Salcia Landmann, and is
accompanied by detailed explanatory comment in the translator’s afterword and a glossary of
terms and names.
62. Landmann, Marienbad, p. 99.
63. Eco, Experiences in Translation, p. 19.
64. Marienbad, p. 105.
65. Shevrin, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 14.
66. Marienbad, p. 148.
67. Shevrin, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. 14–15.
68. See David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990).
C H A P T E R 11
Y
Sholem Aleichem in Estonian:

Creating a Tradition
Anna Verschik
Introduction
Translations of Yiddish literary works into Estonian are a relatively recent
phenomenon. Few people are f luent in both Yiddish and Estonian and fewer
still are inclined to translate fiction. Nor was the number of potential translators
significantly higher before the Second World War. This chapter explores translations
of Sholem Aleichem into Estonian using the theoretical perspective of descriptive
translation studies1 and focusing on the choices made by individual translators of
Sholem Aleichem. As there have been only three translators of Sholem Aleichem
into Estonian (Aron Tamarkin, Kalle Kasemaa, and myself ), each translator’s set
of decisions for the ‘Estonian Sholem Aleichem’ is significant for the formation
of a tradition. Estonian translations of Sholem Aleichem’s works illustrate how
renditions of a distant and very different culture are possible in a meaningful way.
My argument proceeds from the cultural distance between the two literatures and
the need to perceive it in relative terms, especially given the nature and expectations
of Estonian translation culture.
Translation as a Complex Dynamic Process

Translation of fiction is more than just a transplantation of a text from one
linguistic system into another. If one approaches translation from a purely linguistic
viewpoint, one risks ending up with a static picture of correspondences, or lack
thereof, between two abstract sets of linguistic structures. However, in order
to explain a translator’s choices and strategies, it is not enough to compare the
resources of the two languages as represented in the model text and the target
text. Translation, especially of fiction, is an interaction not only between linguistic
systems but between cultural systems, literary traditions, and the existing canon
as well. The original text is not isolated; it has its place among other texts by the
same author, within both a certain literary context and a certain culture in general.
The same is true of translations. In Peeter Torop’s concept of total translation, the
source text is more than just a text, it has historical, discursive, intertextual, and
other dimensions. A translation therefore has to ref lect on these dimensions and to
Sholem Aleichem in Estonian 183
render them in a different cultural situation. Linguistic data can be only one aspect
of understanding translation.2
A complex, non-linear view of literatures as conglomerates of heterogeneous
subsystems was expressed first by the Russian formalists and then developed by the
descriptive school of translation studies, including the work of James S. Holmes,
Itamar Even-Zohar, Gideon Toury, André Lefevre, Susan Bassnett, and many
others. Even-Zohar’s model considers translations as a part of what he calls a given
literary polysystem.3 Such an approach is based on the idea that languages and
cultures are dynamic, never homogeneous, and constantly in transition: something
is always being borrowed, copied, accepted, rejected, forgotten, reinvented,
reinterpreted, omitted, etc. Cultural interference, too, figures in this heterogeneous
dynamism. Thus, Even-Zohar emphasizes the role of translation as a form of
cultural interaction.4
The notion of polysystems and the position translations occupy within them has
become especially relevant for ‘small’ cultures, including Estonian. In a small and
relatively young culture the role that translation plays takes on a different (some-
times greater) significance than in larger and more dominant cultures.5 Of course,
one cannot define unambiguously what the size of a speech community should
be to qualify as a ‘small’ people. The Estonian case, however, is clear given its
approximately one million speakers and relatively late modernization. The cultural
transition from a peasant, mostly rural community into a modern urban nation in
the second part of the nineteenth century succeeded not only because of the rise
of national self-consciousness and language planning efforts but also because of
extensive translation of poetry and fiction from a variety of languages. Translation
involved transplanting cultures, cultural values, and new perspectives, as well as
their dissemination and reinterpretation within the new polysystem.
One can discuss at length the impact on Estonian literature of European
literature, mostly German but also Finnish, Scandinavian, to some extent Russian,
and later English before the Second World War, and how that changed during the
Soviet occupation. During the Soviet era, under conditions of total ideological
control and censorship, it was still possible in Estonia to publish translations of, say,
Isaac Babel, Albert Camus, and Saul Bellow. As Lange and Baljasny emphasize, the
presence of translations helped somewhat to compensate for the cultural isolation
Estonia endured during the Soviet period.6 It is understandable, however, that in
Estonia’s historical, cultural, and demographic circumstances Yiddish literature was
almost unknown to Estonian readers and Yiddish (or Jewish) culture never played
a significant role in the Estonian literary polysystem.
Translation involves more than just a linguistic recoding of a given text, and it is
clear that all parameters of the original cannot be preserved equally in a translation.
A translator therefore has to decide which components, relations, elements, etc., are
crucial and cannot be omitted or weakened. In his formulation of this idea, Roman
Jakobson introduced the concept of ‘the dominant’ (first in 1935 and then published
in 1981): ‘The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art:
it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant
which guarantees the integrity of the structure’.7 The dominant is difficult to define,
184 Anna Verschik
however, in objective terms; in the best case, a perceptive reader/translator would

be able to detect it intuitively and to describe it. It can be a specific linguistic usage
of the author, the overall mood, tone, and rhythm of the text, language play, etc.,
or a combination thereof. Torop emphasizes that the preservation of the dominant
is highly dependent on the selection of the dominant in translation. If a translator
misunderstands the dominant or deliberately changes it, then the translation would
become merely ‘information about the original’.8 This may happen by an accidental
misreading of the original or on purpose.9 I will return later to the notion of the
dominant in relation to the Estonian translations of Sholem Aleichem.
Heterological and Homological Cultures

Translation of fiction is, again, more than a mere establishment of cross-linguistic
equivalents. The whole context, that is, culture in a broader sense (spiritual, mater-
ial, popular, etc.) becomes relevant. One of the widely discussed practical problems
is how to translate aspects of life and reality into the target culture. Rein Raud has
suggested that there are cultures that are more or less similar to one another —
homological and heterological cultures.10 This relative similarity or dissimilarity
affects translatability and translation strategies. Here one can opt either for a
descriptive translation — to give a Yiddish–Estonian example, to render shames
‘synagogue servant’ as sünagoogiteener, literally, ‘synagogue servant’ — which risks
losing something of the original, or for preserving foreign realities in the original
at the risk of exoticizing and requiring footnotes or glossaries. Of course, there are
strategies of compensation accessible to an experienced translator (such as preserving
some items and substituting others). Raud’s main point is that viewed from the
perspective of the distinction between hetero- and homological cultures all North
European cultures, for example, would seem nearly the same to a representative of
Japanese culture. That is to say, the less similar the two cultures, the more difficult
the translation strategies must be to convey the particularity of the source culture
in a way that is most understandable to the target culture. In general, I concur with
this view but with two important reservations.
First, distance and similarity are neither constant nor static measures. For
example, Estonian and Latvian cultures clearly differ because the languages in
question belong to distinct language families (Finno-Ugric and Indo-European,
respectively) and thus are not related; on the other hand, social and linguistic inter-
action, as well as some periods of common history (being subjected to the same
colonizing powers) have all contributed to the shaping of commonalities (even if
individual speakers of Latvian and Estonian are unaware of them).
Second, and more important, distance and similarity can emerge and disappear
in the course of interactions between cultures. Are Yiddish culture and East Slavic
cultures homological or heterological? Despite obvious differences in traditions,
religion, language, and socio-demographic profiles, Slavic–Yiddish cultural sym-
biosis is undeniable in certain spheres, including folklore, cuisine, and, of course,
language.
Thus, translating Sholem Aleichem’s work into Ukrainian, for example, would
demand a different set of solutions than translating that work into Estonian. While
the shtetl vanished long ago, it used to be an integral part of the social and cultural
landscape of Ukraine, and there remains at least a historical memory of the shtetl
and its realities. Therefore, the world and imagery of Sholem Aleichem are not
completely foreign to Ukrainian readers. Quite differently, Estonians have a very
short history of coextensive with Jews. Estonian Jewry was a relative newcomer at
the beginning of nineteenth century, a tiny and highly modernized segment of the
urban population, virtually invisible to outsiders, which makes it unlike other East
European Jewries.11 It is not only distance/similarity but also a history of (cultural)
coextensive and mutual inf luence that matters to the elaboration of translation
strategy. An experience of translating from a given language and an existing
tradition, no matter how ‘distant’ the culture in question is, affects both the work
of a translator and the reception of translations.12 The translations from Yiddish into
Estonian are very few in number and one cannot speak of any developed tradition.
Rather, the translators are in effect on their own: they cannot relate either to any
pre-existing conventions, except some rather general rules of fiction translation, or
to historical memory.
Despite the fact that the Estonian cultural polysystem lacks, or almost lacks,
specific conventions for working with Yiddish texts (starting with the question
of transliteration of proper names and ending with the rendition of differing
realities), there does exist a general framework of translational norms, conventions,
constraints, and freedoms. This general background is important for understanding
and analysing translations of Sholem Aleichem’s work and will be brief ly outlined
in the next section.
Estonian Translation Culture

Some scholars emphasize that a history of translation should be considered a part
of the history of a given literature.13 As it would be impossible to describe the
development of Estonian translation norms in a short article, I will only touch upon
three relevant issues that have been preserved throughout the Soviet era and remain
valid today.
First, it has been tacitly assumed that translation from the original is preferable,
although during the Soviet era some works written in the ‘languages of the Soviet
peoples’ were translated from a Russian translation. Surprisingly, in this respect,
representations of Yiddish literature are ‘luckier’ in Estonia than, say, in Finland:
all translations of Yiddish literature, except for a collection of stories by I. B. Singer
(Surnud moosekant ‘The Dead Musician’, translated by Enn Soosaar, 1980), have been
translated into Estonian directly from Yiddish.
Second, the Estonian culture of fiction translation (especially from ‘exotic’
languages) encourages a translator to provide metatexts, including footnotes and
endnotes, translator’s prefaces and afterwords, glossaries, etc. A translation cannot
preserve all qualities of the original text, among other reasons because it is placed
within a different cultural code. To compensate for that, a translator may include
in metatexts some of the information encoded in the original text. For instance,
186 Anna Verschik
it is possible to describe the way of life in East European shtetls, the conditions
under which Jews lived in Tsarist Russia (this, for example, is the general strategy
of Kalle Kasemaa’s translations), or the complex relationship between Yiddish and
Hebrew. In some cases, a translator may even outline what he or she feels are the
most important principles and strategies of translation. (In the preface to my own
translation of Sholem Aleichem’s Marienbad (1994), for example, I explained that the
overly bureaucratic register in Estonian corresponds to the ridiculously Germanized
Yiddish of some of the upwardly mobile protagonists.) Moreover, information on
the author, his or her biography, and other works is usually a part of a preface or
afterword. Estonian translators have actively been using metatexts as a means of
providing additional information essential for understanding not only a particular
text but also the cultural context of the original.
Metatexts are relevant from a theoretical viewpoint as well. According to Torop,
a source text has implicit aspects, including its relation to other texts by the same
author, to other texts in the same cultural tradition, etc. Implicit and explicit aspects
are interconnected, but inevitably such connections are not always accessible to a
translator.14 Additionally, the borders between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ are not the
same in the original and in the translation.15 Thus, metatexts help to reveal and
explain implicit qualities of the original. Parts of the original are translated into a
text and other parts are included in commentaries, footnotes, etc.
Third, a significant feature of the Estonian translation culture is thorough
editing. Ideally an editor would know the language of the original and would
be able to provide an alternative reading of the original. However, in the case of
Yiddish literature in general and of Sholem Aleichem’s works in particular, this
condition has been seldom fulfilled: very few people are able to read Yiddish and
fewer still are familiar with Yiddish literature.
Translations of Sholem Aleichem into Estonian

Sholem Aleichem was not the first Yiddish author to be translated into Estonian.
Before the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the Second World War, translation of
Yiddish literature was undertaken in effect by one person, Ester Schitomirski,
who translated a number of stories by Y. L. Peretz (published in various Estonian
periodicals) and several dramas by J. Gordon and H. Leivik (manuscripts stored at
Estonian Museum of Music and Theatre). At that time, Estonian Jewry had very
few men or women of letters, and it was a lucky coincidence that someone like E.
Schitomirski undertook the task. This meant, however, that the choice of what
would be translated depended mostly on the taste of a single translator.
The first translation of Sholem Aleichem’s works appeared in 1959, a selection
of short stories published under the title Kuuskümmend kuus (‘A zeks-un-zekhtsik’;
A Game of Sixty-Six), translated by Aron Tamarkin. Apparently, it was part of the
Soviet ‘Sholem Aleichem campaign’.16 The 100th anniversary of Sholem Aleichem
provided an appropriate occasion for translating his works into other languages and,
more generally, for resuming the publication of Yiddish books in the Soviet Union.
Though it cannot be established with one hundred per cent accuracy, the year 1959
suggests that this collection of stories was published within the framework of the
celebration of Sholem Aleichem’s anniversary in the Soviet Union. The collection
appeared in Loomingu Raamatukogu, a weekly established in 1957 in which many
translations from a variety of languages have been published.
Subsequently, apart from Enn Soosaar’s translation of I. B. Singer’s short stories
— which incidentally were not translated from the original — there was a twenty-
year gap in translations from Yiddish into Estonian. Remarkably, the first book to
be translated after the long pause was another of Sholem Aleichem’s works, Ülemlaul
(Song of Songs; translated by Kalle Kasemaa, and published in 1987 in Loomingu
Raamatukogu). It was followed by the novel Piimamees Tevje (Tevye the Dairyman),
by the same translator, published once again in Loomingu Raamatukogu in 1989. After
the restoration of Estonian independence, only one work by Sholem Aleichem has
been translated (Marienbad, 1994, translated by the current author and published as
a separate book).
The list of Estonian translations is rather short, involving only three translators.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to analyse works of individual translators. In what
follows I deal with the translations of Aron Tamarkin and Kalle Kasemaa; my own
translation will not be discussed.
Aron Tamarkin and Kuuskümmend kuus

As mentioned above, the role of translations in a small culture is more significant
in certain ways than in big cultures. What is more, when a translation involves
ostensibly unusual language pairs like Yiddish and Estonian, there are very few
potential translators. This all increases the importance and impact of a particular
translator.
Aron Tamarkin (1915–69) was the son of Šmarje Tamarkin, a Yiddishist and
a teacher in Tallinn Jewish Gymnasium. A graduate of that institution’s Yiddish
section, in the Soviet period Tamarkin became the head of the Estonian Theatre
and Music Museum and for some time also the editor of the music section of the
cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar. Yiddish was his mother tongue or, at least, one of his
native languages. As was typical for most Estonian Jews, he was at least bilingual
from his early childhood.
To the best of my knowledge, the collection of short stories Kuuskümmend kuus
(Sixty-six) was Tamarkin’s only work as a translator. He translated from one native
language to another but had no training as a linguist or a translator. The collection
includes the following short stories (the Estonian title is followed by the Yiddish
original and an approximate translation into English): ‘Kolm peakest’ (Dray kepelekh;
Three little heads), ‘Hoišane-rabe ime’ (Der nes fun hoyshane-rabe; The Miracle
of Hoshanah-Rabbah), ‘Pulmad ilma pillimeesteta’ (A khasene on klezmorim; The
Wedding that Came without its Band), ‘Gümnaasium’ (Gimenazye; Gymnasium),
‘Minu esimene romaan’ (Mayn ershter roman; My first love affair), ‘Sakslane’ (Der
daytsh; The German), ‘Kuuskümmend kuus’ (A zeks-un-zekhtsik; Sixty-six), ‘Kui
mina oleksin Rothschild’ (Ven ikh bin rotshild; If I were Rothschild).
We do not know what the selection criteria were.17 As a first introduction of
Sholem Aleichem to Estonian readers, the choice appears representative. Some of
188 Anna Verschik
the stories are better known than others. According to the model of total translation,
the relation of the source text to other texts by a given author does matter, especially
if a story belongs to a cycle. Thus, several of the stories represented in the collection
belong to the cycle titled Ayznban-geshikhtes (Railway Stories). These short stories
are presented as accounts of real events, allegedly told to the narrator by various
travel companions during his numerous train trips.
For unknown reasons, the titles of the originals are not provided (contrary to
the usual practice) and it is not known what edition of Sholem Aleichem’s works
was used. The collection starts with a short introduction (less than one page) that,
significantly given the time and place, does not refer to the classics of Marxism nor
to anything Soviet. Sholem Aleichem is depicted as a writer who cared about ‘the
life of contemporary Jews from all strata of society’, especially in shtetls (‘those, who
under the special laws of that time were compelled to live in small townships’);18 the
meaning of the writer’s pseudonym is explained, and the titles of some other works
(including ‘Tevye the Dairyman’) are mentioned.
The translations are accompanied by footnotes and short explanations either
of Jewish customs and realities or of foreign linguistic elements (mostly Russian).
Unlike in the translations by Kalle Kasemaa, metatexts are kept to a minimum.
Needless to say, the editor of Loomingu Raamatukogu, Otto Samma, did not know
Yiddish. No other editor is mentioned on the title page; and it is most probable that
the Estonian translation was polished, improved, etc., without the editor’s having
consulted the original.
Dealing with Yiddish proper names and other realia in Estonian deserves a
separate study (as a simple example, the name of Sholem Aleichem has been rendered
into Estonian in at least three different ways: Šolom Aleihhem, Šolem Aleichem, and
Šolem Alejchem). For his part Tamarkin had several strategies for dealing with
these elements. Apparently, he did not employ certain prevalent traditions of
transliteration and pronunciation, such as the German or modern Hebrew versions
with which he would probably have been familiar.19 So, for example, he writes
hoišane-rabe ‘the day when one’s destiny for the coming year is decided upon and
sealed’20 and not, for instance, hoshana-raba (modern Hebrew) or Hoschana-raba
(German); sukes ‘tabernacles holiday’21 and not suk(k)os or suk(k)ot, etc. In one case,
where no exact Estonian equivalent exists for a sound (and letter) at the beginning
of the word — Yiddish kh — he used an approximation: heider (‘traditional school
for young children’, Yiddish kheyder),22 hupe (‘wedding canopy’, Yiddish khupe);23
in other positions the sound is rendered according to Estonian convention by hh:
Morduhh ‘the male name Mordukh’ (cf. krahh ‘breakdown, failure’, a loanword in
Estonian).24 He mostly opts for Yiddish versions of names and terms but sometimes
chooses Ashkenazi Hebrew; hence, bar-mitsvo25 and not Yiddish bar-mitsve. As for
personal names, biblical names sometimes appear in the form they take in the
Estonian Bible, even if used as the personal names of protagonists and not as direct
references to biblical characters: thus, Noa,26 which would be Noyekh in Yiddish. In
fine, the choice between Ashkenazi Hebrew and Yiddish seems not to be governed
by any conscious or systematic criteria.
The fact that Yiddish was one of the translator’s native languages deserves
some attention. Among other things, the translation bears marks of a particular
Yiddish dialect. So, for instance, Yiddish gabe ‘the head of a synagogue council’ is
transliterated as gaabe,27 which corresponds to the Estonian Yiddish pronunciation
with the long a; Yiddish simkhes-toyre, a holiday marking the end of yearly readings
of the Torah and the beginning of a new reading cycle, yields šimhas-toire;28
the name of a protagonist Yoyne becomes Joune,29 thus approximating the local
pronunciation Jöüne/Jöine.
One of the implications of the fact that Yiddish was not a foreign language for the
translator is that one cannot attribute certain choices to a misreading or insufficient
understanding of the Yiddish original. This is especially relevant in the case of
fixed expressions, idioms, and equivalents for Yiddish realities, or, to put it into
more general terms, where a translator has to deal with the problem of ‘native’ vs.
‘foreign’ options.
The division between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ is not as clear-cut as it may appear
to be. Particular translational decisions depend on how a translator determines the
Jakobsonian dominant. The translator has to tackle at least the following questions:
what must be preserved or reinterpreted, as in the descriptive translation of shoykhet
‘ritual slaughterer’ as lõikur ‘something/somebody that cuts’,30 and what can be
omitted without damage to the logic and hierarchical structure of the text? To
what extent are German, Russian, or Ukrainian elements in the original unfamiliar
for an Estonian reader, and how can such interlinguistic relationships — such as
the relationship between Yiddish and German — be rendered in Estonian in a
meaningful way? Would this always mean writing out German elements? Would
Germanized Estonian be more effective? Is the foreignness of an item at times
altogether irrelevant from the point of view of the dominant?
By way of illustration, I will analyse A. Tamarkin’s translation of the short story
‘Sakslane’ (Der daytsh; The German). The main character of the story, the narrator,
is a Jew from a shtetl called Drazhne (Derazhnia) who is looking for an opportunity
to earn some money at the newly constructed railway station. A German arrives
there to conduct some business and is in need of accommodation. The Jew offers
him his not very luxurious quarters and talks his wife into receiving the guest.
When the German is set to depart the protagonist is not too shy to demand a
generous fee. His calculation is far from precise, but the German nevertheless pays.
Later, however, the German keeps sending letters to the protagonist praising the
nice and comfortable accommodation, while the protagonist has to pay substantial
sums in order to get these letters from the post office. Finally, the protagonist is
summoned to Odessa (of course, on his own account) just to meet a business partner
of the German and to receive another portion of greetings. By the end of the story
he is seriously thinking of leaving Drazhne to escape from the German.
The story has several points that are of interest for a translation analyst. In the
f luent and rich speech, a hallmark of many of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, there
are plenty of Yiddish idioms and fixed expressions and some details that always
require creativity and f lexibility from a translator. In addition to that, the ‘native’
and ‘foreign’ elements include Russian as well as the German as spoken by the
protagonist and his quotations of his guest’s speech.
190 Anna Verschik
In this particular story, there are few specifically Jewish details. Generally, the
translator opts for preservation of the Yiddish form, coupled with explanations in a
footnote or, less often, for a description. In this story he introduces lõikur (from the
verb lõikama ‘to cut’) as an equivalent for Yiddish shoykhet ‘ritual slaughterer’. The
word lõikur is not a neologism as such but is used here in an innovative meaning
(with a footnote explanation added). This is somewhat unexpected not only because
it is not a conventional use of the lexical item in Estonian, but also because the
suffix –ur is ambiguous: it can designate both a person (teadur ‘researcher’ from the
verb teadma ‘to know’, kangur ‘weaver’ from kangas ‘fabric’) and a tool/mediator
(tegur ‘factor’ from tegema ‘to do’, andur ‘sensor, detector’ from andma ‘to give’).
Thus, theoretically, lõikur could refer both to a person who cuts something and/or
to a cutting tool. The context does not immediately reveal whether it is animate or
inanimate: hakati juba mõtlema uuele lõikurile ‘they already started thinking about a
new ritual slaughterer’. This is the only case where such a strategy is adopted; and
one may well ask whether the Russian-Jewish reznik ‘ritual slaughterer’ (formed by
adding the agentive suffix to the verbal stem) might have been a prototype.
At times it is difficult to reconstruct how decisions were made in the translation
of idioms and fixed expressions. In this translation of the story there does not seem
to be any systematic approach. Rather infrequently the translator uses a different
formulation in Estonian. Thus, in ‘Der daytsh’, bekitser, s’iz gevorn layehudim, ‘in
short, it became rather pleasant’ (literally, ‘in short, it became for Jews’),31 becomes:
lühidalt, elu läks lõbusaks ‘in short, life became fun’.32 In the majority of cases,
however, Tamarkin provides a word-for-word rendering into Estonian. Knowing
the translator’s background, this can hardly be explained as a misreading of the
original and taking figurative expression at face value. Probably, the translator
believed that word-for-word renditions would be intelligible in Estonian and
would be perceived as fresh metaphors. Sometimes such strategies do work, as
will be shown below. However, in some cases idioms translated word for word do
not achieve this goal but rather remain obscure to the reader, as in the following
example.
Consider the following: er hot zikh tseleygt mit di tshemodanes vi ba zayn tatn in
vayngortn ‘he accommodated himself and his suitcases in the most comfortable
manner’, literally, ‘as in his father’s vineyard’33 becomes ta laiutas end oma sumadanidega
nagu omaenda isa viinamäel,34 using the literal translation of the latter idiom. An
Estonian reader would completely miss the point and wonder why a vineyard is
mentioned here. A similar idiom, if with an additional meaning of security, does
exist in Estonian: nagu vanajumala selja taga, literally, ‘like behind the back of the old
god’, meaning ‘being very comfortable and secure’. It could have been used here.
As mentioned, literal translations of figurative language do not necessarily result
in unintelligible collocations. Sometimes unusual and non-conventionalized word
combinations may become a new fresh metaphor. What quality might a new
collocation have in order for it to have the effect of a new metaphor? Tamarkin’s
translation has several such instances; typical is the following: vu zhe zol ikh im balegn
— in der erd? ‘where on earth shall I put him (for the night)’; literally, ‘where shall
I put him: into the earth?’,35 cf. Estonian aga kuhu ma ta panen, kas maa sisse või?
‘but where shall I put him, into the earth or what?’. In Yiddish, the expression in
der erd ‘in(to) the earth’ often means ‘in a seriously bad situation’, for instance, er iz
gut in der erd ‘he is in deep trouble’ (literally, ‘he is well in the earth’). There is no
such meaning in Estonian but the proposed collocation maa sisse ‘into the earth’ is
transparent and may even imply ‘grave’. In this episode the wife of the protagonist is
not willing to accept the German guest and insists she has no place to accommodate
him for the night. Thus, her unwillingness expressed in a straightforward manner
coupled with the context helps one grasp the unusual collocation.
Dealing with the context of ‘foreign’ and ‘native’ does not only involve finding
stylistically and contextually appropriate equivalents to individual items (as in the
instances discussed above) but also rendering certain relations between different
cultural layers that are evident to readers of the original. For instance, the relationship
between Hebrew and Yiddish in the Russian translation of Der farkishefter shnayder
(The Bewitched Tailor) is interpreted as a relationship between the archaic and
elevated style of an old document on the one hand and its translation into everyday
spoken language on the other and rendered analogously to the relationship between
Old Slavonic and Russian. Sholem Aleichem often plays with different varieties and
different layers of Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Slavic languages, and the story
Der daytsh is no exception.
Inevitably, the effect of juxtaposition and manipulation of closely related
languages such as Yiddish and German cannot be recreated in a translation with
perfect accuracy. While the impact of German on Estonian vocabulary and syntax
is significant — indeed one can even now think of obsolete Germanized registers of
Estonian that sound pompous and ridiculous today — this choice may create a false
overall impression. Sholem Aleichem deliberately plays with linguistic similarities.
For instance, on the basis of the similarity between German Sie (meaning both
the polite ‘you’ and ‘they’) and Yiddish zey (meaning only ‘they’), the protagonist
systematically uses the pronoun zey instead of Yiddish ir, ‘you’ (both plural and polite
form), while otherwise his speech (and the reported speech of the German) remains
more Yiddish-like. So, for example, hobn zey vos tsu esn?36 is intended to mean ‘have
you something to eat?’ and is modelled on German haben Sie was zu essen, while in
Yiddish this means in fact ‘have they something to eat?’. In the Estonian version,
the translator writes out the Yiddish meaning, that is, on neil ka midagi süüa? ‘have
they also something to eat?’.37 While the similarity between German and Yiddish
disappears in the translation, a comic effect is nevertheless retained. Using the
third-person plural form while speaking to one person sounds in Estonian today
like an old-fashioned way to be extremely polite: härrad käskigu võtta voorimees, ja ma
lasen neid sõidutada kõige paremasse võõrastemajja ‘the gentlemen should order to hire a
cabman and I will have them to be taken to the best hotel’.38
Of course, the effect on the reader is different. The reader has to know that
Yiddish and German sound similar and that is why the protagonist begs his wife to
speak hyper-Hebraized Yiddish because the guest may understand. However, the
translator compensates for the inevitable loss by using some real German words in
the speech of the German: where the author has him saying tsum tayvl! ‘to hell!’
in the Yiddish form (cf. German zum Teufel),39 the translator writes Zum Teufel!,
192 Anna Verschik
reasonably assuming that an average Estonian reader would understand it. In some
cases, while the correlation between Yiddish, incorrect German, and German
cannot be entirely reproduced, the comic effect is achieved by other means.
The last point involves the representation of Russian. Though not much Russian
is used in the story, the questions its occurrences raise are typical for the use of
the language in Sholem Aleichem’s works in general. Actually, this is not only
about the choice between the translation of Russian elements or their preservation,
accompanied by a translator’s explanations, but about a conceptual decision that
depends on what Russian symbolizes in a particular context. For example, direct
speech in Russian, spontaneous borrowings from Russian into Yiddish, Russian as
spoken by Jews, Russian in signs and documents, etc., may yield different decisions.
Another concern is the degree to which a potential reader may know Russian or at
least be familiar with the sociolinguistic situation of late imperial Russia.
The story starts with a description of Drazhne, a shtetl where a railway station
has recently been constructed. Through the speech of the main character the author
informs us that the station is equipped with everything necessary and bears a sign
reading stantsiia Drazhnia ‘Drazhnya station’.40 Thus, the language of the sign is
Russian, albeit transliterated into Yiddish for the convenience of Yiddish readers.
The translator, however, chose to translate the sign directly into Estonian, hence
Dražne jaam.41 While this may seem a minor thing, both the fact that the sign was in
Russian and the form of the toponym (ending with –a, not with –e) communicates
information about the status of the different languages. The action takes place
in Ukraine. The language of the Empire is Russian, while neither Yiddish nor
Ukrainian had any official status. The toponym is in its Russian (or Ukrainian)
form. Possibly the translator decided that all this information would be redundant
for the readers. However, the preservation of Russian would have been a possibility
because Estonian readers would understand the Russian sign as well as the imperial
language hierarchy.
Another instance where Russian is omitted is the protagonist’s phrase about bagleyt
aroys dem ‘potshtove poyezd’ ‘I send out the mail train’.42 The Russian component is
in the quotation marks; it signals its special status. In some sense, Russian represents
new and fancy things and technological progress. The Estonian text, however, has
merely saadan välja postirongi, which just communicates the information but not
the connotation. At the same time, non-target Russian pravitel ‘sender’, ‘expeditor’
(the correct Russian form should be otpravitel´)43 is preserved, its form is slightly
Estonianized through lengthening the stressed vowel praviitel,44 and a footnote
explaining the item is provided.
From the preceding it appears that the translator had no systematic approach
to Russian-language items. Probably they did not seem challenging to him and
did not stand out in his reading of the original. This is not a question of ‘being
a native speaker’ versus ‘non-native speaker’. In fact, the whole concept of ‘native
speakerhood’ as applied to a multilingual person is being currently contested in
contact linguistics.45 It is not a question of whether a translator is able or not to
recognize a specific status of an item (like Russian elements in Aleichem’s text) but
rather a question of strategy or lack thereof. As stated before, Tamarkin was neither
a linguist nor a translator (being a multilingual f luent speaker is not synonymous

with being a translator/interpreter), and so possibly it did not occur to him that
some features of the original call for a series of conscious decisions. The translation
exhibits no such consciousness.
Kalle Kasemaa and Ülemlaul

Kalle Kasemaa (b. 1942) is a multilingual theologian and a prolific translator. He
mostly translates fiction from Hebrew and some other languages (Modern Greek,
Arabic, German, Dutch), but occasionally from Yiddish as well. In addition to
Sholem Aleichem’s works he has translated I. B. Singer and I. J. Singer into Estonian.
His background differs from that of Tamarkin in several respects. Tamarkin was not
a man of letters while Kasemaa, by virtue of his education and profession, is well
versed in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, and his proficiency in many languages
allows him access to many sources on a particular writer he chooses to translate. In
contrast to Tamarkin, for whom Yiddish was one of his native languages, Kasemaa
has had minimal contact if any with spoken Yiddish. Among other things, this
implies difficulties in recognizing idioms and fixed expressions (in contrast to the
innovative coinage of expressions). In a sense, he views a Yiddish text through
the prism of German, Hebrew, and Slavic languages (primarily Russian, which
he knows well). While this may in certain cases be helpful for understanding, it
also sometimes obscures the position of a given word in Yiddish: whether it is a
common, stylistically neutral, or unmarked Yiddish item of, say, Slavic origin,
or whether it is a new borrowing of the kind considered in the previous section,
or a stylistic device (like unmarked mund ‘mouth’ vs. derogatory Slavicism gembe
‘mouth’). This leads us once again back to the borders between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’
in the original and in the translation.
Ülemlaul (Shir-hashirim; Song of Songs, published in Estonian in 1987) was
Kasemaa’s very first translation of fiction in general. It is a story of a childhood love
that for several reasons could not develop further in adulthood. The narrative starts
in the early childhood of the protagonist when, after the death of the protagonist’s
brother, that brother’s little daughter appears and is brought up as if a child of
the protagonist’s family. Later the protagonist leaves his shtetl, probably pursuing
modern ideas, but returns when he learns that the girl is about to be married.
However, it is too late, as the two of them have now grown too different, and
nothing can come of it. The narrative is organized around quotations from the
Hebrew text of the Songs of Songs, and biblical verses are interwoven into the
narrative. Hebrew quotations are followed by their Yiddish translation as well
as further contemplations that convey the emotions of the narrator. Mood, tone,
and somewhat elevated style dictate the logic of the text, whereas reality becomes
secondary: a shtetl that lives its usual life and the beauty of nature are described in
an abstract and generalizing way with no geographical names given. This contrasts
with other short stories by Sholem Aleichem in which geography is relevant, despite
the fictionalized location (such as Boyberik, Yehupets, and Kozodoyevke).
In this case, this means that toponyms and proper names are not problematic for
194 Anna Verschik
a translator. What is significant here is the style, mood, and tone. The relationship
between Hebrew and Yiddish, the biblical text, and its rendition into the vernacular
cannot be reproduced entirely. It is not merely about finding equivalents but about
both the diglossic relationship between the languages and the genre of translating
and commenting on Hebrew texts. The whole template, in which an excerpt from
a canonical text is first presented and then its translations and interpretations are
provided, is characteristic of traditional Jewish culture. Sholem Aleichem used this
model in other works as well: ‘The Bewitched Taylor’, for example, imitates a story
from a community chronicle, which, as a text of this genre, would be typically
written in Hebrew and then translated into Yiddish.
One may suggest that the contrast between Hebrew and Yiddish in this model
can be understood as a contrast between high and everyday style; for a reader of the
original, these are not atomized discrete linguistic systems but points on a stylistic
continuum. A possible translation strategy would be to use a highly archaic Bible
translation to represent Hebrew and a modern, neutral style for Yiddish. However,
this presents a problem in Estonian where a sharp stylistic differentiation is lacking.
Kasemaa decided to transliterate Hebrew (in the Ashkenazi pronunciation) and to
translate the verses from Hebrew into Estonian, providing exact biblical references
in the glossary. There are no easy solutions here; for the rendition of Hebrew as an
archaic and elevated register, the target language must have such a ‘high’ register
(for instance, Old Slavonic vis-à-vis modern Russian).
Moreover, the original text mentions some Yiddish cultural realities, such as
holidays, everyday life in the shtetl (the children go to the fields to pick green
branches for the holiday of shvues), etc. These details create a background for the
narrative but are not decisive per se. Thus, not every detail bears the same weight
or importance for a literary narrative, and a translator has to determine when a
descriptive translation would be more appropriate rather then maintaining the
original term, accompanied by an explanation. In this way, zogn kadish nokh mayn
bruder Beni ‘to say kadish for my brother Beni’46 becomes ütlema surnupalvet minu
venna Beni eest,47 where surnupalve is a transparent coinage (deceased + prayer). At
the same time, shvues is preserved (rendered in Estonian as švuess)48 because it is
more difficult to devise a similarly concise descriptive translation, and the meaning
can be explained in the glossary.
As the translator’s command of Yiddish is passive and derives from reading as
opposed to the rhythms of speech, he seems sometimes unaware of the status of
certain Hebraisms and Slavicisms in Yiddish. Probably fearing denationalization of
the translation (that is, deleting ethnically, linguistically, and culturally meaningful
features and rendering them in neutral terms), he renders items of Slavic/Hebrew
origin that are unmarked in Yiddish in italics. For instance, levade (from Ukrainian
levada ‘a kind of lawn’) is preserved italicized 49 and an explanation is provided. In
the same spirit, mazl-tov ‘congratulations’ is written in italics50 and a commentary
informs us that it is a Hebrew formula for congratulation, consisting of the
words mazal ‘luck, happiness’ and tov ‘good’. In both cases, such a strategy seems
mismatched because levade, albeit a local Slavicism, is an unmarked and stylistically
neutral word; as for mazl-tov, it belongs to Yiddish everyday formulaic language
and its Hebrew origin is not an indication of a high style or anything culturally
specific.
Idiomatic expressions are often rendered almost word for word: ikh hob kharote,
vi hint esn mikh,51 ‘I regret, as if dogs were eating me up’ (that is, an expression of
ultimate regret and uneasy feeling) becomes mul on kahju, justkui koerad pureksid mind
‘I regret, as if dogs were biting me’.52 In Estonian, this sounds strange. One can
debate whether such an expression in effect becomes a new figurative expression
as in the earlier examples. What is important is that Estonian equivalents based on
the same notion of how regrets can gnaw at one are available, for example: nagu
uss näriks sees, literally ‘as if a worm were gnawing inside’. At times, idioms are
misunderstood: az zi vet aroys fun keylim ‘when she will be beside herself ’ (literally,
‘when she will be out of vessels’)53 is translated as ja ta ajab silmad pärani ‘and she
opens her eyes widely (with astonishment)’.54
The translations that are arguably questionable nevertheless do not distort the
overall impression. Details of reality play a secondary role here, while the pensive,
sad, and nostalgic tones of the narrative are of primary importance and have been
preserved; in a word, these components constitute the dominant. Although set in a
shtetl in a particular cultural setting where biblical texts are an integral part of the
culture, the story of an unrequited relationship is universally human.
Kasemaa adds numerous metatexts to all of his translations, including in this case
an afterword and a glossary. While a reader receives a lot of relevant background
information, some of it appears redundant. In the example of mazl-tov, the fact that
it is a Hebrew phrase in Yiddish and a semantic compound (‘luck, fortune’ and
‘good’) is of no use to an Estonian reader. In addition to the explanation of Yiddish
realities that come from Hebrew (names of the holidays, etc.), the translator gives
a non-Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation, marking the stress: tálless (tallít) ‘prayer
shawl’.55 One may wonder whether this helps us to understand the text; perhaps
the decision signals the translator’s awareness of the existing problem of differences
between Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi pronunciations, although this is not
particularly prominent in the Estonian context.
The afterword is a brief summary of East European Jewish cultural history and
Yiddish literature. Sholem Aleichem is neither central to this summary nor a primary
subject in it. Apparently, the objective was to provide an overall context rather
than to review in depth the works of the author himself. The afterword explains
mysticism and rationalism in the Jewish tradition, the Jewish Enlightenment, and
Hasidism, and brief ly describes the works of Mendele, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem,
Sholem Asch, Haim Nachman Bialik, Itsik Manger, and I. B. Singer. An Estonian
reader, even an educated one, would have hardly known all this in 1987, and such
a concise history provides a helpful starting point.
Conclusions
In the analysed texts, both translators have succeeded in the determination and
preservation of the dominant. Without that the translation of an artistic work does
not hold together. The problem of ‘native’ as opposed to ‘foreign’ is a perennial one
196 Anna Verschik
and applies often quite differently in individual cases. Although a translator knows
about the danger of word-for-word translation, such a method does periodically
yield a new figurative usage in the target language, particularly in ‘smaller’ languages
that have had little access to the source literature. The question of whether this may
be the result of a conscious decision or simply a misunderstanding of the original is
often impossible to judge.
One sentence in Kasemaa’s afterword to Ülemlaul puzzled me. After a brief
characterization of the ‘Classic’ Yiddish authors Mendele and Peretz, he states that
Sholem Aleichem’s fiction is easier to translate.56 What exactly does he mean by
this? I would in fact argue the contrary: while cultural realities may pose a difficulty
to translation from any language to any other language, none of the authors
mentioned in the afterword commands the same range of styles and varieties with
the same precision and virtuosity as Sholem Aleichem does. The direct speech of
his characters has often immensely complicated morphosyntax (long sentences,
repetitions, self-interruptions, etc.) because it ‘imitates’ real spoken language; in
addition to that, the varieties used in his texts are not just Yiddish or Hebrew
but also include Hebraicized Yiddish, dialectally coloured Yiddish, Germanized
Yiddish, German as spoken by Jews and Germans, Russian, Russian as spoken by
Jews, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew- or Aramaic-sounding gibberish of characters
who want to sound learned.
All in all, Estonian readers do not have many translations of Sholem Aleichem’s
work at their disposal. Various factors are at play here, among them a tiny number
of translators able to select texts and carry out the work and the marginal position of
Yiddish and Jewish culture within the Estonian cultural polysystem. Nevertheless,
even these few translations have been made from the original and the choice of text
provides us with an adequate picture of Sholem Aleichem’s world and imagery. If he
or she wishes, an educated Estonian reader could get an idea of Sholem Aleichem’s
writing and Yiddish literature and culture in general from these translations. Even
if certain culturally specific points became lost or changed in translation, the
dominant (in the translation theory sense of the word) in each of Sholem Aleichem’s
texts has been preserved. This is ultimately the most important issue, because
without it a literary work loses some imminent unique features and becomes hardly
intelligible or, in the worst case, even distorted. Thanks to these translations, an
Estonian reader can appreciate, if not exactly the vanished world of Yiddish shtetls,
then the hearty humour, sincere emotions, and the author’s eloquence and unique
style.
Notes to Chapter 11
1. My approach to translation of fiction will draw on Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, the concept
of total translation as proposed by Peeter Torop in his Totalńyi perevod (Tartu: Tartu Univesrity
Press, 1995), and the notion of the dominant, first suggested by Roman Jakobson in 1935 and
then developed by Torop, Totalńyi perevod, p. 83–84; idem, ‘Translation as Communication and
Auto-communication’, Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique Apliquée, 9.24 (2010), 3–10.
2. Torop. Totalńyi perevod, p. 65.
3. See Itamar Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies [= Poetics Today 11:1] (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1990); and Itamar Even-Zohar (1998) ‘The Position of Translated Literature within
the Literary Polysystem’, Translation across Cultures, ed. by Gideon Toury (New Delhi: Bahri
Publications, 1998), pp. 109–17.
4. See Itamar Even-Zohar, ‘The Making of Culture Repertoire and the Role of Transfer’, Target,
9.2 (1997), 373–81.
5. See Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, pp. 47–49, especially on the inevitable peripheral position of
small literatures in the Western Hemisphere and the dependence of ‘weak literatures’ on literary
importation, especially if a literature is ‘young’.
6. Anne Lange and Boris Baljasny, ‘Testing the Relevance of Translation’, Interlitteraria, 15 (2010),
287. Although Babel was not forbidden and Camus appeared in Russian in 1969 and 1980, this
had little to do with the Estonian situation. The feeling of being violently removed from the
Western world by the Soviet occupation and a sense of isolation was prevalent in Estonian
society during the Soviet era. Despite attempts at Russification, Estonian retained its high
prestige and the experience of previous statehood was valued. Although instruction in Russian
was compulsory in secondary schools, proficiency in Russian depended on an individual’s needs,
profession, etc. and reading fiction, especially translations, in Russian would be unlikely. Thus,
translations of fiction were viewed as a means to overcome isolation. Sometimes, translations
into Estonian appeared earlier than translations into Russian, for instance, Camus was published
in Estonian in 1963, several years earlier than in Russian.
7. Roman Jakobson, ‘The Dominant’, in his Selected Writings, iii: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of
Poetry, ed. by S. Rudy (The Hague, Paris, and New York: Mouton Publishers, 1981), p. 751.
8. Torop, ‘Translation as Communication and Auto-communication’, pp. 3–5.
9. For an example from the history of translation of Yiddish literature, see Anna Verschik, ‘Ühe
tõlke ebaõnnestumise põhjustest’, Vikerkaar, 2.3 (2000), 141–47, on what happened to the Russian
translation of David Bergelson’s novel Nokh alemen.
10. Rein Raud, ‘Keel ja kultuuriline teine’, Vikerkaar, 2.3 (2000), 148–49.
11. Anna Verschik, ‘Yiddish in Estonia: Past and Present’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 30.2 (1999),
117–18.
12. On the importance of existing norms, see Theo Hermans, ‘The Production and Reproduction
of Translation: System Theory and Historical Context’, Translations: (Re)shaping of Literature and
Culture, ed. by Saliha Paker (Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2000), pp. 175–94.
13. See Lange and Baljasny, ‘Testing the Relevance of Translation’, p. 287. See also the references
therein.
14. Torop, Totalńyi perevod, pp. 67–68.
15. To give an example, Sholem Aleichem uses elements of Russian for various reasons. In many
cases Russian expressions are highlighted in some way, i.e. placed between quotation marks,
or they clearly refer to realities of imperial Russia or to innovations like vstretshayen dem poyezd
(expecting a train to arrive, cf. Russian встречать поезд). Imagine that such a text is to be
translated into Russian. If left unmarked, the special status of Russian elements in the original
is lost in the translations. Thus, the opposition between ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ is not the same.
A different instance would be the problem of rendering the relationship between Yiddish and
German speech, i.e. Germanized Yiddish or German as spoken by the protagonist of the story
Der daytsh (The German). Theoretically, a translator into Estonian can draw upon the existing
sources of Germanized Estonian, but would that produce the same effect? The Estonian
translation of this story will be analysed below.
16. Gennady Estraikh, ‘Der sovetisher Sholem-Aleykhem’, Forverts, 27 February 2009: ‘After the
eradication of the Yiddish culture in the USSR during the late Stalinist era, in the so-called
‘thaw period’ for several reasons attitudes towards Yiddish were revised and Sholem Aleichem
made a good candidate for a ‘Soviet Yiddish classic’ (although, paradoxically, he never lived
under Soviet rule).’
17. On the importance of selection, see Even-Zohar, Polysystem Studies, p. 48.
18. Šolom Aleihhem, Kuuskümmend kuus, Unattributed preface, trans. by Aron Tamarkin, Loomingu
Raamatukogu, 7 (1959), 3. Estonian lacks an equivalent for shtetl (unlike Russian местечко,
literally, ‘a small place’, but referring to the specific official designation for market towns which
constituted the historical shtetls). If something is called in Estonian väikelinn ‘small town’ etc.,
this does not evoke any Jewish association.
198 Anna Verschik
19. A. Tamarkin belonged to the generation who learned at least two foreign languages at school,
German usually being one of them. As a graduate of the Jewish Gymnasium in Tallinn, a secular
institution, he had at least some idea of modern Hebrew. Knowledge of English was not typical
for that generation, and I doubt that Anglo-American conventions for translating Yiddish names
could have been a model for him.
20. Šolom Aleihhem, Kuuskümmend kuus, p. 9.
21. Ibid., p. 11.
22. Ibid., p. 6.
23. Ibid., p. 37.
24. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
25. Ibid., p. 24.
26. Ibid., p. 15.
27. Ibid., p. 26.
28. Ibid., p. 14.
29. Ibid., p. 41.
30. Ibid.
31. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Der daytsh’, in his Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem, i (New York: Sholem-
Aleykhems folksfond oysgabe, 1919), p. 133.
33. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Der daytsh’, p. 137.
36. Ibid., p. 135.
38. Ibid., p. 42.
40. Ibid., p. 133.
43. Ibid., p. 133.
45. See, for instance, a most recent collection of contributions: U. Ansaldo, The Native Speaker and
the Mother Tongue, Special issue, Language Sciences, 32 (2010).
46. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Shir-hashirim’, in his Ale verk fun Sholem-Aleykhem (New York: Sholem-
Aleykhems folksfond oysgabe, 1919), p. 22.
47. Šolem Alejchem, Ülemlaul, trans. by Kalle Kasemaa, Loomingu Raamatukogu, 3 (1987), 14.
48. Ibid., p. 16.
49. Ibid., p. 13.
50. Ibid., p. 21.
51. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Shir-hashirim’, p. 29.
52. Šolem Alejchem, Ülemlaul, p. 18.
53. Sholem Aleichem, ‘Shir-hashirim’, p. 10.
54. Šolem Alejchem, Ülemlaul, p. 6.
55. Ibid., p. 55.
56. Kalle Kasemaa, ‘Järelsõna’, in Šolem Alejchem, Ülemlaul, p. 50.
CH A P T E R 12
Y
Speaking Tevye der milkhiker

in Translation:
Performance, Humour,
and World Literature
Jan Schwarz
Historians of literary translation have often noted a strange phenomenon:

although an original text still gives us pleasure even centuries after it was
written, almost all translations age quickly. Why translations should be more
time-bound than literary works of art remains a mystery, but the consequences
are clear: each new age demands its own versions of the literary past.
Breon Mitchell, ‘Translator’s Preface’ (1998)1
This image of performance may account for the fact that, surprisingly enough,
I always seem to conceive of and discuss the translating process as essentially
auditory, something immediately available to other people, as opposed to a
silent, solitary process. I think of the author’s voice and the sound of the text,
then of my obligation to hear both as clearly and profoundly as possible, and
finally of my equally pressing need to speak the piece in a second language.
Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (2009)2
Sholem Aleichem’s work has been translated for over a century, and a part of his
ouevre exists (in some cases in multiple versions) in Russian, Ukrainian, English,
German, Hebrew, and many other languages. Perhaps the single most important
fact that distinguishes Sholem Aleichem’s work from his contemporaries in
twentieth-century world literature such as Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, and Franz
Kaf ka is the rapid decline of the (secular) Yiddish speech community, the primary
readers of Yiddish books, press, and periodicals where his work was first published.
Proust, Twain, and Kaf ka are canonical figures in their national literatures,
and their respective nations all include governmental, educational, and cultural
infrastructures that give financial support to academic and popular publications of
their work as well as pedagogical and scholarly recourses for accessing them. Most
importantly, Proust, Twain, and Kaf ka can still count on a constantly renewable
readership in their original languages. In Sholem Aleichem’s case, what remains of a
viable secular Yiddish culture is primarily limited to academic centres and cultural
institutions in the United States and Israel; the academization of Yiddish culture
200 Jan Schwarz
Fig. 12.1. Cover of Tevye the Dairyman (2009)

Speaking Tevye der milkhiker in Translation 201
has become a foregone conclusion. However, this has not resulted in additional
publications of Yiddish academic editions of Sholem Aleichem’s work. Instead,
there has been a proliferation of interpretative essays about that work. Most of
these are in English and Hebrew, and relatively few are book-length studies. To
date, there have been no academic biographies.3 These days, the primary readers of
Sholem Aleichem are primarily scholars and students in the field of Jewish literary
studies; and fewer still have the linguistic skills necessary to read him in Yiddish.
Translators of Sholem Aleichem tend to be middle-aged or elderly, who grew up
speaking or hearing Yiddish in childhood, or who learned the language as adults
from native speakers. However, Yiddish translators are not different from literary
translators of other languages for whom professionalization and academization have
increasingly become the norm.4
It was the American musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964) which most successfully
made Sholem Aleichem’s work broadly available outside the academy. That musical
has monopolized the cultural space left vacant by the absence of a Yiddish reader-
ship and viable Yiddish culture.Today, Fiddler is universally known and performed
all over the world. Most of its worldwide audience has never heard of Sholem
Aleichem and would be hard pressed to come up with the title of one of his works.
Sholem Aleichem’s work in Yiddish has shared the fate of his culture: marginalized
and occluded even in the two most important Jewish centres in the world, the
United States and Israel. As a result, translation of Sholem Aleichem’s work has
to a very large extent become the only way of securing its afterlife and continued
relevance for a new generation of readers.
Often overlooked in the discussion of the Yiddish reader reception of Sholem
Aleichem’s work is the wide array of spoken-word events which proliferated in
Yiddish culture. These included the public readings of Yiddish celebrity writers
such as Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh in the Russian Empire
in the early twentieth century; Hersh Grossbart’s popular vort kontsertn (word
concerts) in inter-war Poland and post-Holocaust Jewish Diaspora and Israel; and
the obligatory reciting of Yiddish poetry and prose at various public events, and
much more.5 The centrality of spoken-word events in modern Yiddish culture
is textually embedded in Tevye the Dairyman in the form of Tevye himself, the
work’s only speaker and the most fully f leshed-out character in Sholem Aleichem’s
oeuvre. As David G. Roskies points out: ‘What is lost in translation is not the plot
line or punch line, not the story’s manifold interpretive possibilities, from pious
to postmodern, each locatable within a different contextual-generic map, but the
story’s orality’.6 The Tevye stories’ ‘orality’ applies not only to the monologue
as a first-person narrative and its multilingual play with the various linguistic
components of Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s monologues would also provide him
with material for his public readings. Moreover, the author’s extensive work on
turning Tevye into a play and a film derived from his narrative genius in creating
theatrical characters and plots.7 In short, Tevye’s monologues are imbued with the
‘rhetoric’ and ‘aesthetics’ of performance. The Soviet Yiddish critic Meir Wiener
delineated these features:
202 Jan Schwarz
Sholem Aleichem’s masterpieces do not have their greatest impact when read,
but rather when declaimed. First, then, one notices the masterly subtleties
which are not apprehended during a ‘quiet’ reading.
Sholem Aleichem’s work is directed, in fact, not only to the ‘factual
imagination’ ( faktn-fantazye) but the ‘verbal imagination’ (vort-fantazye), if such
imprecise terminology may be used. (It is imprecise because both forms of
‘imagination’ proceed from a concrete, essentially similar basis in the ‘facts of
reality’.)
Such speech in its full properties can only be fully experienced by being
reproduced in spoken form. As with a strong dramatic work, so Sholem
Aleichem’s stories must be staged in order for them to achieve their full sound
( fuln klang). They must be declaimed. That is the reason for Sholem Aleichem’s
habit of reading his stories publicly, and it is no coincidence that of all the
Jewish writers (and certainly most of the non-Jewish writers), his works are
most often publicly recited and read.
Sholem Aleichem’s works, even the smallest of his masterful stories are
therefore a sort of wordplay (reyd shpil), depicting an illusory, ‘play-acting’
(shpilerish) world. This is a peculiarly new genre in world literature. On the
surface it appears to be prose, but in essence, it resembles high comedy.8
As Sholem Aleichem’s baredevdikayt (volubility) is a central feature of his works, the
dramatic quality of the spoken word enables a fuller realization of his monologues’
tonality and voice. Wiener points out that Sholem Aleichem’s monologues can
be described as a kind of word play which expresses an ‘illusory’ reality of play
acting disengaged from any coherent ideological pattern. The comedy derives
from the sheer delight in listening to the limitless individual capacity for talking
(almost without interruption) as a means of self-justification and self-therapy. It
sometimes approximates to a ‘stream of consciousness’ which is addressed to an
implied listener (Sholem Aleichem or others) and presented to the readers without
any explanations other than the monologue itself. In order to recreate the effect
of the monologue as a seemingly verbatim recording of spoken language, Sholem
Rabinovitsh meticulously orchestrated, phrased, and paced his character’s f low
of spoken language and structured it aesthetically by including phonetic and
aural features of the speech act. Therefore, it is perhaps no coincidence that a
quintessential American musical art form has been most successful in conveying the
aural, performative quality of Tevye the Dairyman.
While translating Tevye the Dairyman into Danish, I listened to the Yiddish
theatre director and actor Shmuel Atzmon’s recording of Gants Tevye der milkhiker.9
Atzmon’s pitch perfect rendering of Tevye’s Ukrainian Yiddish dialect enabled
me to experience fully the oral tonality of Tevye. I noted in the afterword to the
Danish translation:
Listening to the Israeli theatre director and actor Shmuel Atzmon’s declaiming
Tevye’s monologues with its pauses, sighs, diminuendos, and crescendos is a
sublime experience; one which leads directly into the main character’s world.
Tevye the Dairyman can be viewed as a kind of sheet music which is only fully
realized when recited aloud. Sholem Aleichem was a master reader of his
work in front of audiences, and his style, according to observers, was based on
understatement.10
I also characterized Tevye as the first Jewish stand-up comedian, which turned
out to be a serendipitous choice of words as this designation became a linchpin for
the reviewers of the book. Two major Danish newspapers titled their reviews of
the book: ‘Yiddish Stand-up’ and ‘The First Jewish Stand-up Comedian’.11 The
reviewers used stand-up comedy as a well-known concept to describe Tevye’s
humour and performance style, which previously had been solely associated with
Fiddler on the Roof. A majority of the ten reviews which have appeared so far begin
with a (negative) reference to Fiddler on the Roof. This association with the musical
followed partly from the publisher’s decision to place a reference to it on the book
cover, illustrated by Marc Chagall’s ‘The Musician’, with the subtitle: ‘The Source
for Fiddler on the Roof ’. By contrast, the 1961 Danish translation of the work by the
chief rabbi Marcus Melchior, a translation made prior to the musical, established a
connection to the Danish comedic tradition:
Let me finally advise the reader to size up this book. It is implied in its
monologue form that the narrative — even if it is indeed visible and once in
a while comes to a head quite dramatically — often must leave room for the
artistic presentation of the situation. It is my belief that the Danish readers will
enjoy this special form of humour which in comical effect does not fall short
of Holberg at his best.12
With this reference to the classical seventeenth-century Danish playwright Ludvig
Holberg (1684–1754), Melchior situated his translation in a comedic tradition familiar
to most Danes. After almost half a century of exposure to Fiddler the Roof, my 2009
Tevye translation, by contrast, was presented as part of the American cultural
performance of stand-up comedy known to most Danes from Jerry Seinfeld, Jon
Stewart, and others. Several reviewers highlighted Tevye’s loquacity as a typical
example of Jewish stand-up comedy: ‘His rambling and incredibly funny comical
stand-up monologues are packed with texts from the Jewish holy books...’.13
Two other reviews raised questions about the book’s comedy and humour: what
exactly is the character of Tevye’s humour? What is typically Jewish about it? What
is the connection between its comedic and tragic features? A review titled ‘A Book
only for the Chosen?’ highlighted Tevye’s mixture of comedy and tragedy:
I feel a frozen smile when the gallows humour is split into something deeply
tragic, and something with such a backdrop seems really inappropriately
comical... [...] why does Tevye take on the role of the always funny self ironic
Jew. Is it a sale’s trick? A kind of self-therapy? Or can the belief in God’s
omnipotence only be combined with all the calamities in the world in the form
of gallows humour?
Another reviewer invoked a similar image:
The indulgent laugh over Tevye’s frills, exaggerated quotations and ostensibly
naïve way of thinking sticks in the throat, and one is left with yet another story
about a lost European minority...14
For today’s readers Tevye’s humour has little to do with stand-up comedy, whose
main goal is, in Yuri Vedenyapins’s words, ‘to make people laugh, and in the final
account, it is this and only this criteria that will determine the degree of a stand-
204 Jan Schwarz
up comedian’s success’.15 As has been well documented, Sholem Aleichem’s own

readings of his work elicited exactly such a response from the audience. Today,
readers’ distance from the Yiddish cultural world in pre-Holocaust Europe, and
particularly from the origins of Tevye’s humour in the religious discourse of the
study house, disqualifies it as a stand-up routine comparable, for example, to the
ones perfected by the Yiddish comedian Shimen Dzigan in Israel in the 1950s and
1960s, and Jerry Seinfeld in the United States. In her study of the The Shlemiel as
Modern Hero, Ruth Wisse elaborates on Sholem Aleichem’s humour as a survival
strategy which gives his monologists a sense of meaning, enabling them to outlive
the confrontation with a horrific universe that threatens to obliterate them. Sholem
Aleichem’s monologists use irony and humour as a psychological survival mechanism
which allows them to remain unscathed by historical misfortune: ‘Kaf ka’s heroes
are themselves a part of the universal horror confronting them. Sholem Aleichem’s
heroes are confronted by horror, but within a universe of meaning’.16
In his seminal essay Vegn Sholem-Aleykhems humor (About Sholem Aleichem’s
Humour, 1941), which I quoted above, Meir Wiener compares Sholem Aleichem’s
treatment of the pogrom theme with that of Bialik’s poem ‘Shkhite-shtot’ (In the
City of Slaughter) and Lamed Shapiro’s story ‘Der tseylem’ (The Cross). Wiener
points out that, unlike Bialik, Shapiro, and others, Sholem Aleichem avoids direct
descriptions of the pogroms and their victims. Instead, he presents the pogrom
in ‘an oddly light-hearted, almost humorous manner’.17 Sholem Aleichem’s art is
intent upon eradicating fear and upholding ideals which might seem completely
out of touch with reality. Nevertheless, it enables Tevye to shift the focus from
the actual atrocity of the pogrom in Tevye’s eighth monologue ‘Lekh-lekho’ (Get
Thee Gone) to its insignificance in the larger scheme of things, which for Tevye is
equated with God and His plan for the world.
‘Lekh-lekho’ was written in 1914, after a five-year hiatus following Sholem
Aleichem’s completion of ‘Tevye Travels to the Land of Israel’. The four monologues
‘Hodl’, ‘Chava’, ‘Shprintse’ and ‘Beylke’ were written in succession between 1904
and 1909. This set of monologues focuses on Tevye’s particular relationship with
each one of his daughters, whereas ‘Lekh-lekho’, with the exception of Khave’s
return at the end, depicts Tevye’s expulsion from Anatevke and his relationship
with the town’s council represented by the policeman, who has been given the
order to carry out the edict to expel Tevye from the town. ‘Lekh-lekho’ reenacts
Tevye’s confrontation with the Russian Orthodox priest in ‘Khave’. This time the
stakes are much higher, though, because Tevye is directly confronting an official
government representative who has been ordered to implement the Tsarist anti-
Semitic policies forcing him to leave his hometown forever.
The historical backdrop for ‘Lekh-lekho’ is the Mendel Beilis case. In that famous
case, the blood libel accusing Jews of using Christian blood to make matzo was
used to prosecute Beilis, a Russian Jew who was put on trial in Kiev. It became
an international cause célèbre which ended with his exoneration in 1913.18 Like
Kaf ka in The Trial, written the same year as ‘Lekh-lekho’, Sholem Aleichem is
not interested in spelling out the actual accusations and background for Tevye’s
expulsion. Rather, it is depicted as a bureaucratic matter, an order given from above
in the governmental hierarchy which the local authorities have no choice but to
implement. Unlike the protagonist in The Trial, however, Tevye does not gradually
internalize his own guilt. Instead, in order to avoid dealing with the consequences
of the expulsion, Tevye spends the final pages of the chapter pondering if it is
indeed right for him to accept the convert Khave’s return to his family.
Tevye’s quotation from the section of the Torah known as Lekh-lekho (‘Go
Forth’, Genesis 12.19–13.18) equates him with a latter-day Abraham who has been
commanded by God to ‘go forth’ and leave his homeland. This presents Tevye’s
first extended example of taytshn a sedre (interpreting a chapter of the Bible),
encapsulating his ambivalent relationship to the biblical text. In this monologue,
however, Tevye’s quotation is not only a way of showing off and protecting himself
from the vicissitudes of life. It is also an attempt to use the ancient Jewish strategy
of enlisting the Bible to respond to anti-Semitic horror and lawlessness in late
imperial Russia. Tevye plays on the double meaning of the Yiddish expression
lernen mit emetsn bolek, ‘to teach somebody a lesson’ and literally ‘to study Balak with
someone’, using the name of the Torah portion Balak (Numbers 22:2–24:25). The
following comparison of two English translations of the section in ‘Lekh-lekho’
which focuses on the Yiddish expression’s double meaning highlights some of the
complex issues of translating Tevye:
Vu zshe, heyst es, haltn mir? Bay der sedre lekh-lekho. Nor eyder mir veln
tsukumen tsu der sedre lekh-lekho, vil ikh aykh betn zikh matriekh zayn mit
mir opshteln zikh oyf a vayle bay der sedre bolek. Der mineg haoylem iz afile
fun zint di velt shteyt, az frier lernt men lekh-lekho, dernokh bolek. Un gelernt
hot men mit mir bolek azoy sheyn, az ir megt es horkhn. Es kon aykh a mol
tsu nuts kumen.
Where were we? Yes, in the chapter of Lekh-lekho. But before we get to Lekh-
lekho, suppose we have a look, if you don’t mind, at the story of the Amalekites
in the Book of Exodus. I know that the way things are done in this world, and
the way they always have been, Genesis comes before Exodus, but in this case
the Amalekites came first. And I suggest you listen to the lesson they taught me,
because it may come in useful some day. (trans. Hillel Halkin, 1986)
Where were we? Yes, at the passage in Get Thee Gone. But before we get to that,
I beg you to be so kind as to stop for awhile at the section about the Amalekites
in the Book of Exodus. Since the world began, it has always been the custom
to study Get Thee Gone first and then Exodus. But with it is the other way
around — first study the Amalekites and then Get Thee Gone. I was taught a
real lesson from that book. You might want to hear this — it might come in
handy someday.19 (trans. Aliza Shevrin, 2009)
In the above two English translations, the double meaning of the idiom — to teach
somebody a lesson and a reference to a particular Bible chapter — has fallen by the
wayside. The two translators present their own interpretation rather than conveying
Tevye’s ambiguous use of the Bible reference. Although the Amalekites are brief ly
mentioned in ‘Balak’, the main thrust of Tevye’s reference is not the story of the
Amalekites which occurs in Exodus (17.8) but instead the biblical chapter’s literary
and generic character in Numbers 22–24:
206 Jan Schwarz
The special quality of this story encouraged the talmudic opinion that it was
a separate book of the Bible, making Seven Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers 1–21, Balaam (Numbers 25-end), and Deuteronomy (Bava
Batra 14b-15a). It is a tale of great charm, humor, moving poetry, and particular
literary quality.20
In ‘Balak’, a pagan soothsayer named Balaam is assigned by King Balak of Moab
to curse the Israelites, in order to prevent their invasion of the land. Baalam takes
on this assignment, but God makes him bless Israel instead of cursing them in the
prophetic final part of the chapter. The biblical chapter highlights the power of
words by demonstrating how they can be used as either curses or blessings, and
how the lines between these two kinds of speech acts are blurred. The connection
between the biblical chapter and Tevye’s character in ‘Lekh-lekho’ is manifold.
Tevye’s whole raison d’être is tied up with his verbal performance, his great ability
as storyteller to talk endlessly in order to serve his need for self-justification in
persuading his listener (Sholem Aleichem and the reader) that he can uphold a
distinction between right and wrong, curses and blessings. The reason why Khave
figures so prominently in the final section of ‘Lekh-lekho’ originates with Tevye’s
silence towards her in ‘Khave’ when they met in the woods. Instead, he wilfully
ignored Khave’s plea for compassion by angrily riding past her. As Olga Litvak
points out, Khave’s biblical reference to Balaam’s ass in the form of Tevye’s horse,
and Khave as a stand-in for the satanic representative of the angel are derived from
that same Bible chapter, Balak:
The suspension of speech in the confrontation with Khave places Tevye on
the level with Balaam, the ‘tainted prophet’ obliged continually to testify
against himself. After ‘Khave’, Tevye reenters the narrative cycle not merely
as an unreliable narrator but as a pathological liar whose every word defeats
his intention, whose endless stream of talk constitutes a hysterical symptom of
unbearable guilt and whose every avowal of parental love effectively provides
evidence to the contrary.21
In ‘Lekh-lekho’, the rebellious Khave is reluctantly repatriated by Tevye while the
threat to Tevye and his fellow Jews is heightened by their frightful victim status at
the hand of the tsarist authorities, a latter-day Balak, the Moabite king and hostile
neighbour of the Israelites in the Bible. These biblical echoes provide the backdrop
for Tevye’s exercise in wilful avoidance, his stubborn clinging to his own version
of things: to his God-given universe of clear-cut boundaries between curses and
blessings. There is an uncanny parallel between Tevye’s abusive behaviour towards
Khave with his initial curse and expulsion of her in ‘Khave’, and his subsequent
reluctant repatriation (and implicit blessing) of her in ‘Lekh-lekho’, and the
town council’s own reluctant implementation of the Tsar’s edict to expel Tevye
from the town.
In order to convey these biblical associations, Hillel Halkin’s English, Dan
Miron’s Hebrew, and my Danish translation chose to maintain the Hebrew titles of
the Bible chapters while explaining the double meaning of the Balak reference in
a footnote. As a result, the foreignness of the names of the Hebrew Bible chapters
is emphasized in translation while providing an explanation in a footnote enables
further reader engagement.
Later in ‘Lekh-lekho’, Tevye’s daydream about the state of God’s world is said
to take place ‘Veyehi biyamey mendl beylis’, a mock-biblical Hebrew phrase meaning
‘And it was in the days of Mendel Beilis’. He speculates about the coming of the
Messiah who, as is traditionally believed, will arrive on a white horse. Instead of
the Messiah, the village policeman appears presented here in the same two English
translations discussed above:
Undzer gantse hofenung atsind iz dokh nor, tomer vet got ton a nes, es vet kumen
meshiekh!...
Dervayl, azoy vi ikh zits mikh fartift in di dozike rayones, ikh tu a kuk — a vays
ferdl, un emetser zitst oyf dem raytndik, un glaykh tsum toyer fun mayn shtub!
Trrru — opgeshtelt zikh, aropgekrokhn, tsugebundn dos ferdl tsum toyer, un aleyn
glaykh tsu mir:
Zdrastoy, Tevel!
Zdrastvoytye, zdrastvoytye, vashe blahorodye! — entfer ikh opet gants breytlekh un
in hartsn trakht ikh mir: vayoyvo homen — makht Rashi: az me kukt-aroys afn
meshiekhn, kumt der uratnik...un ikh shtey-oyf akegn im, akegn dem uratnik
heyst es — borkhabe a gast! — zog ikh — vos hert zikh epes oyf der groyser velt
un vos vestu — zog ikh — epes zogn guts, adoni porets?
The only hope left us is for God to work a miracle and send us the Messiah right away...
There I sat thinking all this when I happened to look up — and what do you suppose
I saw? A white horse with a rider on it right in front of my house! ‘Whoaa’, he tells it,
jumping down and tying it to the gate, while to me he says, ‘Zdrastvoy, Tevel!’
‘Zdrastvoytye, Officer, Zdrastvoytye’, I say, giving him a friendly greeting. It seems
I only need to think of the Messiah for Haman to appear right away — I mean the
village policeman. ‘Welcome, sit down’, I say. ‘What’s the good word? What’s new in
the big world, Officer?’ (trans. Hillel Halkin, 1986)
Our entire hope now is that God will perform a miracle and the Messiah will come!
Just then, I looked up and saw a white horse and rider coming straight to my door!
He stopped, got off, tied the horse to the post, and came right over to me. ‘Zdrastoy,
Tevel! Greetings!’
‘Greetings to you, your honor!’ I answered in a friendly manner, and in my heart
I was thinking, Haman approacheth. As Rashi says, When you await the Messiah, the
village constable comes instead. I rose and said to the constable, ‘Welcome to you. What’s
happening in the world, and what good news do you bring, your honor?’22 (trans. Aliza
Shevrin, 2009)
This passage poses a number of challenges for the translator:
(1) The Russian greetings are contrasted with regular Yiddish greetings which
indicate the separate universes of Tevye and the policeman as a representative of the
Tsarist governmental power. The policeman is addressed as an ‘uratnik’ (uriadnik,
the village policeman), a word of Slavic origin, and ‘adoni porets’, the Yiddish/
Hebrew words for ‘master landowner’. In both cases Tevye is using an honorific
address to emphasize his lowly social and legal status. Tevye seek to achieve a
comic effect in contrasting the official titles and greetings in the Russian with the
Yiddish greeting ‘borkharbe’ (welcome) and ‘adoni porets’, words that must sound
as incomprehensibly ‘other’ to the Russian policeman as the Russian words in
Tevye’s Jewish discourse.
208 Jan Schwarz
(2) Tevye’s Hebrew quote from the Book of Esther, followed by his own made-
up Rashi (the medieval Jewish commentator of the Hebrew Bible) interpretation
is meant to release some of the tension through humour while telling about his
humiliating encounter with the policeman.
(3) As in the rest of the chapter (and the book), Tevye narrates the story retro-
spectively by dramatizing the dialogue and the action of the characters. The event
is narrated in the present tense, shifting only once to the past tense. The phrase
‘zog ikh’ (says I) is repeated twice in the narrated dialogue; the non-verbal sound of
the horse, ‘Trrrru’, heightens the performative urgency of the retelling particularly
when read aloud.
Both English translations maintain the Russian greetings but do not highlight their
difference from the Hebrew greeting. ‘Adoni porets’ becomes ‘officer’ (Halkin) or
‘your honor’ (Shevrin). Halkin paraphrases the mock Rashi interpretation which
makes the joke fall f lat. Shevrin more accurately translates the Rashi quote in italics,
which despite looking and sounding awkward in its imitation of the King James
Bible presents a legitimate translational strategy in dealing with Tevye’s Hebrew
quotes. Neither of the two translators includes the repetition of Tevye’s ‘zog ikh’,
and only Halkin imitates the horse’s sound, ‘Whoaa’. Overall, Shevrin’s translation
is more faithful to the stylistic and diaglossic details while Halkin is better at
conveying the breathless, immediate quality of Tevye’s verbal performance.
Dan Miron’s 2009 Hebrew translation of Tevye the Dairyman starts from a more
advantageous position because he is translating from one Jewish language to another.
The fact that the Hebrew alphabet is the same in Yiddish allows for a similar visual
graphic reproduction of the words on the page which is obviously impossible to
do in a non-Jewish language. Furthermore, the overlap in Jewish vocabulary and
concepts between Yiddish and Hebrew brings the translation closer to the original.
Miron reproduces all the Russian words in vocalized Hebrew and explains them in
footnotes while reproducing the Rashi quote in Talmudic fashion. Finally, the two
instances of ‘zog ikh’, which Tevye uses to emphasize that he is retelling the events,
and the horse’s sound (reproduced in the same lettering as in the Yiddish original)
have been included.23
My Danish translation does not include the Russian greetings, which have been
translated without contrasting them with the Hebrew greeting. In general, I tried
to limit the use of foreign words as much as possible to make the translation more
accessible to the Danish reader. In this instance, I made a questionable choice,
because Sholem Aleichem’s strategic placement of the Russian words encapsulates
the policeman’s authority and Tevye’s powerlessness in confronting his shocking
appearance, which suddenly interrupts the dairyman’s wistful dreams about
messianic redemption. Moreover, I integrated the Scriptural quote followed by
the Rashi commentary into the text without italics. Instead of presenting Tevye’s
verbal performance in one block of text (as in Miron and Halkin’s translations), I
reproduced the dialogue as if Tevye’s verbal performance had been tightened up
by a professional writer similar to Shmuel Rozhansky’s edition of the Yiddish text
(and Shevrin’s translation). I wanted to make Tevye’s retelling of the dialogue more
graphically accessible in order to provide at least some familiar territory in a book

packed with Jewish content and style mostly foreign to the Danish reader.24
This example demonstrates some of the many challenges any translator of Tevye
the Dairyman faces, including the graphics of the texts, linguistic and cultural
differences, and framing devices such as book cover, introduction, and notes.
Perhaps most important is the translator’s negotiation of the tendency to domesticate
a foreign text in order to heighten its accessibility for its new readership.25 Although
much of the subtle linguistic differences and multilingual play will be lost in
translation, the confrontation between Tevye and the Tsarist policeman in ‘Lekh-
lekho’ can still be accurately translated without losing too much of the humour
inherent in Tevye’s use of the mock Rashi quote.
Unlike Motl the cantor’s son who can persuasively feign childish innocence when
he is told by a friend when a pogrom will take place, Tevye knows what a pogrom
is, and the reader knows that Tevye knows. In short, Tevye’s verbal performance in
front of the police officer is, as the latter puts it, ‘stories about your grandmother and
grandfather’ (in short bobe-mayses), which have no impact on the expulsion decree.
Rather, Tevye is going through the motions of bartering for time by scoring moral
talking points which won’t change the situation significantly. In an article about the
artistic use of comedy and laughter in response to the Holocaust, Sidra DeKoven
Ezrahi describes Sholem Aleichem’s shlemiel characters:
Confronting the dangers meted out to him by the world with an inner faith and
an uncanny ability to tell stories, his schlemiel engages in a self-conscious denial
of historical reality in favor of a higher principle of order and the production
of narrative space. A modern Queen Esther rewriting the murderous decree
against his people, the schlemiel rewrites its prewar equivalent, the pogrom
[...] the pogrom is as much a sign of the coming redemption as it is of the
devastation of this world; the redeemer’s tarrying provides opportunities for
comic creativity in the meantime.26
After the death blow to Tevye’s European Ashkenazic world in the Holocaust, Tevye
as a shlemiel figure might seem a throwback to a comparably more ‘innocent’ time
of pogroms. By now, in Seth Wolitz’s words, ‘The Americanization of Tevye’ has
become ensconced around the globe owing to the universal popularity of Fiddler
on the Roof.27 Today, the point of departure for any translation of Tevye regardless
of language is inescapably ‘the horizon of expectations’ established by Fiddler on the
Roof. However, if the translator of Tevye does his job well, this unreliable character’s
verbal performance and minority status will be transmitted in translation. Rather
than joke-telling and stand-up routine, Tevye’s monologues give aesthetic pleasure
and elicit laughter primarily because of their stylized colloquial language. The
translator is required to speak Tevye’s speech in a foreign language, so that it comes
alive as a verbal performance which can be actualized in various modes of reading
and public declamation.
Daniel Boyarin points out that in traditional Jewish culture, ‘Reading [...] is a
public, oral, and illocutionary speech act, an act, moreover, which when successful
always has perlocutionary effect’.28 This kind of reading is different from the private
reading for pleasure which has remained a central characteristic of European literary
210 Jan Schwarz
history. Emblematic of many Sholem Aleichem characters, Tevye bridges tradition

and modernity in his ambivalent desires for his daughters. Tevye is a product
of a basic traditional Jewish education, which has endowed him with a limited
religious vocabulary. He uses this circumscribed arsenal of religious quotes to great
humorous effect. Tevye would have been completely out of place at a Yiddish
spoken-word event such as a poetry reading, lecture, or debate. According to Jeffrey
Veidlinger, these were the ‘most common form of performance in early-twentieth
century Russian Jewish communities’.29 The shift to such secular, modern forms
of cultural performance based on ritualized forms of talking and listening is very
different from the traditional style of Jewish religious performance which favoured
the khevruse, discussing the intricacies of biblical and Talmudic texts in pairs in the
besmedresh (the study house). In traditional Jewish society, unlike secular spoken
word events, ‘Talking was a highly valued skill, but listening was underrated’.30
Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh’s use of religious Jewish textual practices such as
bilingual translation, biblical references, and generic and stylistic collage signalled
to the reader that his Mendele novels were using normative Jewish textual practice
in satirical ways. Similarly, Tevye, who more than any other Sholem Aleichem
character is indebted to the Mendele figure, mimics and subverts textual practices
in traditional Jewish society. Tevye’s monologue is addressed to Sholem Aleichem
who, except for a few characteristics, is never described in detail. Sholem Aleichem
remains a stock character, a well-educated man of the world, a littérateur, who might
be persuaded to turn Tevye’s stories into narrative commodities in the literary
marketplace. Modern Yiddish literature came into its own when the traditional
male discourse in the Jewish religious institutions became an aesthetic model that
could be subverted and transcended.31
Tevye’s Yiddish reader is presented with an abundance of textual clues, most of
which are represented visually on the page as examples of subversive meta-play with
traditional textual discourse. In Shmuel Atzmon’s recitation, these textual clues are
realized aurally as verbal performance through intonation, rhythm, and pauses. To
translate both the visual and aural aspects of the monologues, footnotes and cultural-
historical explanation are useful but not essential. Instead, the translator must find
equivalent textual practices derived from the cultural context into which the work
is translated in order to recreate a normative sense of Tevye’s verbal performance.
In the 1961 Danish translation of Tevye by Rabbi Marcus Melchior, the back cover
mentions what was still then a common practice of public declamation of literary
works: ‘Without doubt this book will have an impact all over Denmark where the
art of public reading is practised — in families, in clubs, and from the lecture stand’.32
For a contemporary readership in the United States and Europe, declamation
of Sholem Aleichem’s work might seem outdated and stand-up comedy more
culturally pertinent as an expression of a distinctly American ( Jewish) comedy
style. Like Fiddler on the Roof, stand-up comedy speaks to contemporary cultural
sensibilities and media. By conceptualizing Tevye the Dairyman’s monologues
as stand-up comedy in the afterword to the Danish translation, a hook to a
contemporary readership is provided. As a result, Tevye’s verbal performance and
humour is framed in a familiar way to a new generation of readers.
According to the National Yiddish Book Center, fewer than 2 per cent of
all Yiddish books have been translated into English. It is highly unlikely that
this number will change significantly because of the general lack of commercial
interest in translating foreign literature into English. The recent publication of
Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, Motl the Cantor’s Son, and Wandering Stars in
English translation has received relatively little attention, in contrast to the much
more vigorous reception of the Hebrew and Danish translations of Tevye.33 Small
countries generally translate more foreign literature, which in turn has a greater
impact on their cultural and literary landscapes. This is magnified in Israel, which
is perhaps a more welcoming place for translating Yiddish literature in regard to
reader interest and closer proximity to the original Yiddish works in terms of
religious, cultural, and linguistic sensibilities. In contrast, English translations tend
to streamline, ‘drown out’, and ultimately domesticate difference. The Danish and
Hebrew translations of Tevye were small literary events in their respective countries,
which have ensured the work a modest but engaged readership. Still, English is the
most important world language today, and the American Jewish community’s size
and cultural status make English translations crucial in turning a small number of
Sholem Aleichem’s works into world literature:
It is one of the preposterous ironies of our current literary situation that
despite the pitifully low number of translations published each year in the
United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of the English-speaking world
compared, say, with the industrialized nations of western Europe, or Latin
America, the English-language market is the one most writers and their agents
crave for their books.34
Sholem Aleichem is arguably the only Yiddish writer who (so far) has stood the test
of time by being canonized as a classical writer of world literature 35 As a result,
Sholem Aleichem’s work will continue to be translated, because the life span of a
translated literary classic typically is measured in a few decades.36 One of the main
purposes of translating a literary classic is primarily to make it available outside its
own national and cultural boundaries. It is also a way of turning the attention of
the readers of translation back to the original, especially the small group of readers
interested and proficient in the original language. Although it is commercially
impossible to publish fiction in bilingual editions, which rarely happens even with
poetry, translations should provide some of the tools for the reader to turn to the
text in the original language. In the case of Tevye the Dairyman, we are fortunate to
have several excellent Yiddish editions and recordings of the work.37
The tension between eradicating difference, and stressing the work’s distance
from the target language and culture, remains a staple of the translator’s assign-
ment. Today’s increasingly more inclusive concept of world literature culturally
and geographically (by including more post-colonial non-Western literatures),
historically (by expanding the time line further back), and generically (by including
‘non-canonical’ genre such as life-writing, chronicles and other hybrid forms)
bodes well for the future interest in translating Sholem Aleichem’s work. Tevye the
Dairyman, in particular, articulates the struggle between tradition and modernity in
a variety of ways by addressing aesthetic and ideological concerns similar to those
212 Jan Schwarz
of contemporary world literature, especially post-colonial writers. The present

paradigm shift in the field of comparative literature in the conception of world
literature opens up venues for new readings of a literary classic such as Tevye the
Dairyman. David Damrosch summarizes this point:
Major canonical masterpieces are worthy of sustained attention both for aesthetic
and for cultural reasons, but they persist so strongly, after all, not because they
f loat forever in some eternal realm but because they adapt so effectively to
the changing needs of different times and places, and the transformation now
occurring in the shape of world literature is having a major impact on the ways
we read even the greatest of great books.38
The translator is the deepest and most thorough of readers, one who turns the
reading of a work in one language into speaking it in another. In the case of the
2009 translations of Tevye the Dairyman into English, Hebrew, and Danish, the
translators actualized various features of the work’s range of verbal performance,
linguistic artistry, and humour for three very different readerships. As a result, the
work’s lease on life has been renewed; it has re-entered the field of world literature
and affirmed its status as a literary classic beyond the Fiddler phenomenon.
Notes to Chapter 12
1. Franz Kaf ka, The Trial, trans. by Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), p. xiii.
2. Edith Grossman, Why Translation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 12.
3. Both Olga Litvak and Jeremy Dauber are at work on biographies of Sholem Aleichem. The
most recent examination of Tevye der milkhiker in a comprehensive Jewish literary context is Dan
Miron, ‘Contiguity: How Kaf ka and Sholem Aleichem Are Contiguous’, in his From Continuity
to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010),
pp. 351–403.
4. On English translation of Yiddish literature, see Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish–
Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2006), especially chapters 6 and 7; and Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular
Language & Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 92–126.
5. For an interesting (and rare) discussion of spoken word events in Jewish culture including
Sholem Aleichem’s in late imperial Russia, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late
Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 141–65.
6. David Roskies, ‘Inside Sholem Shachnah’s Hat’, Prooftexts, 21.1 (2001), 46.
7. About Sholem Aleichem’s love affair with cinematography, see Ber (Boris) Kotlerman, ‘ “In
kinematograf ligt a groyse tsukunft” oder Sholem-Aleykhems letste libe’, Afn shvel, 350–51
(2011), 13–18.
8. Meir Wiener, ‘Di sotsyale vortslen fun Sholem-Aleykhems humor’ [1931], in his Tsu der geshikhte
fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert, ii (New York: IKUF, 1946), p. 303. For an English
excerpt of Weiner’s essay, see ‘Sholem Aleichem: The Critical Tradition’, Prooftexts, 6.1 (1986),
41–55 (trans. by Ruth Wisse). For an insightful discussion of the essay and Wiener’s critical
engagement with Sholem Aleichem, see Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle:
Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Weiner (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2010): ‘Now Wiener treats the subject of humor not as a social but as
an aesthetic category in world literature. He deliberately takes Sholem Aleichem out of the social
context of his time and the historical context of Jewish literature and places him within the
world canon of comic literature along with Aristophanes, Cervantes, Rabelais, Dickens, Heine,
and Gogol. Wiener uses theory of the genre of the comic as the most authentic expression of
folk creativity and its progressive role in culture.’ (p. 240)
9. Atzmon’s recording of Tevye der milkhiker is available on CD in the Sami Rohr Library of
Recorded Yiddish Books.
10. Sholem Aleykhem, Mælkemanden Tevje, trans. by Jan Schwarz (Copenhagen: Hovedland, 2009),
p. 186.
11. Lars Bonnevie, ‘Jiddisch stand-up’, Weekend-Avisen, week 2, 2010 and Lotte Kirkeby Hansen,
‘Din første jødiske stand-up-komiker’, Kristeligt Dagblad, 20 February 2010.
12. Marcus Melchior, ‘Indledning’, in Tewje der Milchiger/Mælkemanden Tewje (Copenhagen: Wangels
Forlag 1961).
13. Weekendavisen, ibid.
14. Tine Roesen, ‘En bog kun for de udvalgte?’, Information, 10 February 2010.
15. Yuri Vedenyapin, ‘Doctors Prescribe Laughter: The Yiddish Stand-up Comedy of Shimen
Dzigan’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 2008), p. 6.
16. Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.
53.
17. Wiener, ‘Vegn Sholem-Aleyhhems humor’.
18. For a recent examination of the Beilis affair, see Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s
Creator, S. An-Sky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
19. Sholem Aleichem, Tevye der milkhiker (Buenos Aires: YIVO, 1969), pp. 200–01; Tevye the
Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. by Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books 1987), p.
120; Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son, trans. by Aliza Shevirn (New York: Penguin,
2009), p. 118. Danish translation: ‘Hvor kom vi til? Bibelafsnittet Lekh lekho. Men før vi kommer
til bibelafsnittet Lekh lekho, vil jeg bede Dem anstrenge Dem en smule og sammen med mig
stoppe op en stund ved bibelafsnittet Bolek. Siden verdens skabelse har det været skik og brug
at jøder først studerer Lekh lekho og derefter Bolek. Jeg, derimod, fik først læst og påskrevet
Bolek og derefter Lekh lekho. Og jeg blev sat så grundigt på plads at De må høre godt efter.
Det kan komme Dem til gavn engang!’ (Mælkemanden Tevje, trans. by Jan Schwarz (Højbjerg:
Hovedland, 2009), p. 162).
20. The Torah by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981:1170.
21. Olga Litvak, ‘Khave and Her Sisters: Sholem-aleichem and the Lost Girls of 1905’, Jewish Social
Studies, 15. 3 (2009), 9.
22. Tevye der milkhiker, pp. 205–06; Halkin, ibid., p. 123; Shevrin, ibid., p. 121.
23. Tevye hakholev (hashalem), trans. by Dan Miron (Israel: Keter, 2009), pp. 165–66.
24. Sholem Aleykhem, Mælkemanden Tevje, trans. by Jan Schwarz, p. 166:
Vores sidste håb er simpelthen at Gud skal gøre et mirakel så messias kommer.
Mens jeg sidder fordybet I disse tanker, løfter jeg blikket — en mand på en hvid hest
kommer ridende hen til indgangen til mit hus. Han stopper hesten, springer ned, binder den
til træværket og siger til mig: ‘Hilsner til dig, Tevski.’
‘Hilsner til Dem, Deres Excellence,’ svarer jeg ganske varmt, og jeg tænker ved mig selv,
den onde Haman i egen person, som Rashi fortolker, når man længes efter messias, tropper
landsbybetjenten op i stedet, og jeg rejser mig op og står over for betjenten.
‘Velkommen, min gæst,’ siger jeg, ‘hvad sker der I den store verden og hvad kan De bringe
af gode tidender, gode herre.’
25. In a special issue of Afn shvel, nos. 350–51 (Winter/Spring 2011), devoted to celebration of the
150th anniversary of Sholem Aleichem’s birth, the editor Sheva Zucker conducted interviews
with the translators of Tevye the Dairyman into Hebrew (Dan Miron), English (Aliza Shevrin),
and Danish ( Jan Schwarz), 26–42. Miron mentions that Zayed Kasua, a talented Arab Israeli
writer, pointed out in his review of the Hebrew translation that ‘the Arabs can identify with the
book’. Miron argues that the book’s universality makes it highly relevant for Palestinians under
Israeli occupation: ‘They feel close to a simple, humble person who must go through terrible
trials and lives under the power of a foreign authority which doesn’t particularly care for him’
(27).
26. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, ‘After Such Knowledge, What Laughter’, The Yale Journal of Criticism,
14.1 (2001), 301.
27. Seth Wolitz, ‘The Americanization of Tevye or Boarding the Jewish Mayf lower’, American
Quarterly, 40. 4 (1988), 514–36.
28. Daniel Boyarin, ‘Placing Reading: Ancient Israel and Medieval Europe’, in The Ethnography
of Reading, ed. by Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 15:
214 Jan Schwarz
‘Illocutionary act is a term in linguistics introduced by John L. Austin in investigation of the

multiple meanings in a speech act. The simplified gist of Austin’s theory is that if you utter ‘Is
there any salt?’ at the dinner table the illocutionary force is that you desire salt, as distinct from
the locutionary act (a question about the presence of salt) and the perlocutionary act (causing
somebody to hand you the salt). (Wikipedia on-line)
29. Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture, p. 141.
30. Ibid., p. 146.
31. For a recent study of this phenomenon see Jordan D. Finkin, A Rhetorical Conversation: Jewish
Discourse in Modern Yiddish Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2010).
32. Melchior, ‘Indledning’.
33. According to Dan Miron, his Hebrew translation of Tevye became a bestseller which sold
thousands of copies: ‘For the first time, Sholem Aleichem’s masterpiece broke through the Israeli
wall of the aging Ashkenazi minority and reached young people, non-Ashnenazim and even
Arabs who read Hebrew’ (Miron, Afn shvel, pp. 26–27).
34. Grossman, Why Translation Matters, p. 15.
35. Although I. B. Singer has been canonized as a Jewish American writer in English (from which
his work is translated into other languages), only time will show if Singer will maintain this
canonical status. His Yiddish oeuvre has still not been critically evaluated in its entirety and
parts of it are only available in Yiddish newspapers and journals. Singer is considered an original
and subversive writer in multiple genres by Yiddish critics, but his Yiddish work has never
achieved the classical status of Sholem Aleichem in his own speech community. See Harold
Bloom, ‘Revisiting Isaac Bashevis Singer’, New York Book Review, 28 October 2010, p. 45.
36. Sheva Zucker: Do you think that a new translation will be necessary twenty five years from
now? Dan Miron: Absolutely. A good translation serves its time, and the readers to whom it is
addressed. And then a new translation is necessary. I believe that we need new translations not
only of Sholem-Aleichem but also of Peretz. (Afn Shvel, p. 30)
37. The best Yiddish versions available are the Soviet edition and the Musterverk (Buenos Aires)
version of Tevye der milkhiker, both of which include useful lists of Hebrew quotes with
explanation and phonetic pronunciation.
38. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 135.
INDEX
Y
‘A khasene on klezmer’ (A Wedding without Bhabha, Homi 136

Musicians) 138–44, 187 Bialik, Haim Nachman 95 n. 26, 195, 204
‘A nisref ’ (Burnt Out) 136 Bialystok 20
‘A por verter vegn undzer balmelokhe’ (A few words Birnbaum, Nathan (also Matthias Acher) 138,
about our tradesman) 161 149 n. 63
A Prayer for the Dead (paly) 77 Birobidzhan 72, 87, 111
Adamovich, Iosif 67 blessings 113, 118, 119, 121, 124, 206
Akselrod, Zelig 73 Blondzhende shtern (Wandering Stars) 20, 69, 211
Aksenfeld, Yisroel 106 Bogrov, Grigorii 11
Alexandrovsk 114, 115 Boreysho, Menakhem 76
Altman, Nathan 77 Bovshover, Joseph 66
‘An eytse’ (Advice) 113 Boyarin, Daniel 209
Appenszlak, Jakub 54, 57 Boyberik 193
Aristophanes 109, 212 n. 8 Brandenberger, David 83
Aristotle 198 Brandstaetter, Roman 58
Asch, Sholem 21, 59 n. 23 Brenner, Yosef Haim 116
Atzmon, Shmuel 202, 210, 212 n. 9 Brod, Max 142
authenticity 6, 13, 15, 20, 86, 109, 113, 117, 121, Bronshteyn, Yashe 88, 93
212 n. 8 Budushchnost (Prospect) 16
Ayznban-geshikhtes (The Railroad Stories) 4, 47, 113, Bund 18, 62, 64
130 n. 5, 134–44, 153, 156–58, 161, 188 Butwin, Frances 115, 118–21, 124, 125, 127, 133 n. 49,
163 n. 37, 168
Babel, Isaac 69, 73, 74, 125, 183, 197 Byadulya, Zmitrok (Shmuel Plavnik) 71
Bakhtin, Mikhail 109, 120, 132 n. 33, 135, 167, 179 Byk, Eleazar 52
Balak (king of Moab) 148 n. 47, 205, 206 Bystroń, Jan Stanisław 55
Balitskii, Anton 67
Bal-Makhshoves (Isidor Eliashev) 18, 50, 144 Camu, Albert 117, 183, 197 n. 6
Balzac, Honoré de 22, 110, 111 canonization 1–3, 39, 46 n. 41, 58, 63, 67, 71, 72, 74,
Bashert an umglik (Fated for Misfortune) 146 n. 12, 83, 88, 103, 106, 109–11, 150, 176, 182, 194, 199,
147 n. 43 21, 212, 214 n. 35
‘Baym doktor’ (At the Doctor’s) 113 censorship 9, 19, 23 n. 34, 34, 63, 84, 183
Bellow, Saul 183 Cervantes 109, 212 n. 8
Belorussian translations 71 Chaplin, Charlie 55
Barthes, Roland 143 Chagall, Marc 203
Baudelaire, Charles 139 ‘Chava’ 169, 171, 204
Bazhan, Mykola 76 Chekhov, Anton 17, 22, 136, 155
Beilis, Mendel 149 n. 59, 204, 207, 213 Chernenko, Miron 65
Belenkii, Moisei (Moyshe) S. 77, 99, 156 Cherniak, Ber (Yakov) 70
Belinsky, Vissarion 111 Chwila 50
Belmont, Leo 56, 57, 58 n. 3, 61 n. 59 curses 113, 114, 117, 122, 124, 130 n. 5, 148 n. 47, 171,
Ben-Avigdor 21 206
Bercovitch, Sacvan 115, 119–22, 128, 132 n. 28, 29 Custine, Marquis de 76
and 31
Benjamin, Walter 138, 139, 142, 144, 148 n. 53, 154 Damrosch, David 212
Berdichev 8, 31, 169, 173 Daniel, M. 70
Bergelson, David 70, 72–74, 104, 111, 138 Döblin, Alfred 180 n. 22
Berkovich, Yitshak-Dov 16–18, 20 Drazhne (Derazhnia) 189, 192
Berlin 168, 171 ‘Der daytsh’ (The German) 187, 189–91
216 Index
Der Emes (Truth) 64 Frug, Shimon 16

Der Emes publishing house 38, 44 n. 19, 72, 77, 98, ‘Funem priziv’ (The Automatic Exemption) 113, 134
106 Funem yarid (From the Fair) 107, 108, 110
‘Der farkishefter shnayder’ (The Bewitched Tailor) 69,
76, 115, 128, 191, 194
Der fraynd (The Friend) 16, 17, 20, 36, 45 n. 33 Gekht, Semen 69, 70
‘Der gliklekhster in kodne’ (The Happiest Man in Genesis 162 n. 17, 205, 206
Kodno) 136, 150–62 German translations 134–42, 173, 175, 176
‘Der mentsh fun Buenes-Ayres’ (The Man from Buenos ‘Gim(e)nazye’ (Gymnasium) 56, 136, 187
Aires) 113 Ginsburg, S. M. 16, 17
‘Dos meserl’ (The Penknife) 103 Glikman, David 70
‘Der nes fun hoyshayne-rabe’ (The Miracle of Hoshana Gogol, Nikolai 27, 69, 109, 136, 138, 212 n. 8
Rabba) 139, 140, 143, 187 Goldberg, Abraham 76
Der yud (The Jew) 16, 29 Goldberg, Lev (Leyb) 75
Derrida, Jacques 149 n. 61 Goldshtein, Alexander 108
Deti cherty (Children of the Pale) 155 Goldstick, Isidor 158–60, 163 n. 37
Dickens, Charles 22, 64, 109, 121, 132 n.36 and 39, Gontar, Avrom 87
212 n. 8 Gordon, Judah Leib 10, 186
Dik, Isaac Meir 9 Gorin (Ofshteyn), Grigory 77
Dobrolyubov, Nikolay 66 Gorky, Maxim 17, 43 n. 13, 69, 73, 84, 111, 155
Dobrushin, Yekhezkel 64 Gorshman, Mendl 77
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 67, 117. 125, 138 Grossbart, Hersh 201
‘Dray kepelekh’ (Three Little Heads) 187 Gurshteyn, Arn (Aron) 68, 74, 98, 99
‘Drite klas’ (Third Class) 143, 153 Gutman, R. 52
Druker, Irme 74 Gutmans, Teodor 115, 124, 146 n. 22
Dzigan, Shimen 204
Dubnow, Simon 9, 15, 32, 43 n. 6 Hakarmel 10
Halkin, Hillel 158–60, 205–08
Edelstadt, David 66 Hamagid 10
Eidherr, Armin 142, 144, 148 n. 55, 149 n. 66 Hamelits (The Advocate) 11
Eliasberg, Alexander 138, 139, 141–44 Harshav, Benjamin 48, 116, 125, 126
English translations 76, 115, 118, 121, 125, 130 n. 8, Hartsman, Motl 87
132 n. 32 and 36, 151, 159, 165, 173, 175, 205, 207, Hashahar (The Dawn) 16
208, 211, 212 n. 4 Hatsefirah (The Morning) 11, 12
Erik, Max 101, 106–08, 110, 156–58 Haynt (Today) 20, 50, 76
Erlich, Victor 115, 117, 125, 132 n. 33, 149 n. 62 Hebrew 2, 8–11, 15–17, 19, 21, 22, 27, 28, 35, 44 n. 26,
Esperanto 56 47, 52, 55, 63, 113, 115, 124, 134–36, 141–44, 159,
Estonian Theatre and Music Museum 187 166, 171, 172, 174, 186, 188, 191, 193–96, 201,
Evreiskaia biblioteka (Jewish Library) 10 206–08, 211, 212
Evreiskoe obozrenie (Jewish Review) 10, 13, 27 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 108, 110
Even-Zohar, Itamar 183, 196 n. 1 Heine, Heinrich 88, 96 n. 36, 109, 212 n. 8
Eynhorn, David 65 Hibat tsiyon (Love of Zion) 16
Exodus (Book of) 205, 206 Hilf (Help) 17
Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven 209 Hirszhorn, Samuel 52
‘Hodl’ 204
Fadeyev, Alexander 73, 74 Hofshteyn, David 72, 73, 87
Falkevich, Isai 71 Holberg, Ludvig 203
Fefer, Itsik 73, 88, 91–94, 96 n. 33, 35 and 40 Holocaust 1, 6, 98, 201, 204, 209
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 108 Horwitz, Max 48
Fiddler on the Roof 1, 5, 6, 201, 203, 209, 210, 212 Hoyz-fraynd (Household Friend) 16, 21
Finkel, Uri 86 humour 18, 31, 32, 54, 56, 69, 74, 84, 86, 87, 91,-93,
Finkin, Jordan 115, 116 104–10, 124, 136, 143, 146 n. 13, 150, 151, 153,
First World War 19, 20, 63, 98 155–57, 161, 196, 199, 203, 204, 209, 210, 212
folklore 56, 83, 99, 109, 110, 117, 184 Huntington, Samuel P. 139
Forverts 24 n. 48, 65, 66
French 138, 148 n. 51, 165, 174, 176 ‘Iber a hitl’ (On Account of a hat) 135
Frieden, Ken 115, 116, 121, 133 n. 40 illustrations 35, 77, 203
Index 217
In umru (In Storm) 101 Landau, Adolf 10, 14, 15, 17, 23 n. 21
Indelman, Ch. 52 Landmann, Salcia 138, 171, 173, 176, 179 n. 21,
Inger, Grigory (Hirsh) 8, 77 181 n. 45
Institute of Belorussian Culture 71, 106 ‘Lekh-lekho’ 145 n. 5, 204–07, 209
Ionov (Bernshtein), Ilya 70 Lenin, Vladimir 62, 64, 66, 88, 108
Isaacs, Bernard 81 n. 86, 115, 119–21, 124, 125, 128, Leningrad 67, 69
130 n. 10, 133 n. 49, 158–61, 163 n. 35 Lermontov, Mikhail 83, 86
Iser, Wolfgang 139 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 108
Izraelita 50, 56, 59 n. 14 letters (literary form) 29, 54, 87, 88, 91–94, 165, 166–
72, 175–77, 189
Jakobson, Roman 113, 123, 183, 189, 196 n. 1 Lestschinsky, Jacob 66
Jewish holidays 50, 52, 160, 188, 189, 194, 195 Levanda, Lev 11
Jewish Luck (film) 69 Levi, Israel 11, 15
Jonas, Gernot 134, 138, 139, 141–44, 146 n. 16 Lew, Henryk 52, 56
jubilees 50, 66, 67, 72–74, 83, 86–88, 92, 166 Lezhnev, A (Abram Gorelik) 64, 73
Judaism 7, 15, 71, 77, 100, 111, 126 Lezhnev, I (Isai Altshuler) 73
Judkevich, L. 148 n. 51 Lilienblum, M. L. 16
Literarishe bleter (Literary Pages) 57
Kachuck, Rhoda 115, 123, 124, 131 n. 14 Litvak, Olga 206, 212 n. 3
Kafka, Franz 138, 146 n. 22, 149 n. 59, 199, 204 Litvakov, Moyshe 63, 64, 67, 101, 107, 111
Kagan, Abram (Avrom Kahan) 77 Lodz 20
Kamenetz-Podolsky 169 Loomingu Raamatukogu 187, 188
Kanfer, Mojżesz 57, 61 n. 67 Lopatin (Lopate), Shloyme 87, 91
Kaplan, Anatoly (Tankhum) 77 Loyev, Elimelekh 12
Kasemaa, Kalle 182, 186–88, 193–96 Lozovsky, Solomon 73
Kasrilevke (Kasrylewka) 18, 35, 36, 38, 45 n. 38, 58, Loeff Rabinowitz, Olga 72
100, 106, 146 n. 16 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 67, 70
‘Keyver oves’ (Graves of our Forefathers) 138, Lurye, Note 70
146 n. 18, 149 n. 65 Lvov 50, 52
Khashin, Alexander 106
Khrushchev, Nikita 163 n. 35 Mały Przegląd 50, 52
Kiev 11, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 28, 43 n. 15, 67, 72–74, 84, Mandelbaum, Jacques 148 n. 51
90, 204 Manger, Itsik 50, 195
Kiev Commerce Institute 66 Mann, Thomas 138
Kiev Group of Yiddish Writers 72, 99, 100, 104, 106 Marek, Andrzej 56
Kiev Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture 106 Marek, Peysekh 68
Kievskaia mysl’ (Kiev Thought) 64 Marienbad 20, 135, 165–78, 186, 187
Kievskie vesti (Kiev News) 43 n. 15 Markish, Peretz 73–75
Kievskoe slovo (Kiev Word) 43 n. 15 Marshak, B. I. 68, 74, 79 n. 15, 80 n. 45, 156
Kishinev 17, 168, 171, 180 n. 40 Marx, Karl 100, 108, 110
Klitenik, Shmuel 106 Marxism 64, 74, 76, 101, 104, 106, 188
Di klyatshe (The Nag) 64 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 62, 67, 88, 91, 96 n. 38
Kohn, Maurycy 56, 60 n. 51 ‘Mayn ershter roman’ (My First Love Affair) 187
Kol mevaser (Voice of the Herald) 10, 11 ‘Mechtateli’ (Dreamers) 27
Kol mevaser tsu der yudisher folks-bibliotek (Forerunner to Melchior, Marcus 203, 210
Jewish Folk Library) 28, 44 n. 25 Menakhem-Mendl (The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl)
Korczak, Janusz 52 1, 16, 21, 29, 52, 54, 56, 66, 69, 71, 99–101, 105,
Korolenko, Vladimir 17, 46 n. 45, 155 108, 110, 138, 170
kosher 77, 113, 114 Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Sholem Yankev
Kozodoyevke 193 Abramovich) 10, 11–15, 21, 25, 27, 31, 64, 67, 68,
Krakow 18, 23 n. 34, 29, 50 72, 100, 101, 103, 111, 138, 146 n. 12, 150, 169,
Kultur-Lige (Culture League) 63, 67 195, 196, 210
Kultura i Trud (Culture and Work) publishing house Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture
71 29, 44 n. 17
Kupala, Yanka 67 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri 138
Kvitko, Leyb 73 Mikhoels, Solomon 66, 73
Miller, David Neal 123, 124
218 Index
Minovitskaia, E. G. 70 Plotkin, Pinye 87, 88, 91

Minsk 67, 72, 86, 90, 101, 106 pogroms 17, 103, 140, 141, 143, 148 n. 47, 149 n. 59,
Miron, Dan 36, 101, 115, 116, 135, 141, 149 n. 59, 166, 204, 209
206, 208, 213 n. 25, 214 n. 33 and 36 Pomoshch (Help) 17
Mogilev 8 Pravda 64, 71, 74
Monologn (Monologues) 17, 113, 115, 131 n. 15 proletarian writers 66, 72, 87, 88, 106, 107
monologue (literary form) 4, 17, 28, 54, 91, 105, Proust, Marcel 199
110, 117, 120, 125, 131 n. 21, 141, 150, 158, 166, Prywes, Naftali 56, 60 n. 51
201–05, 209, 210 Puchina (Dark Depth) publishing house 70, 71
Moscow 9, 38, 65, 67, 69, 74, 88, 98, 101 Pushkin, Alexander 3, 66, 69, 83, 86, 88, 92, 111
Moscow Lenkom Theatre 77
Moscow State Pedagogical Institute 107 Rabelais, François 109, 212 n. 8
Moscow State Yiddish Theatre 66, 69, 75, 77 Rabinovich, M. Ya. (Ben-Ami) 16
Motl Peysi dem khazns (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) 1, Rabinovich, Osip 11, 25, 27, 28
64–66, 68, 71, 75, 100, 105, 107, 110, 135, 155, Rabinovitsh, Volf (Vevik) 73, 74
209, 211 Rafes, Moyshe 64
Myshkovskii, L. 156 Raitsin, Efraim 71
Raort, Wilhelm (Józef Rappaport) 52
Nadelmann, Leo 138 Rashi 135, 207–09, 213 n. 24
Nalewki Street 168, 169, 172, 173, 180 n. 22 Ravnitski, Y. Kh. 16, 23 n. 31
Narbut, Vladimir 70 Remenik, Hersh (Gregory) 77, 95 n. 11
Nashi deti (Our Children) 31 Riga 20
Nasz Przegląd 50, 57 Riminik, Yerukhem 110
Nasza Jutrzenka 52 Roskies, David G. 8, 101, 115, 117, 145 n. 8, 148 n. 47,
Di naye velt (The New World) 20, 156 157, 158, 166, 201
New York 18–20 Rozhansky, Shmuel 208
New York Times 64, 181 n. 51 Rubin, Rivke 106–08
Nietzsche, Friedrich 100 Russian translations 2, 3, 28, 31, 44 n. 27, 45 n. 32,
Niger, Shmuel 55, 179 n. 14 33 and 38, 46 n. 41, 62, 63, 66, 70, 72, 73, 78,
Nomberg, Hersh David 65 94 n. 9, 107, 119, 130 n. 10, 147 n. 38, 148 n. 51,
Nowy Dziennik 50, 57 155, 159, 185, 191, 197 n. 9
Nusinov, Isaac 64, 65, 68, 73, 79 n. 15, 86, 101, 104, Russkii evrei (Russian Jew) 10, 13
105
St Petersburg 2, 9, 10, 11, 15, 17, 20, 27, 29, 36, 66, 70
Odessa 2, 8, 10, 11, 15–17, 20, 28, 29, 34, 39, 43 n. 15, Samma, Otto 118
44 n. 17 and 25, 70–72, 84, 90, 135, 140, 168, 171, satire 69, 74, 84, 88, 91–93, 110, 117, 119, 120, 123, 125
175, 178, 189 Schlegel, Friedrich 108
Ohr, Jerzy 52, 56 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 138, 139, 142
Opatoshu, Joseph 175 Schmitz, Siegried 138, 175, 176
ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Scholem, Gershom 134, 138, 142, 148 n. 53, 149 n. 63
Training) 70 Second World War 98, 111, 119, 176, 182, 183, 186
Osherowitch, Mendel 65 Sender Blank un zayn gezindl (Sender Blank and His
Osipovich, Naum 71 Household) 84, 105
Oyslender, Nokhum 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, Serebryan(y)i, Yisroel (Israel) 157
161 Shaikevich (Shomer), N. M. 14, 16, 17, 94 n. 2
Shambadal, Mikhail (Peysekh-Mendl) 38, 40, 70, 73,
Pale of Jewish Settlement 2, 28, 37, 44 n. 24 and 27, 130 n. 10
66, 99, 140, 155 Shandler, Jeffrey 5–7, 115, 123, 124, 126
Paris World’s Fair 73 Shapiro, Lamed 204
Peretz, Yitskhok Leybush 3, 18, 21, 45 n. 37, 55, 64, Shatzky, Jacob 115, 118, 134, 163 n. 37
65, 67, 68, 100, 101, 105, 111, 136, 138, 148 n. 55, Shevchenko, Taras 74
175, 186, 195, 196, 214 n. 36 Shevrin, Aliza 165, 167, 169, 173, 175, 177, 180 n. 40,
perestroika 77 205, 207, 208, 213 n. 25
Pereyaslav 12, 26, 67, 72, 74 ‘Shir-hashirim’ (Song of Songs) 187, 193
Pinus, Yuly (Yulius) 38, 43 n. 1, 44 n. 26, 45 n. 27, 32, Shmeruk, Chone (Khone) 48, 56
36 and 37, 46 n. 44, 68, 69, 155, 157 Sholem Aleichem Yiddish theatre troupe 69
Platner, Ayzik 86–88, 95 n. 26 Shomers mishpet (Shomer on Trial) 14
Index 219
Shtern (Star) 86 Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt (Scattered and Dispersed) 18, 56

shtetl 1, 28, 33–38, 45 n. 29, 65, 71, 77, 99, 100, 103, Twain, Mark 19, 64, 120, 132 n. 31, 132 n. 32, 199
106, 107, 131 n. 21, 139, 140, 153, 168, 169, 185,
186, 188, 189, 192–96, 197 n. 18 Ukrainian Academy of Sciences 73, 74, 103
Shver tsu zayn a yid (Hard to be a Jew) 57 Ukrainian People’s Commissariat 67
Sicher, Efraim 69 Ukrainian translations 71, 76, 77, 124
Singer, Isaac Bashevis 1, 60 n. 51, 69, 74, 140, 185, 187,
193, 195, 214 n. 35 Varshavskii, Mark 16
Singer, Israel Joshua 193 Der veker (The Tocsin) 16
Sirp ja Vasar 187 Vedenyapin, Yuri 203
Sławiński, Janusz 56 Veviorka, Avrom 67, 68
Slezkine, Yuri 60 n. 41, 77 Vienna 175
Slonim, Yakov 40, 70 Viennese Jewish theatre 175
Sobol, Andrei 69, 70 Vilna 8, 15, 20, 63, 98, 99
socialist realism 3, 77, 98, 106 Volkenshteyn, David 74
Soloviev, Vladimir 17 Volpe, Boris 110, 111
Soosaar, Enn 185, 187 Vorobeytshik, Arn (Aron) 30–36, 44 n. 17 and 25,
Sovetish heymland (Soviet Homeland) 69, 76, 77, 94 45 n. 29
Sovetishe literatur (Soviet Literature) 86 Voskhod (Dawn) 9, 10, 15, 27, 29, 34–37, 43 n. 6
Sovremennye Problemy (Contemporary Problems) ‘vulgar sociologism’ 3, 74, 86
publishing house 38, 45 n. 37, 68, 69
Spector, Mordechai 16, 17, 23 n. 34 Wagman, Saul 56, 57
Sperber, Manès 144 Warsaw 8, 9, 11, 16, 18, 20, 21, 35, 50, 56, 57, 63, 76,
Spivak, Elye 73 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173
Stalin, Josef 3, 38, 73, 75, 83, 84, 86, 88, 96 n. 37, 119, Weinig, Naftali 50, 57
157, 162 n. 35, 197 n. 16 Weinreich, Max 65, 125, 179 n. 18
Stempenyu 14, 21, 50, 52, 56, 103 Wiener, Lewi 52
stock market 29, 39, 84, 87 Wiener, Meir 95 n. 18, 101, 102, 104–09, 201, 202,
Sukhov, Alexander 71 204, 212 n. 8
Szaniawski, Klemens Junosza 56 Wisse, Ruth 7, 115, 116, 128, 135, 149 n. 59, 204
Wolitz, Seth 209
Tallinn Jewish Gymnasium 187, 198 n. 19
Talmud 11, 35, 113, 116, 118, 119, 121, 128, 135, 193, Yaknehoz, oder dos groyse berzenshpil (Yaknehoz, or: The
206, 208, 210 Big Gamble on the Stock Market) 21, 84
Tamarkin, Aron 182, 186–90, 192, 193, 198 n. 19 Yehupets 193
Tarnopol, Joachim 8, 9 Yidishe folksbibliotek (The Jewish Popular Library)
Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman) 1, 16, 20, 22, 13–17, 28, 84
31, 54, 55, 57, 71, 73, 75, 77, 78, 99–101, 108–10, Yiddishkayt 7, 65
113, 127, 135, 138, 155, 166, 167, 187, 188, 199–212 yortsayt (anniversary of death) 26 n. 26, 66, 115, 173
textbooks for Jewish schools 52, 58, 65, 111 Yudishes folksblat (Jewish People’s Gazette) 11, 13, 27
Tillemann, Ozjasz 54, 57 Yudishes folks-tsaytung (Jewish People’s Gazette)
Tolstoy, Lev 17, 46 n. 45, 66, 67, 138, 155, 174 23 n. 34, 45 n. 34
Torah 189, 205
Torop, Peeter 182, 184, 186, 196 n. 1 Zabludovski, Noyekh 156
Travels of Benjamin III 13, 27, 146 n. 12, 162 n. 17 Zemlia i Fabrika (Land and Factory) publishing house
treyf 113, 114 69, 70
Trunk, Y. Y. 101, 131 n. 21, 146 n. 13, 149 n. 62, Zionism 15, 16, 21, 50, 55, 70, 84, 157, 168, 171, 172
179 n. 10 Zuskin, Benjamin 73
Tsederbaum, Alexander 11 Zweig, Stefan 138

Translating Sholem Aleichem - History, Politics, and Art

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History, Politics and Art

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture

published in this series

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

© Modern Humanities Research Association and 5BZMPS'SBODJT 2012

ISBN 978-1-907975-00-4 ICL

Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University

For an author to canonize himself as Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitch) did

Sholem Aleichem can be considered from the different perspectives of history,

Sholem Aleichem exploiting the conventionalized connotations of the different

The Untranslatable Translated

The Russian Origins of Modern Yiddish

The Beginnings of a Career

Aleichem, recently enriched by the legacy of his father-in-law, wished to replicate or

The Jewish Writer as Institution

of which were offprints of stories and novels previously published in periodicals.

dramatic and widespread surge towards secularization. Implicated in this process,

Sholem Aleichem as a Self-Translator

Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Forgotten Production’

Fig. 2.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Pereyaslav, his birthplace

Fig. 2.2. Arn (Aron) Vorobeytshik, 1920

of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, Moshka-konokrad (Moshkele the Horse Thief ), that

The Fate of ‘Forgotten Production’

Appendix 1: Sholem Aleichem’s Works Written in Russian

Appendix 2: The Cycle A bintl blumen/Blumen: Transformation

Yiddish Russian Yiddish

Sholem Aleichem and the

Modern Jewish Multilingual Culture and the Question of Translation

trilingual polysystem of the Jewish culture in Poland. This modern multilingual

Fig. 3.1. Cover of Tales of a Commercial Traveller (1925)

Sholem Aleichem’s Reception in Poland: An Outline

Fig. 3.2. Cover of The Musician (1900)

Thirdly, Sholem Aleichem’s works were published in Poland principally in series.

Fig. 3.3. Cover of Millions: A Stock Novel in Letters (1903)

also dominated Sholem Aleichem’s literary portraits which appeared in general

into a Jewish variant of Chaplin’s figure of Charlie,40 interpreted as a symbol of

The Polish-Jewish Literary Audience

Staw,61 Pesach Schmutzer, Z. F. Finkielstein, Salomon Dykman,62 Leon Fajn, Zwi

Soviet Sholem Aleichem

Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish

The Jubilee of 1926

hot-headed communist who advocated wholesale rejection of bourgeois culture.

Translations and Translators

Fig. 4.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Moscow

Sholem Aleichem’s literary characters had to face enormous challenges of

The 1950s and Later

(1892–1955), was a member of a distinguished Yiddish literary family; his two

The mini-industry that emerged in the 1920s around Sholem Aleichem-related

88. Maydansky, ‘Tsu vayterdiker farfulkumung’, p. 149.

‘Du host zikh a denkmol af eybik geshtelt’:

Fig. 5.1. Sholem Aleichem’s monument in Kiev

The Jubilee Poems of 1939

As a matter of course, such dark reminiscences were always followed by an ecstatic

Letters to the Dead

‘A shmues mit Sholem-Aleykhems portret’

Vos varemer, shrayber,

[‘A Conversation with Sholem Aleichem’s Portrait’

you could, heaven forbid,

Is there any house

49. Ibid., pp. 116–17, 10th and 18th stanza.

© Modern Humanities Research Association and 5BZMPS'SBODJT 2012