Sholem Aleichem: The Joys of Storytelling

D. Clarke: The Joys of Storytelling

When Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) died in New York City in 1916, an estimated 100,000 people came out to mourn him. His following has shrunk since then—there are no longer many Yiddish speakers left. But Aleichem, whose pen name means hello, or literally peace unto you, remains relentlessly appealing, and Joseph Dorman’s new documentary, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, is delightful.

As much history as biography, the documentary features a series of talking heads—mostly academics, but also Aleichem’s granddaughter, writer Bel Kaufmann—relating his life story, assessing his influence, and reading aloud excerpts from his work. Aleichem, we learn, started writing in Yiddish at a time when no one else was, when it was viewed as the mother tongue, language of the home, unfit for literary pursuits. Yiddish and the traditional folk tales told in it were a purely oral tradition. Aleichem elevated the language, even as his stories focused on the lives of shtetl Jews, the traditional speakers of Yiddish—peasants, vagrants, and tradespeople, not the German- and Hebrew-speaking intellectuals of the Haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) in whose society he moved. He chronicled Eastern European Jewish life just as that world was dissolving under the forces of emigration and modernization, feeding a nostalgia that both fueled and grew with every stroke of his pen. Bel Kaufmann quotes a line from her grandfather’s biography: “To make people laugh was almost a sickness with me.”

The letters between Menachem Mendl and his love, Sheyne-Sheyndl; the woes of Tevye the dairyman and his seven daughters: these are the stories, accompanied by old photographs of shtetl life, that make the film feel like a family album of Yiddish lovers. David Roskies, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, reads aloud his favorite section of one of Aleichem’s books; Aaron Lansky, founder of the National Yiddish Book Center, recounts the storybook-worthy tale of how Aleichem met and wooed his wife. The literary focus of the film is Aleichem’s most famous work, Tevye the Dairyman, a series of stories that were adapted into the musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. Despite its darker elements, the film itself is remembered and experienced as joyous, while Laughing in the Darkness draws on the bitter aspects of the stories as Aleichem originally wrote them. Tevye is full of sorrow at the linked disintegration of his family and traditional Jewish life (one of his daughters marries a Russian revolutionary, another a Cossack, and a third is raped), but he expresses that sorrow through wry storytelling. And Laughing in the Darkness is more about stories and the simple, uniting joys of telling them than about anything else.

In Adventures in Yiddishland Jeffrey Shandler writes about the growing fondness for Yiddish among American Jews, a great majority of whom do not speak it. Most of the world’s Yiddish-speaking population was killed in the Second World War, and within the space of a few years Yiddish became a phenomenon of the past.

The establishment of the state of Israel also contributed to the language’s disappearance; in its early years, the country made Hebrew its official language and outlawed the publication of Yiddish newspapers and the performance of Yiddish theater. Israel wanted to define and legitimize itself to the world with a persona of independence and physical strength (the “New Jew”), counter to the image of pale, intellectual Eastern Europeans dying in gas chambers.

Before the war, Yiddish had followed the same path as many Eastern European immigrants: to America. It was the language that Jews who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used in their new neighborhoods, forming unions and publishing newspapers like the Forward. The papers served as the Jewish community’s cultural resource, with stories and essays by writers like Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, advice columns on relationships and Americanization, and advertising for popular shows in the Yiddish theater.

These days, very few people outside academia and small Yiddish-speaking Orthodox communities speak the language. It has fallen from the lofty literary heights to which Aleichem raised it, and is once again a comfortable mameh-loshn (mother tongue), reminiscent of long afternoons with Bubbe and Zayde, a way of communication that has more to do with hand gestures and intonation than with the words themselves. Parts of this culture have made it into the mainstream; it’s no longer particularly Jewish to eat a bagel with schmear, watch a Woody Allen film, or complain about the schmuck down the hall. And then there’s the ultimate in Yiddish-American kitsch, Ellis Weiner and Barbara Devilman’s picture book Yiddish with Dick and Jane.

The Forward has survived, but it also publishes in English these days. (It only switched to automated printing in the mid-1990s, when its last unionized printing press operator died, and the one area where it really distinguishes itself is in reporting on the politics of Yiddish academia.) The paper does have it’s younger, Jewish-specific counterparts. At the lowbrow end are websites like Jewcy, which calls itself “a curated platform for ideas that matter to young Jews today” and whose homepage has recently featured such hard-hitting articles as “Will A Nice Jewish Guy PLEASE Marry Monica Lewinsky?” Then there’s the more sophisticated Tablet, a magazine which styles itself “A New Read on Jewish Life.” Tablet considers history and the Torah alongside the Park Slope Food Coop’s proposed boycott of Israeli products.

I cannot help but wonder if Laughing in the Darkness, though peopled with academics who are all Yiddish speakers, is nothing more than a comfortable, simplified story for the American Jew seeking validation, the familiar, and a chance to commune with the past. Just as Aleichem’s stories were first distilled into the delightful, easily digestible Fiddler on the Roof, so they are now spliced into snippets, with accompanying romantic, sepia-toned images of the shtetl and of Aleichem and his family.

That said, neither the documentary nor its subject shy away from the darker aspects of Jewish life in the early twentieth century; instead they latch onto the comic element of despair. Aleichem wrote his first book, a compilation of his cranky mother’s colorful curses, when he was only a teenager, and the film features a series of them spoken aloud and accompanied by photographs of old men and women, their faces pulled into grimaces of exasperation. Tevye has many long, rambling talks directed at God lamenting his lot, but he ends with a quip or a wink or a song. Words, the film says, are the only way to deal with an errant child, grinding poverty, or even pogroms.

The closing shot of the documentary is telling: Zero Mostel, as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, dances toward the camera in boots and a loose shirt, arms raised. “Tradition!” he sings, “Tradition!” He flashes a smile at the viewer and the screen goes dark. As the credits roll, the music keeps playing.

Diana Clarke is an undergraduate at Columbia University and a former intern at Dissent and the National Yiddish Book Center.