Like Grandfather, Like Father, Like Son

By WENDY ZIERLER

Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz
Edited by Ken Frieden
286 pages. Syracuse University Press. $19.95.

Ken Frieden’s Classic Yiddish Stories of S.Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz is a family affair. The 19^th century trio of Abramovitsh, Peretz, and Aleichem (né Sholem Rabinovitsh) have long been referred to (respectively) as the “grandfather,” “father,” and “grandson” of modern Yiddish literature. In fact, Frieden’s anthology can be seen as a literary family album that, upon close inspection, reveals the stylistic and ethical kinship of these three great writers.

The story that opens the volume, Abramovitsh's “Dos kleyne mentshele” (“The Little Man”), serves as a key to the many shared familial traits on display in this volume. “The Little Man” introduced Yiddish readers to Abramovitsh’s most famous narrator, Mendele the Book Peddler. (In the same way that Yiddish readers conflated Sholem Rabinovitsh with his narrator, Sholem Aleichem, people came to identify Abramovitsh simply as Mendele.) In “The Little Man,” Mendele is called to the study of the Rabbi of Glupsk, along with some of the richest men in town, to hear the last will and testament of a recently departed wealthy man named Itsik-Abraham. Mendele narrates the beginning of the story, but when the reading of the will begins, Itsik-Abraham’s written narrative takes over. In the story's structural frame, which encloses the written narrative of wealthy and corrupt Itsik-Abraham’s life in the oral, colloquial style of Mendele, we already discern one of the hallmarks of modern Yiddish fiction: the combination of oral, vernacular narration alongside very deliberate, written forms.

Mendele is conversationalist as much as narrator. Often, the flow of conversations takes him off course, and so as he digresses, he frequently checks himself, announcing that "he is getting off point." Mendele's digressions enliven the text and give it the feeling of real conversation, and thus, in great measure, are precisely the point! This same lively, monological, exuberant style finds expression in other works featured in this volume, Aleichem's "Hodl" and "Chava," his monologue "Advice," and Peretz’s "The Strayml."

At the same time, Mendele's casual assertion that he is getting off the point provokes questions about the purpose of the stories in this volume, beyond their ability to divert, engage, and entertain. Running beneath the humor and plot of virtually every piece in this collection is a strong undercurrent of social criticism.

"The Little Man," is a fictional marvel in the way it simultaneously amuses and admonishes, provokes laughter, and urges for social change. In his will, Itsik-Abraham tells us how as a boy, he once saw (what he did not realize to be) his own reflection in his mother’s eye and thus asked his mother, "Tell me Mama, what sort of little man is that in your eyes?" His mother responds that "this little man is the soul. It isn't in everyone’s eyes, and not in the eyes of animals. It’s just in Jewish eyes." His mother's cryptic answer fuels him with a great desire to become "that little man." Physically and psychologically abused by all the various adults entrusted with his care, Itsik-Abraham, naïve and overly literal in his understanding of language, persistently seeks imaginative refuge in the idea of being transformed into another little, soulful version of himself. Later, when he hears the same terms "little man" and "soul" used as (ironic) designations for various wealthy, pampered but corrupt men, he decides that a wealthy little man is what he’d like to be. Itsik-Abraham prospers financially as a "little man," even as he dwindles spiritually and ethically. His successes are contrasted with the sufferings of the one truly good character in the story, a maskil (scholar) aptly-named “Gutmann” (good man), who lives a truly generous, ethically large life, but nevertheless suffers from poverty and ostracism. The whole question of whom one should take as one’s role model is similarly dramatized in a number of other stories in this anthology, including Abramovitsh’s "Fishke the Lame," in which Fishke comes under the bad influence of a group of opportunistic Jewish beggars; in Peretz’s "Kabbalists," in which a Hasidic rebbe's stern, outmoded asceticism leads to the death by starvation of his only remaining disciple; and in Peretz's famous story, "If Not Higher," in which a skeptical Litvak learns to revere as wondrous the Rebbe of Nemirov’s anonymous actions on behalf of the poor, sick, forgotten Jews of his town.

But social action isn't the only issue at stake here: gender is a big theme for these Yiddish writers. Abramovitsh’s "The Little Man" also introduces a gender dynamic that figures in a number of the other stories in the collection. Frieden translates "Dos kleyne mentshele" as "The Little Man," but ought, perhaps, in view of the neuter form of the noun mentsch, to have translated the title as "The Little Person." Is this little menstchele in his mother’s eye masculine or feminine? As Naomi Seidman observes in A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, Itsik-Abraham endeavors throughout this story to extract this little person from his mother’s eye and give it a decidedly masculine form. In the context of an historical study of modern Yiddish fiction, the little person or soul that Istik-Abraham sees in his mother’s eye becomes a powerful metaphor for the need on the part of male Yiddish writers to remake the oral mamaloshen (mother-tongue) of Yiddish over in their own written, masculine image.

Anxiety and humor accompany this assertion of Yiddish masculinity. Aleichem's most famous character/narrator, Tevye the Dairyman, has a milk-giving job that associates him literally and figuratively with housewives. Nevertheless he repeatedly insists—even as he gets hen-pecked by his wife, loses his authority over his daughters, and weeps uncontrollably and repeatedly—that "Tevye’s no woman." When the radical student Fefferel tells Tevye that his older daughter, Hodl, is "very sharp, a mentsch in every sense of the word," one hears an echo of Abramovitsh’s early effort to interrogate the meaning of the little mentschele. Itsik-Abraham’s mother may insist that "the little man" only inhabits Jewish eyes. Stories such as Aleichem’s "Chava," however, where Tevye's daughter runs off and marries a Russian peasant intellectual, demonstrate exactly how modernity throws such parochial definitions of mentschlichkeit into question.

There is a quality of intimacy and directness to many of these stories by Abramovitsh, Rabinovitsh, and Peretz, so many of them being narrated in the first person. The same family-album intimacy characterizes the biographical essays that close the volume. Lev Binshtok’s essay on Abramovitsh is an appreciation offered by a friend and collaborator. R. Peretz-Lak’s "Observations and Reflections," written by a young female cousin of Peretz who lived in his house, focuses mostly on Peretz as he behaved at home—what he liked to eat, how he dressed, how he treated the servants and the various literary admirers who came to his home. Y. D. Berkovitsh’s "Memories of Sholem Aleichem," written by Aleichem’s son-in-law, himself a noted writer, offers a wonderful glimpse at the private Aleichem, even as it offers commentary on his oeuvre.

Like all family members, these three great Yiddish writers shared traits but also differed greatly in personal and literary disposition. Despite, or perhaps in keeping with, the familial epithets assigned them, Abramovitsh and Aleichem had a very warm relationship, while Aleichem and Peretz's interactions were more fraught than friendly. Frieden, in his 1995 critical study of the writers, quotes Yiddish critic A.A. Roback, who observed that Abramovitsh, aiming for social change, "wrote to the Jewish people"; that Sholem Aleichem, the populist and humorist, "wrote for them"; and that Peretz, in his third-person, neo-folktales and neo-hasidic tales, "wrote about them." More than a hundred years later, all of these prepositions come together, as we, this next generation of Jewish readers, feel the ongoing power of these stories to speak to, for, and about our Jewish past.