Irving Howe 1951
Source: New American Mercury, February 1951. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
At the heart of Yiddish literature, often in its most earnest works, one finds Jewish humour - the homely anecdote or joke. It is a remarkable fact that this people of tragic destiny insisted on making laughter a major strand of their folk expression. And their greatest writers - Sholom Aleichem, Peretz, Mendele - based their works on this laughter as a matter of course and without condescension. It bound folk and artist in a tight relationship such as can be found in no other modern culture.
It is not frivolous, therefore, to examine Jewish humour seriously, as art in the raw, as a unique distillation of the sorrows and insights of the race. The opportunity is provided by a recent compilation of Jewish wit called Röyte Pomerantsen (Red Oranges), [1] ‘transliterated’ from Yiddish - that is to say, printed in Latin letters reproducing Yiddish phonetically. The device was employed, the publishers say, to preserve the ‘untranslatable’ flavour for Americans who understand but do not read Yiddish. The volume is a valid introduction to the tight little world of the Russian-Polish ghettoes that persisted for centuries, reached their cultural peak in the last half of the nineteenth century and came to an end in Hitler’s slaughterhouses. The very first joke in this collection shows how revealing folk humour can be:
You tell a joke to a peasant and he laughs three times: when you tell it; when you explain it; and when he understands it.
A landowner laughs only twice: when he hears the joke and when you explain it. For he can never understand it.
An army officer laughs only once: when you tell the joke. He never lets you explain it - and that he is unable to understand it goes without saying.
But when you start telling a joke to another Jew, he interrupts you: ‘Go on! That’s an old one’, and he shows you how much better he can tell it himself.
Now offhand this anecdote seems merely to express an unattractive sense of group superiority: the Jew is more clever than anyone else. But take a second look at it and you see that it contains something more subtle and complex. The anonymous narrator is really poking fun at the weaknesses of his own people: their intellectual impatience and over-confidence. Though usually subtle, this persistent self-criticism of Jewish humour sometimes verges on self-denunciation. This ambivalent unity of pride and criticism is classically expressed in the Jewish saying, ‘We have a God in heaven, thank God; but has he got a people on earth, God help him!’
The quoted anecdote is a concentrated expression of the relationships between the East European Jews and the social classes of Tsarist Russia. Nearest to the Jews in social status is the peasant; with him they have closest dealings and live peacefully for stretches of time. So though you have to tell the peasant a joke three times before he understands it, he at least can understand. But the landowner, scorned by the landless Jews even though they often had to deal with him and seek his protection, can never understand. And the army officer is most despised of all: first because he is a professional soldier, a reprehensible occupation for the Jews, and second because he represents the Tsarist army which in not-too-distant times used to shanghai Jewish boys for 25 years of military servitude. So we see that the degree of comprehension the anecdote grants to the peasant, the landowner and the officer reflects the attitudes of the Jews to the social group each personifies.
Of course not all Jewish humour is so heavily laden with such specific social relevance. Some jokes mock human folly and vanity in general, as for example one which pits a Greek and a Jew against each other. They boast of their ancient cultures:
‘Why’, says the Greek, ‘the archaeologists were digging in the ruins of Athens and found wires - which shows that my ancestors had telegraph!’ To which the Jew snorts back in reply: ‘Huh, that’s nothing. They were digging in the ruins of Palestine and didn’t find any wires - which shows that my ancestors had wireless!’
Or to quote another happy anecdote which seems universal in its application and relevance:
Two Jews get into a furious argument and end up by agreeing to a duel. Next morning at six o'clock one of the Jews is waiting, pistol in hand. A half hour, an hour, an hour and a half go by. The other Jew is not to be seen. Finally a messenger comes up to the Jew with the pistol and hands him a note from his opponent: ‘Listen, Joe, if I happen to be late, don’t wait for me; go ahead and shoot!’
The majority of the East European Jews were descended from refugees who had fled from the anti-Semitic excesses of the Crusades. These wanderers of the middle ages brought with them a dialect which, though bred in German, was to borrow from many languages, give rise to numerous locutions of its own, and develop its own vocabulary, grammar, idiom and inflection. Between this tongue, Yiddish, and German there are only surface similarities. Where German is heavy and formal, Yiddish is breezy and conversational.
The position of the Jews in the Tsarist empire was always precarious and marginal; they usually lived in tiny villages where their economic function was to conduct petty trade between the peasantry and the towns. These villages were steeped in poverty.
The East European Jews clung tenaciously to their ways: religious customs frozen by centuries of use; isolation from Western civilisation and indifference to its affairs; condescension towards worldly knowledge and insistence that only in the Holy Books could truly useful knowledge be found. The East European Jews were the last to be attracted by the hope of assimilation.
In this isolated sub-world Hebrew was the language of prayer and study; men felt themselves the spiritual contemporaries of ancient prophets. But in the home and the market-place Yiddish was the prevalent tongue; it thereby acquired a rich idiom drawn from daily life, which became one of the major ingredients of Yiddish humour.
Disintegrative tendencies often nibble away at a culture before it has reached its peak. When East European Jewry achieved its literary golden age in the nineteenth century, it was already under assault by alien influences: tempting dreams of wealth in America; contagious rationalistic doctrines from Western capitals; works of science and literature to seduce youths weaned on the Holy Books; disturbing doctrines of socialism and atheism. For though the Jews were often the victim of Tsarism, their way of life was inextricably bound up with it; neither could survive in the turbulent air of Western capitalism.
This, then, is the world we meet in Röyte Pomerantsen and in the stories of Sholom Aleichem. It is a world of tension: half in the past and half in the future; a world of awareness: the self-consciousness of a transitional period; and a world of clashing values and intellectual excitement. And always evident at its base is economic primitivism and squalor.
Strictly speaking, Jewish humour is not humorous. It does not make you laugh uproariously nor does it provoke a carefree guffaw. The usual ingredients of current American humour - stylised insult, slapstick, horseplay, cruel practical jokes - are seldom present in Jewish humour. Rather is it disturbing and upsetting, its phrases dipped in tragedy. A typical anecdote of Röyte Pomerantsen provokes a smile which is cut short by the disturbing realisation that you have been made to think.
For here was a people which clung to the myth of the Chosen People despite the most extreme adversity and persecution. Despite its pride it was much too realistic not to recognise how grandiose an anomaly was the contrast between its claim and its position. Hence the characteristic strategy of its humour was an irony which measured the distance between pretension and actuality, held it up for public inspection and then made of it the salt of self-ridicule.
Jewish humour is therefore full of acute social observations. The group which struggles along on the margin of history is always in a better position to examine it realistically than the group which floats in mid-stream. But since Jewish humour was conceived as a means of internal criticism, it took for granted the poverty and misery which were the people’s daily lot. These conditions were obliquely twisted into the materials of humour, but they are still observable in it. For instance:
In the old days, you no doubt remember, they used to grab children off the streets and send them to the army. Just so long as they weren’t married, they were taken at any age. So Jews - being Jews - found a way out. We used to marry off the children at the ages of six and seven. You'd walk along the street and see a husband, barefoot and in shorts, playing marbles. Once a Jew, seeing such a child, asked him why he wasn’t at school. The child answered, ‘I don’t go to school anymore, I was married yesterday.’ So the Jew asked him again, ‘If you got married yesterday and are now the head of a family, why aren’t you wearing long pants?’ The child replied, ‘Yesterday I got married, so I wore the pants; today my younger brother is getting married, so he’s wearing the pants.’
This is not exactly a light-hearted joke; yet one cannot but feel a certain admiration for a people which can laugh at these tragic facts of its own life. We find the same unrelenting realism in another anecdote which centres around a fabulous character, Hershl Ostropoler, who does all sorts of hare-brained things and then offers justifications which make one wonder if his oddities are not more relevant to life than our common sense:
Hershl is working as an assistant to a rabbi when a distraught woman comes for advice. In the rabbi’s absence, he hears her out. She complains that her daughter has been in labour for three days and still can’t give birth. Never at a loss, Hershl tells her to place a copper penny on her daughter’s naval in order to hasten the birth. A few days later the woman comes back and this time the real rabbi is present. She throws herself at the rabbi’s knees and thanks him for the wonderful advice. The copper penny on the navel did the trick: the baby came out immediately. Guessing that this was another of Hershl’s tricks, the rabbi turns to him and sternly asks, ‘Are you crazy unto death? Why a copper penny on the navel?’ To which Hershl replies, ‘Listen, rabbi, I figured that if the little pauper saw the penny he'd jump right out to grab it.’
Beneath Hershl’s wisecrack there is an intimate sense of history, of helplessness before its inexorable sequences and yet of ultimate scorn for its workings. A classical expression of this attitude is found in another anecdote, one of the many ‘Rothschild jokes’ which counterpose the fabulously wealthy Rothschild to clever beggars:
Two Jewish beggars once went to Rothschild’s house for alms. Said the first to the second: ‘You know what? You go inside and I'll wait here.’
The second beggar went in and told one of Rothschild’s secretaries that he had come for alms. The poor beggar was passed along from secretary to secretary; slips of paper were filled out about his request; and finally after an hour of being shunted from office to office, the bewildered beggar reached the chief secretary. But when he got to the chief secretary’s office, the beggar was brusquely told to beat it: no alms today.
As the beggar stepped out of Rothschild’s house, he was asked by his companion, ‘Well, what did you get?’
‘Get?’ replied the beggar, ‘I got nothing, of course. But I must say that never in my whole life have I seen such a system as they have at Rothschilds!’
Implicit in this joke is a sly scorn for wealth and its bureaucratic apparatus together with a recognition of the need to concern oneself with them. A similar attitude is expressed in another Rothschild joke:
A Jew once came to Paris where a friend took him to the Jewish cemetery. There he saw Rothschild’s grave over which loomed a large and beautiful tombstone. So the Jew looks at it and looks and looks - and then he turns to his friend and says, ‘You see, Yankl, you see that tombstone Rothschild has; that’s what I call living!’
Here the knife is being twisted several ways. Obviously the Jew who makes the ironic remark is aware that, come what may, it is better to be poor and alive than rich and dead. Yet he also notices that the dead Rothschild is in a position to ‘live’ better in his grave than we poor people who are really alive.
The same acute social perception can be found in the humour the East European Jews developed about those threats of external aggression from which their life was never free. That the Jews should be sceptical about wars and inclined to pacifism is understandable. One is reminded of the joke about the Albanian in the First World War who, when asked his opinion about the war, replied, ‘Two dogs are fighting over a bone and you ask the bone how it feels!’ As the bone in the squabbles between dogs, the Jews ridiculed the idea of war per se and gently noted their lack of passion for things military. What is perhaps the most famous of all war jokes is of Jewish origin:
A Jewish soldier in the Russo-Japanese war shoots up in the air instead of at the enemy. He is brought before a Russian court martial and asked why he fired upwards. In apparent innocence he replies, ‘What do you mean? In front of me there were people; if I'd shot at them I might have killed someone!’
Through the wit and satire of these folk anecdotes we also see an even greater danger to the life of the East European Jews: the pogrom. One of the most poignant and magnificent anecdotes of Röyte Pomerantsen is a subtle comment on this danger:
In a Jewish village there once appeared a circus with many animals. One evening a bear escaped. How and why, don’t ask; he escaped and that’s all there is to it. So the chief of police ordered that whoever saw the bear should kill him. When one Jew heard of this he decided to leave town immediately. ‘Why are you running away?’, asked a friend, ‘You're not a bear.’ The Jew replied, ‘Listen to me. Before you know what has happened they'll kill a Jew - and then go prove he’s not a bear!’
Though a joke usually involves a thrust at someone else, Jewish humour is often a thrust at the Jews themselves. The plight that is ridiculed is often that of the narrator, with whom the audience can so easily identify itself. But the Jewish joke is not merely self-criticism; it is at the same time self-justification. Or more accurately, it is in a state of constant tension between criticism and justification. For the narrator is a sly fellow. If you extend his remark just a bit, it becomes a sardonic comment, not merely on the plight of the Jews, but also on the plight of all humanity:
In the midst of a ship’s voyage, a severe storm broke out which endangered the lives of all aboard. The ship swayed from side to side; women fainted all over the place; people bewailed their fate. One Jew aboard the ship kept shrieking: ‘Help, Oh Lord! The ship is sinking, the ship is being smashed; help, help, the ship!’
Annoyed with the shrieking, another passenger went over and calmly asked him, ‘Why are you making such an uproar? What are you screaming about? Is it your ship?’
If we understand the word in its original Latin sense, Jewish humour is genuinely vulgar. It is not earthy, for the Jews lacked roots in the land and paid scant attention to nature. It is seldom obscene, for Jewish humour is too fascinated with the ridiculousness of man’s total condition to be interested in his quickly decaying physical parts. But it is vulgar, common, ordinary, full of the affairs of common life; its scenes are kitchens, market-places, railroad stations and streets; its characters, housewives, mothers-in-law, children, merchants and beggars. In Jewish humour we move along the social ladder from top to bottom, and often savour those delicious contrasts of manners between social strata which the Jews so enjoyed noticing.
A basic situation in Jewish humour is the counterposition of Rothschild, the archetypical millionaire, against the schnorrer, a sort of high-class beggar. Though the schnorrer is poor, he is also proud and will brook no humiliation. In one anecdote the schnorrer insists on seeing Rothschild personally and when he finally gains an interview he asks for alms:
‘Couldn’t you see my secretary if that’s all you want?’, asks Rothschild in anger. ‘See here, Mr Rothschild’, replies the schnorrer, ‘you may be very competent in your field, but don’t tell me how to run my business.’
If schnorrers have wit - what else can they live on? - then the shadchen, or matchmaker, is something of a philosopher. Faced with the task of pairing off doubtful human material, he becomes a bit sceptical about human nature. When he extols the virtues of a bride-to-be, he quietly remarks, ‘Well, so what if she is a little pregnant?’ Such things happen in this world and no one knows it better than the shadchan. But sometimes even he forgets himself. One joke tells of a shadchen who tries to convince a bachelor to marry. ‘But what are the advantages of marriage?’, asks the bachelor:
‘Ah’, answers the shadchen, ‘your wife cooks for you, she takes care of you, she mends your clothes, she blesses you with children, and she talks to you... and she talks to you... and she talks... the devil take her the way she talks!’
But the most perennial and beloved character of Jewish humour is the schlemiehl. How can one define a schlemiehl? That he is completely poverty-stricken goes without saying; that is the least of it. Let us rather say that he has a positive gift for getting into trouble, for doing things the wrong way, for saying the inept word at the inappropriate moment - and always with the best of intentions. He is the eternal innocent, and yet one is never sure if he is merely a good-natured fool or if there is a reservoir of deep and hidden wisdom beneath his foolishness.
A typical schlemiehl joke tells of the not-too-bright young man who before going to meet his bride-to-be is instructed by his father to talk about love and family affairs and then to wind up with a bit of philosophy. That should be safe enough. The young man dutifully begins his conversation with his betrothed by asking her:
‘Tell me, my love, do you love noodles?’
‘Why of course I love noodles.’
‘Tell me, darling, do you have a brother?’
‘No. I have no brother.’
Well, at this point the young man has exhausted two of his three subjects and that leaves only philosophy.
So he asks her, ‘But suppose you did have a brother, would he love noodles?’
The special bitter-sweet taste of this humour, one is conscious, is largely dissipated in translation; language and content are too intimately wedded. It is the same flavour that marks off the major figures of Yiddish literature from any other European literary group, and binds them to the masses for whom they wrote. When Sholom Aleichem died in New York, when Peretz died in Warsaw, crowds of 150,000 attended their funerals. They were mourned even as members of one’s own family.
Though there was a Yiddish cultural movement of some proportions in America during the early part of the century, it has recently been restricted to an increasingly narrow circle. What has percolated into American life is a sad substitute - the dialect joke, often vicious and always cheap; the Jewish theatre with its tawdry farces and bathetic melodramas; the Broadway clowns who can only vulgarise Jewish humour; and the supercilious dialect writers for ‘sophisticated’ magazines who exploit Jewish humour but fancy it proper to hold their noses while doing so. These vulgarisations have less genuine connection with Jewish humour than did, say, Will Rogers, with the American folk humour of Mark Twain. But in the pages of Röyte Pomerantsen and the stories of Sholom Aleichem, one may see the true and splendid expression of both a folk and its greatest artist in humour which mocks pomp and wealth, which shatters pretension and which upholds the poor and the suffering.
1. Immanuel Olsvanger, Röyte Pomerantsen, Schocken, New York, 1947.