Sholem
Aleichem is a man without didactic intentions or social ideology, one of those
rare storytellers whose work sums up the outlook of a whole culture. Few writers
have so completely captured the imagination of their people as Sholem Aleichem
has that of the Jews. He is the property of the Jewish people as a whole, known
and loved even by those on the borderline of literacy. He is the only writer
of modern times who may truly be said to be a culture-hero more so than
Mark Twain or Dickens, whose popularity hardly rested upon any feeling among
their readers that they were moral spokesmen; and certainly far more so than
T. S. Eliot, about whom it should be said that the claims entered by his admirers
have yet to he recognized by his culture.
In
his humorous yet often profoundly sad stories, Shalom Aleichem gave to the Jews
what they instinctively felt was the right and true judgment of their experience:
a judgment of love through the medium of irony. Sholem Aleichem is the great
poet of Jewish humanism and of Jewish transcendence over the pomp of the world.
For the Jews of Eastern Europe he was protector and advocate; he celebrated
their communal tradition; he defended their style of life and constantly underlined
their passionate urge to dignity. But he was their judge as well: he ridiculed
their pretensions, he mocked their vanity, and he constantly reiterated the
central dilemma, that simultaneous tragedy and joke, of their existence
the irony of their claim to being a Chosen People, indeed, the irony of their
existence at all.
Sholem
Aleichem's Yiddish is one of the most extraordinary verbal achievements of modern
literature, as important in its way as T. S. Eliot's revolution in the language
of English verse or Berthold Brecht's infusion of street language into the German
lyric. Sholem Aleichem uses a sparse and highly controlled vocabulary; his medium
is so drenched with irony that the material which comes through it is often
twisted and elevated into direct tragic statement-irony multiplies upon itself
to become a deep winding sadness. Many of his stories are monologues, still
close to the oral folk tradition, full of verbal by-play, slow in pace, winding
in direction, but always immediate and warm in tone. His imagery is based on
an absolute mastery of the emotional rhythm of Jewish life; describing, for
example, the sadness of a wheezing old clock, he writes that it was "a
sadness like that in the song of an old, worn-out cantor toward the end of Yom
Kippur" and how sad that is only someone who
has heard such a cantor and therefore knows the exquisite rightness of the image
can really say.
From:
Irving Howe & Eliezer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (Viking
Books, 1953; republished by Schocken Books)