On
Sholom Aleichem:
Sholom Aleichem
He was born in 1859 in
Pereyaslav, Ukraine. His name is the Yiddish pseudonym of Shalom
Rabinowitz, based on the shalom aleichem (peace be unto you) greeting. Done to avoid offence, especially Hebrew
oriented father. Yiddish was his
preferred language for writing, but by many rather despised. He wrote stories, poetry and drama
His father was a merchant
whose business failed and the family fell into poverty. His mother died of cholera in 1872. He was thirteen. Next year he went to the Gymnasium (‘grammar
school’) and graduated in 1876. He began
writing in Hebrew.
In 1883 he married the well-to-do landowner’s daughter, Olga
Loeve. Later he, in a speculation, he
lost the money inherited from her father and had to flee from creditors.
In 1904 after witnessing the
pogroms they left for USA, but then went to Geneva to join the rest of his
family. He worked as a lecturer. In 1908 he collapsed on a train, due to a
relapse of a form of TB. He and his
family supported after this by admirers
and friends.
In 1914 he went to USA again,
New York and died 13 May 1918, aged 57.
In his life he pressed for
Yiddish to be the national Jewish language and was a Zionist, serving as a
Zionist delegate at the Eighth Zionist Congress at the Hague (1888). He was superstitious about the number
13. He became enormously popular as a
writer. There were some 100,000 mourners
at his funeral. His play Tevye’s
Daughters formed the basis of the film musical Fiddler on the Roof.
The Story: some thoughts
In one sense a very simple
story indeed: a guest comes, stays the
night, and runs off with the silver.
In one way it’s a typical ‘twist
in the end’ short story. We are led by
events into a particular interpretation, and then discover things aren’t like
that at all. We are led to see the
guest as friendly, interesting and devout,
and so to trust him. But he is a
fake.
The American linguist, Labov, set out a framework into which stories (tend
to) fall.
1 An ordinary routine event of some kind
2 Something out of the ordinary, a crisis,
which unbalances the ordinary routine
3 This creates a problem for the main
character to solve
4 The problem is pursued until resolved (not
necessarily solved)
5 The conclusion is both fitting but also
unexpected.
Sholom Aleichem’s story doesn’t
fit this framework as straightforwardly as many stories do. We could summarise the structure as
1 The routine Passover celebrations involving
hospitality to strangers
2 The guest is ‘out of the ordinary’ in his
identity, as is his homeland as he describes it. He doesn’t upset, but changes the family Passover celebration
3 The ‘problem’ that follows from 2 does not appear directly. But in retrospect we see it as something like having a thief in the
house, except no-one realises. He’s also
a
‘temptation’ to them to devalue the good
life they have when presented with a false
(materialistic) alternative. A
spiritual problem.
4 The problem is not ‘resolved’, by the main character’s doing
something. The main characters aren’t aware of the
problem. They allow it to be resolved by
doing nothing, by their misplaced trust and admiration.
5 The conclusion is their realisation their
loss of what they had and had almost begun to
disparage, and the boy’s loss of a ‘dream’.
Unexpected, but when we replay it in
our minds and see the guest for what he really is, perfectly fitting.
How we see this structure is
affected by how we read. Do we begin to
feel even as he talks that the guest’s tales are not quite genuine? After all we see it all through the
inexperienced eyes of a boy. If/when we
get suspicious, we’re the more aware of the family’s contribution to their own
loss.
In retrospect we notice the
way the narrator, and the guests eyes, draw attention to such things as the
mother’s diamond earrings, and her pearls (p4), and how he includes the maid in
his audience - ‘in such a friendly, such
a very friendly way!’ (p5)
Further notes
The Passover. This celebrates the Jews freedom from slavery. Do any aspects of this feast work their
way into this story?
Orientalism. A tendency to look at people from
different cultures as humanly different,
often in a disparaging way. Much
is made, in the story, of the guest’s difference. Edward Said wrote about this.[ii]
The narrator (a boy we should note) says
in a mixture of folktale and Biblical language:
It
is not every day that a person comes from perhaps two thousand miles away, from
a land only to be reached across seven seas and a desert, the desert journey
alone requiring forty days and nights. (p4)
Sefardim. From the Hebrew word for Spain. It refers to Jews who lived in the Iberian
Peninsular at the beginning of the 2nd millennium. They were driven out in the late 15th
century by the Catholics.
Levites. Hebrew ethnic group. According to Wikipedia:
‘the Sons of Levi were the only Israelite tribe that received
cities but were not allowed to be landowners "because the Lord the God of
Israel Himself is their inheritance" (Deuteronomy 18:2)’. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica Levites
were given a special religious status, conjecturally, for slaughtering idolaters of the
golden calf during the time of Moses (Ex.
32:25–29). They thus replaced the
firstborn sons of Israel who were “dedicated to the service of the Lord” for
having been preserved from death at the time of the first Passover (Ex. 12).
Narration:
(1) The
narrator switches so often from present to past back to present. Not sure why.
(2) He
sometimes puts himself very self-consciously into the narrator’s role.
‘Such was the
conversation that took place between my father and the beadle, a day before
Passover. . .(p1)
‘The fact is
this: our guest from beyond the desert
and the seven seas has disappeared’(p6)
A Paradox
The guest is not rich, but he tempts them with imaginary riches. Their imaginations are greedy: they have
enough. The guest presents himself as culturally rich,
not materialistic. But he steals
materialistically.
Or does he? Or is there more to this? In his land with riches everywhere there is
a rule that when he leave ‘you cannot take it with you’. Is he a kind of messenger? Have they got the message?
He takes their material goods from them, and
their servant (privilege). Instead of the hope of even more goods,
they have less.
The boy tells the ‘true’ tale. It is worth telling because of the ‘false’ tales
the guest tells tales within this tale.
But is the guest’s tale false?
[i]
It’s on the web at http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/55720/
[ii]
As a cultural critic, Said is best known for the 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyses the cultural representations that are
the basis of Orientalism, a term he
redefined to refer to the
West's
patronizing perceptions and depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North
African societies—"the East". He
contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to
the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work
inherently political, servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect
- Wikipedia
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