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culture. The east European settlements,
in
Poland .and in the Pale
surrounding Kiev, of which Sholom Aleichem wrote, were great com–
munities, flourishing as well as misfortune, repressions and pogroms
would allow. But it was
in
the nature of this world to die. Even without
pogroms, without Chmelnitzky and Petlura, who failed, and Hitler who
succeeded in destroying it, it would have died, a victim, even, of an
innocent history in whose changes it neither had, nor wanted, a part.
Mr. Samuel has, therefore, done well in making his exposition careful
and clear and detailed. He should certainly have shown, as I imagine he
possesses, a more philosophical understanding of his subject; and, since
he was dealing with one of the greatest folk-artists, he might have devoted
more attention to the individual stature of the man and the techniques of
his craft. But by way of capturing and translating into the English
language traits and qualities of a culture which was lost in social trans–
lation, Mr. Samuel has succeeded admirably.
There have been many Jewish worlds. The one known through the
novels of Sholom Asch
(Three Cities)
or
I.
J. Singer
(The Brothers
Ashkenazi)
represents the breakdown of traditional folkways under the
influence of industrialism, and the emergence of a Jewish proletariat and
a modern middle class. This aspect of history the Jews of Asch and
Singer share with the rest of the world, and their story has successfully
been translated because their life was itself in process of translation.
But the life of Kasrielevky (Pauperville), Sholom Aleichem's arch–
typical village, was too far removed from the origins of social change,
too limited in its access to history and too faithful to its own traditions
to endure without breakdown the eventual adjustments that were forced
upon it. Kasrielevky was guarded but exhausted by an old religion which
had never learned to rationalize adaptation to the world.
In Kasrielevky, religion, like mud and chicken feathers, clung to
one's very boots. Let alone the Sabbath, holidays, ceremonies and learn·
ing,-even haggling involved Scripture. Sholom Aleichem's Jews, it is
correct to say, were a religious group. Of necessity their religion was
more than a
do~atism,
unrelated, or in winking contradiction to the
life they led. Their religion affected their most familiar and intimate
emotions, the perpetual insecurity, fear and nostalgia of the homeless,
fortified them with parables, and provided a metaphysics of sentiment as
well as an immediate
~uide
to the conduct of life. Besides, it was funda–
mentally a secular religion, for it provided the only available basis
for culture. But while this religion embraced the world, it was also
profoundly alienated from it, and acknowledged Kasrielevky only as
society, never as a homeland. All thought and expression, even the most
trivial modes of intercourse among the Jews were permeated with yearn–
ing for Eretz Israel, for home. Even the Yiddish
langua~e,
as Mr. Samuel
shows in a brilliant chapter, was never allowed to
devel~p
affinity for the
natural world; it was poor in object-names, recognizing only the few
miserable species of flower and bird whose existence alone the exiled for
fear of forgetting Jerusalem, permitted themselves to acknowledge. '
Sholom Aleichem's humor drew upon the phenomena of alienation.
He himself was a man of "Western" culture, born of a landed middle
class family (rare among Russian Jews), to whom the progressive and
