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experience highly unified, singular and contiguous. The writer who ap–
proached this experience could look at it. steadily, in developing per–
spective; it was certain and self-conscious; it was vital in the present
and yet had connectives with the deep subterranean past; and, above
all, it did not crumble into discrete parts in his hands as does the
American experience.
When Shalom Aleichem wrote, however, the Ghetto was already
in dissolution and his stories show it under assault by overwhelming alien
pressures. And there was his crucial advantage: approaching the Ghetto
in its last tremor of self-consciousness before dissolution, he was able
to sum up, to view the Pale in its rise and fall, to apostrophize and yet
soberly evaluate it.
Shalom Aleichem gave to the Jews what they instii).ctively felt was
the right and true judgment of the experience in the Pale. He was their
protector and advocate; he wrote with love and warmth of the com–
munal tradition; he defended its ethos and constantly underlined its
passionate urge to dignity. But he was its judge as well: he ridiculed its
pretentions; he punctured its pride; and, as a highly conscious artist,
he constantly reiterated the central dilemma, that simultaneous tragedy
and joke, of its existence-its consummately ironic position of self-pride
in clinging to the myth of the Chosen People, in fact the consummate
irony of its existence at all.
Viewed retrospectively, it seems most unlikely that the Jews could
have adopted as their culture-hero a writer who merely sang their glories
or miseries. They were too conscious of their position in history and too
aware that history itself was just a little ridiculous. And though they
could not help being part of history, they were apart from it too. In such
circumstances, irony was inescapable; it became their central attitude.
As the Ghetto declined and lost its cohesiveness, irony began to replace
faith, or, more accurately, irony became intermingled with faith to the
point where in Sholom Aleichem's work no statement of faith is possible
without irony and no statement of irony possible without faith.
Sholom Aleichem in his deceptively simple stories was able there–
fore-because of the ambivalence of his attitude-both to express and
heighten
the consciousness of his people. For if they loved him for
bringing to sharp explicitness what they felt about themselves, they could
never feel quite the same again after reading him. He expressed them
and transformed them.
Though Sholom Aleichem's conscious purpose is not particularly to
serve as a social analyst, the stories are so right in perception that the
social relations of the Ghetto can be seen as a delicate skein just below
the surface of the writing. Contrary to the retrospective idealization of
the Ghetto, in which a number of recent reviewers of Sholom Aleichem
have shared, it was not a flat social plane. To speak of classes within
