Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz

Memories of Sholem Aleichem

207 Y. D. Berkovitsh (1885–1967) was an important Hebrew writer. In 1905 he moved to Vilna, where he met Sholem Aleichem and his daughter, whom he married. Berkovitsh translated many of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish stories into Hebrew, including the stories of Tevye the Dairyman. 1. These recollections of Sholem Aleichem are excerpted from Berkovitsh’s introductory chapters—preceding each group of letters—in The Sholem Aleichem Book (Dos SholemAleichem bukh). The passages included here are from “Family and Milieu” (“Mishpokhe un svive,” p. 17), “In His Own Republic” (“In zayn eygener republik,” pp. 47–53), “With the Family of Writers” (“Mit der mishpokhe fun shriftshteler,” pp. 155–60, 165–67, 168–72, 187–89), and “With Friends and Everyday Folks” (“Mit fraynt un yidn fun a gants yor,” pp. 285–89, 291). The length of the original chapters makes it impossible to include the full text. Berkovitsh’s other memoirs of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz are contained in Harish ’onim ki-vnei-adam (Hebrew). The title of this section has been added by the editor. Memories of Sholem Aleichem Y. D. Berkovitsh Family and Milieu It is an old, generally accepted rule that one needs to look nearby for the secret of every extraordinary person’s talent: in his origins and in his childhood milieu—with parents, relatives, and sometimes also with teachers and friends.1 If one tries to apply this rule to discover the secret of the extraordinary phenomenon of Sholem Aleichem, from the start this will be a bit difficult . For Sholem Aleichem, the great popular writer and master of Yiddish humor, seems to stand apart from his surroundings. Among his family and earliest childhood friends, he appears as a unique phenomenon, like a solitary , foreign plant. Neither his father nor his mother—and even less his brothers, relatives, and friends—exhibited anything externally that could have prepared and groomed the future Sholem Aleichem. His father, Nokhem Rabinovitsh, was a small-town intellectual, “religious, with a mastery of Hebrew,” “a hasidic follower of the Tolner Rebbe, and a lover of [Avraham ] Mapu,” a quiet, reticent man with a gentle, pliant character, a gloomy 208 | Y. D. BERKOVITSH 2. The quotations that appear in these remarks are all taken from Sholem Aleichem’s autobiography From the Fair [Funem yarid, 1915–16; Berkovitsh’s note]. person “always with a worried look on his face”—at first glance the opposite of Sholem Aleichem.2 His mother, Chaya-Esther, was “a virtuous woman,” preoccupied with minding the shop, and a practical housewife who was the mother of many children. She “was neither as soft nor as indulgent as other mothers,” and “we often received slaps, jabs, and blows from her,” because in her view “children should not like to laugh and amuse themselves,” which “must have meant that children shouldn’t laugh”—she, too, was not especially similar to Sholem Aleichem, who throughout his life was for children (and particularly for his own children) an inexhaustible source of tenderness, joy, and playfulness. His maternal grandfather, Moshe-Yossi Zeldin, who for a short time had some influence on his grandson, was a strange creature: a small-town moneylender “dressed in rags and worn-out shoes,” “with an oddly coarse face,” a fanatical hasid of the Chabad sect, a half-deranged mystic , a kind of Jewish, hasidic “holy fool” (yurodivi), from whom Sholem Aleichem ’s bright, joyful character, it would seem, was unable to acquire anything. Sholem Aleichem’s brothers were almost all ordinary householders ; while literate, they were far removed from intellectual accomplishments, all practical men with purely material ambitions. . . . In His Own Republic 1 “My republic”—this is what Sholem Aleichem would often call his home. With that he wanted to designate both the liberal, “republican” regime that ruled in his household, allowing each individual member to move around freely, in accordance with his inborn qualities and inclinations, and the pleasure that he himself—the free “president” of the free “republic”—enjoyed in his own environment. He would say it in a humorous tone, but beneath this tone one could feel a deep, sincere pride, for he was extremely satisfied with his “republic.” For in that republic of his own, Sholem Aleichem derived such great and complete satisfaction as nowhere else. In contrast to most artistic personalities , whose everyday home and family life oppresses their spirits and clips MEMORIES OF SHOLEM ALEICHEM | 209...