The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem by Jeremy Dauber

Author:Jeremy Dauber [Dauber, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4316-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

* * *

In Which Our Hero Fights Back Against Libels of a Frivolous and Tragic Nature, and Encounters His Alternate Selves

1911–1913

The problems kept piling up that fall. Sholem Aleichem was battling a case of influenza. He was missing his two older daughters, who were with their spouses in, respectively, Vilna and Berlin. And that October he discovered that an Odessan had begun to publish a newspaper titled Sholem Aleichem, naturally giving the erroneous impression that he was personally involved. It made him so upset and nervous, he wrote Abramovitch, that he couldn’t even write, “which is, for me, a remarkable occurrence, like for a goy—you should excuse the comparison—to not even look at a drink.” The offending publisher claimed somewhat implausibly that he had first decided on naming the newspaper Sholem Aleichem and only subsequently remembered the existence of a writer by that name. Abramovitch, a fellow Odessan, finally intervened at Sholem Aleichem’s request, Solomonically persuading the offending publisher to cut his title in half and just call it Sholem.

His biggest newspaper problems, though, were with the Haynt. Moment, the Haynt’s lead competitor, had leapt ahead in the circulation wars: they’d cracked the traditional Polish audience question with a series of immensely popular sketches featuring a group of Hasidim humorously reviewing the week’s events while preparing for the Sabbath. An editor at the Haynt—his old friend David Frishman—argued in staff meetings that the feuilletonist was just doing what Sholem Aleichem used to do himself in works like “The Intercepted Letters”; the Haynt should simply get the master himself to do it better; and only a popular character like Menakhem-Mendl would do as a central focus. Yatzkan, who had wanted more Menakhem-Mendl stories all along, loved the idea, and as Sholem Aleichem’s annual contract negotiation approached, increasingly pressured the author to do it. Sholem Aleichem was still opposed to the idea, and the resulting standoff lasted for several months.

His increasingly elegiac mood was apparent in the first two entries in a planned series, “Sketches of Disappearing Types,” he published that fall in honor of Yom Kippur and Simchat Torah. Introducing the first sketch, he wrote, “Among the different types that the Jewish life produces, there are found those who are standing on the edge of extinction, that are moribund. Depicting living people is a pleasure; describing the types that are passing on is a mitzvah. They plead: ‘Depict us, describe us; let us not be forgotten by the coming generation.’… Such types I give an entire sheaf, a serial.” This concern with chronicling a vanished world—decades before the Holocaust—was a theme gaining more and more momentum as the years passed, personally felt as friends departed and children grew. But his concerns weren’t only about modernization and acculturation. “Times have changed,” he writes in the second sketch, “and the mayor and constables have changed with the times. Now we are thankful if they permit us Jews to get drunk once a year and go freely from house to house singing holiday songs.

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