Free No Joke by Ruth R. Wisse

between fear and “civilization” in his comic routine of the two-thousand-year-old man. Asked about the principal means of transportation in his younger days, Brooks answers, “Fear. An animal would growl, you’d go two miles in a minute.” 3 Along the same lines, Sholem Aleichem’s humor, often called “laughter through tears,” is more accurately understood as laughter through fears.
    Born in 1859 in one Ukrainian Jewish town and raised in another, Sholem Rabinovich turned his given name into a term of common greeting as though he were standing on the doorstep welcoming one and all into his world. Thanks to the language in which he wrote, he remained bound to the Yiddish-speaking society. But there was also something of Max in him: the author was not identical with his fictional persona.
    At the age of seventeen, Rabinovich was hired by a wealthy Jewish landowner to serve as a live-in secretary and tutor to the man’s only daughter. Within a few years, pupil and instructor married, at first against the father’s wishes. Happily, reconciliation ensued, and when his father-in-law died, the aspiring and now-wealthy writer was able to take up residence in Kiev, a city that was legally out of bounds to all but a privileged minority of Russian Jews. There he began a serious literary career while enjoying, albeit briefly, an affluent life. His longtime literary associate Yehoshua Ravnitski recalls that at their first meeting, he had trouble reconciling the homespun author he had been reading with the dandy in white spats who stood before him. Incongruities were the stuff of Rabinovich’s life.
    The man who became known as Sholem Aleichem liked to trace his comic genius to a childhood talent for mimicry; his earliest work, he said, was an alphabetized list of his stepmother’s curses that won her over by making her laugh. His audience was meant to believe that in similar fashion, he had continued to pick up from commonplace Jews the sayings, anecdotes, and stories that he then artlessly repackaged for their enjoyment. And indeed, his male and female monologists, speaking “in their own voices,” became beloved personalities in their own right. His fellow writer Yosef Haim Brenner called him a unique amalgam, a poet who was “a living essence of the folk itself.” 4 He played the role so well that the extent of his influence on the folk’s perception of itself went largely unnoticed.
    In fact, Sholem Aleichem revolutionized Jewish culture more profoundly than any figure of his time. Almost single-handedly, he invented a Jewish people that laughed its way through crisis and an imaginary Jewish town, Kasrilevke, whose very name connoted merry pauperdom. His comic protagonists Menahem-Mendl, Sheyne-Sheyndl, and Tevye the Dairyman became national prototypes like the biblical Abraham, Esther, and Job. What Heine had celebrated as the “sabbath spirit” of the Jews was now presumed to function not as a sacred interval from the rest of the week but rather as an innate capacity for transmuting humiliation, subjugation, misery, and dread into funniness. This image would later be used in film and story to deactivate even the horrors of the Holocaust, though the salvific properties of laughter had clearly failed to save the population that allegedly sought refuge in it. Sholem Aleichem was not merely the alchemist but also the inventor of a putatively magical people.
    Historians of the so-called Age of Nationalism that culminated in the First World War point to the heightened importance of a sustaining national culture in the struggle for the sovereignty of ethnic minorities like the Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. The national cohesion of Jews, who lived outside their ancestral territory, was even more dependent than those others on the nonpolitical underpinnings of peoplehood such as common language and literature. Sholem Aleichem’s “fictional