Free No Joke by Ruth R. Wisse Page A

territory” of Jewish towns and cities with train compartments as their mobile prayer houses was a brilliant surrogate for national autonomy, and it was duly harnessed by all the emerging Jewish national movements of the time—including Zionism,which he actively promoted. The consummate insider and virtuoso of the insider’s language, Sholem Aleichem seemed to offer a complete contrast to Heine—and so he did, until he was forced into exile from the Russia he had so ingeniously reimagined as his own. At that point, the homey language that had been his insulation betrayed the degree of his displacement. Once Jews abandoned Yiddish, they could no more understand the intricacies of his humor than could any Gentile.

    Sholem Aleichem’s spirit avowedly influenced the art of Marc Chagall, who later brought a modernist touch to the scenery and costumes he designed for the dramatic productions of Sholem Aleichem. Chagall’s paintings of a fiddler, including this one of the violinist on a rooftop, became the iconic image for the Broadway musical that was based on Sholem Aleichem’s stories of Tevye the Dairyman. Marc Chagall, The Green Violinist . © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris and CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
    To understand where Sholem Aleichem sprang from, I need to make a brief excursion into eastern European Jewish history as an incubator of modern Jewish humor.
    Forays into the sources of Jewish comedy usually focus on institutions like the Purim shpil —a skit or performance marking the festival of Purim—and the badkhen or marshalik —the master of ceremonies called into service at celebrations and weddings. Both date from about the sixteenth century, when Jewish communities began selectively incorporating entertainments adapted from surrounding populations. Both provided opportunities for mostly amateur musical, poetic, and thespian performers. Some of the Purim scripts and badkhen songs became standard folk repertoire, and were later adapted by modern playwrights, poets, musicians, and writers who likewise worked in Yiddish, the everyday language. Studies and compendiums of this material show boundaries between folk and individual attribution remaining fluid well past the invention of the rotary printing press.
    In western and central Europe, Jews had begun to speak and study in local languages by the end of the eighteenthcentury. The case was otherwise in the more populous Jewish communities of the Russian Empire, which remained mostly Yiddish speaking for about another century. There, Jews were concentrated mostly in towns, or shtetlach (singular, shtetl), where they formed substantial fractions, if not majorities, of the population. “Literacy” continued to refer to literacy in traditional Hebrew-Aramaic sources, studied mostly by boys in Jewish elementary schools and yeshivas.
    This is not to say that Jewish society was immune to change. Whereas in France and Germany the impulse for change came mainly and directly from without, among eastern European Jews it could bubble up in autochthonous form in towns and cities where Jews constituted significant minorities. At the risk of compressing what scholars have gone to great lengths to distinguish and develop in detail, we can trace at least three powerful indigenous movements that vied for influence, each of them enriching Yiddish humor with mockery of the others.
    Pressing in from the West, the Enlightenment, in the specifically Jewish form known as Haskalah, was a reformist movement requiring Jews to undertake the behavioral and ideational changes that could make them worthier of citizenship, were it ever to be on offer. In common with other modernizers, Maskilim, “Enlighteners,” believed in progress, sometimes at the expense of inherited traditions and assumptions. Because they advanced their arguments in Jewish languages—Hebrew and