Volume 26, Number 10 · June 14, 1979
Pain and Laughter
By V.S. Pritchett
The Best of Sholom Aleichem
edited by Irving Howe, edited by Ruth Wisse
New Republic Books, 276 pp., $12.50
Sholom Aleichem is one of the prolific masters of Yiddish comic storytelling, an art springing from the oral folk tradition of Eastern Europe and crossed by the pain and laughter of racial calamity. Like all comics he is serious, has one foot in the disorder and madness of the world and, as a Jew, the other foot in the now perplexing, now exalted adjuration of the Law and the Prophets. Did God really choose their fate for the Jewish people? If so, was He being irresponsible, or why doesn't He make it clear? There is no answer. The oppressed stick to their rituals and are obliged to perfect the delights of cunning, the consolations of extravagant fantasy, the ironies and pedantries of the moralist who is privately turning his resignation into a weapon. With so many insoluble dilemmas on his hands, Aleichem developed that nimbleness of mind and fancy, those skills of masking and ventriloquism that made him the prolific 'natural' in short tales drawn partly from the remaking of folk tradition, a juggler of puns, proverbs, and sudden revealing images caught from the bewildered tongues of his people.
Review, 1832 words
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