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Ida Nasatir book review

The Old Country by Sholom Aleichem

March 27, 1947: Book review: The Old Country by Sholom Aleichem—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 6: The Old Country, a collection of Sholom Aleichem tales, is more than a book. It is the epitaph of a vanished world and an almost vanished people.  The salty and hilarious folk of of whom it tells—the Jews of Europe—are dead.  All the 'Tevyahs' whose souls and sayings, whose bizarre and tender antics Sholom Aleichem immortalized in the richest Yiddish prose ever written—were massacred, six million strong, by the Germans. And all the quaint and heart-warming villages in which the Jews of Europe lived are no longer on the map.  This selection of twenty-seven of the author's three hundred tales, is translated from the Yiddish by Julius and Frances Butwin.  Both these people tried to convey the mood, the sensitiveness, and the purpose of the original dialogue. However, there are phrases and references that are peculiar to a people or a language that cannot be converted into another pattern.  This is definitely true of Yiddish.  The author of these delightful tales was born with the name of Solomon Rabinowitz in the town of Pereyaslav in the Ukraine. But a Jew's birthplace is not necessarily his home. Nor is the land in which he lived and flourished the place that calls him his own. His friends and family debated for five years after his death...to what country does Sholom Aleichem belong? Where should they bury so great a genius? In 1921, he was buried in the Workmen's Circle Cemetery, Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. He lies there in a soil as strange to him as that of the land beyond the moon.  A tall black monument stands over his grave. Here come every year thousands of Jews to pay homage and make a prayer for the man who laughed for them. The Old Country depicts a people who curse their dear ones as an expression of bitter denunciation of their unfortunate lot.  Living as they did, in the midst of poverty and struggle and oppression, their only release came through tales that would amuse or inform. Sholom Aleichem described these situations in terms of the daily life of a small community...the trials and the comedy of the tailor, or the village beggar, or the sexton, or the housewife.  Only indirectly did he ever touch on the rich and their pattern of life; when he did so, it was only because the rich man's story was woven into the fabric of the poor man's tale. Yet, although his stories treat of the poor and oppressed, they usually are gay and tender; sometimes they amuse by the sheer insanity of the theme. The author knew and understood the spirit of the people about whom he wrote.  As the translators put it, "He was a genius whose writings are the perfect expression of a people, their mind, their heart, their wit."  Take Tevyeh the Dairyman. His closest western cousin is perhaps Sancho Panza.  There is the same earthiness in both of them, the same familiarity with misfortune, the same wisdom expressing itself in proverbs and misquotations. But Tevyeh is a Sancho with Don Quixote, unless Tevyeh's Knight is God Himself.  Then there is Motel, the irrepressible child, who has a humor denied to Tiny Tim when he repeatedly cries, "I'm lucky—I'm an orphan."  One must have a talent for that sort of life. As MOtel's mother used to say, "Even to be unlucky, you have to have luck." The women folk too speak out of both sides of their mouths—cursing and blessing, weeping and laughing in one breath.  In truth, life itself was ambiguous, double-tongued, for these Jews, as it is bound to be for any people trying to be themselves in another people's world. But these people loved life more than misfortune. And when there was nothing else to sustain them, they managed to live a little madly on their own wit.  In all these tales, Sholom Aleichem's pen dances with a wink and a smile, but his ink is compounded of tears. Like Mark Twain, he exhibits rather than describes his characters: their very speech is a powerful portrait.