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Sholom Aleichem: A Hundred Years and It's Still "Now"

1960; Antioch College; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/4610300

2326-9707

Leonard Nathan, Sholom Aleichem,

Jewish Identity and Society

The Jew away from Jewishness has often had to discover what Jewishness means the hard way-from strangers. And, if he has decided to learn more than strangers can teach him (that is, what he is not), then he may still tend to learn from the outside, from commentries on commentaries, from, say Martin Buber on Hassidism. About this I can speak for myself, at least. Of the two times that I have attended synagogue, one was to make a speech on the writer that I am about to discuss. And both times I felt like an outsider, not because of the kind regulars around me, but because the act of going was so foreign to me, as if, again, I had to arrive through a door marked For Those Entering the Synagogue Through the Idea of a Synagogue. When I picked up the stories of Sholom Aleichem for the first time, all such indirections-those desperate and abstract freeways to a lost address-were unnecessary. I felt neither apology nor patronizing in my attention. There, so to speak, he was, like a familiar: no reservations, no deviousness, and all of a sudden real. High-minded interpreters were not necessary, only wits and imagination. But, for all his immediacy, this year is the centenary of Sholom Aleichem, a man dead before the Germans freed a murderous barbarism that we had imagined extinct. And yet the experience of Sholom Aleichem and his people, though irreversibly ended as an historical fact, is still so immediate that nothing, not even translation, can entirely distort or deaden it. Its power and movement, its variety and expressiveness, can still satisfy the hunger for reality that all great literature satisfies. As a view of life, his best work partakes of that com-