7
I always dream of beggars, the sack in mid-air –
the old familiar Jewish beggar sack, like black bile …
(Mendele 1888)
In the second half of the 19th century, an exclusively Jewish Eastern European Yiddish and Hebrew literature flourished, in Yiddish as the language of the Jewish masses, and in Hebrew as the language of a minority elite. As late as 1939, the majority of the world Jewish population, over ten million in all, spoke Yiddish. Yiddish became the first literature aimed chiefly at a proletarian readership, a phenomenon reflecting the high literacy rate among working-class Jews.1
European literary influences on Yiddish and Hebrew writers were uncommonly broad, with the great Russian writers the gold standard. Insofar as Russian poverty was general in the empire, Jewish literature can even be seen as a tributary of Russian literature. To an extent generally greater than in other 19th- and early 20th-century literature, poverty dominates both Yiddish and Hebrew literature but in different ways: in Hebrew, Jewish poverty had clear historical resonances, in the Bible and Talmud; Yiddish literature, in contrast, was rooted mainly in the present, in the vernacular. Yiddish literature reveals poverty to be the main reason for the disproportionate involvement of Jews in revolutionary movements in the early 20th century. Intolerance of poverty is particularly striking in the Yiddish and Hebrew satires of the Mendele Mocher Sefarim (‘Mendele the Bookpeddler’, pen name of S.J. Abramowitz, 1835?–1917), who lived most of his adult life in the Black Sea port city of Odessa.2
Mendele represents a massive change in Jewish social psychology, a recognition of the full extent of Jewish degradation in the diaspora, and a consequent rejection of passive acceptance of poverty and the ‘holy poor’. A unique 19th-century eyewitness portrayal of false beggars is Mendele’s novel, The Beggar-Book, one of the first major works of modern Jewish fiction, and written both in Yiddish and in Hebrew.3 The Beggar-Book is set in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where the largest Jewish community of the pre-1917 period lived, about five million, mostly impoverished. The novel reflects the conditions of the Eastern European Jewish population, whose rapid growth had led to widespread paupery. Like much medieval European literature, it breaks with the biblical image of the ‘holy poor’.4 In the Hebrew version there is particular vehemence in Mendele’s rejection of the biblical association of poverty and moral purity; he is disgusted by the Betteljuden, the so-called orchei porchei (flotsam and jetsam), the useless, unemployed, starving Jewish multitudes; at times he is gripped by almost murderous rage at their humiliation and alleged moral corruption.
In Mendele, Jewish literature catches up, as it were, with the more cynical streak of Western literature toward the poor. To Mendele as social reformer, the poor are vile: Jewish degradation was curable through education and social mobility. Christian anti-Semites saw the solution in conversion; but racial anti-Semites saw the filth and shame of Jewish poverty as the unchanging essence of Jews and Judaism. While the Bible forbids humiliation of the poor, Mendele probes this very humiliation, not as in the Bible a source of moral goodness and closeness to God, but of disgust and, at times, almost homicidal rage. Poverty to Mendele defines ‘the Jews’. The metamorphosis of a kingdom of priests to a rabble of beggars is particularly striking in Hebrew whose literary associations lend themselves to irony: look at the glorious history of this people, and look at them now, in c. 1890! Yet Mendele’s jaundiced view of the poor in fact follows much Western literature from the Middle Ages onward, as Christian idealism diminished with the growth of capitalism, and a negative image of the poor became embedded in Poor Law. In the literature on poverty, Mendele stands out as angry satirist and compassionate social realist, the ‘disgrace of hunger’ (Ezekiel 36: 30) haunting his stories.
Mendele’s beggars, as we have seen, have the added affliction of Russian anti-Semitism: their poverty provokes hatred, hatred justifies prejudice and discrimination, which limit opportunity, enterprise, and social mobility, making poverty worse. Mendele does not take into account the Western European Jews and Jews in Oriental countries, whose social and economic conditions were better in many ways than those of the Eastern European Jews.5 Also, Mendele was writing (though in a segregated form) in the environment of the Russian Enlightenment, whose great writers – including Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy – were also social reformers, aiming to improve the conditions of the Russian poor. Chekhov, no stranger to poverty, strongly rebuts the idea that there is virtue in welcoming or tolerating poverty, in the story Ward 6 (1892). Yet, to Mendele, Jewish poverty is more than a socio-economic problem: it is a national disgrace, a sordid symptom of the vulnerability and degradation of the Jewish people as a whole, in exile among hostile goyim. In Mendele, the biblical conception of the ‘holy poor’ has its most cynical and determined enemy. In the Bible the poor are loved; Mendele hates the poor and seeks their reform. With Mendele we reach rock bottom in literary depictions of the poor.
Jewish literature in the period 1861–1939, both in Yiddish and Hebrew, was the first literature to have poverty as its main subject. Especially in Russian Hebrew literature, with its predominantly religious world, biblical attitudes to poverty largely survived, e.g. the idea that poverty should not be tolerated and that the better-off have responsibility toward the poor. In the political maelstrom of late-Tsarist Russia, in which most of the population was impoverished, one generation’s belief in the ‘holy poor’ often changed to atheist socialism in the next, preserving the social content while discarding the religious husk. Yiddish poetry was notably sensitive toward the poor, both in Eastern Europe and in new centers of migration, particularly New York, which by 1914 had the largest Jewish population of any city in history, with over a million, mostly Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants. Abraham Reisen (1876–1953), for example, in ‘Household of Eight’ (Warsaw, 1899) writes of the endemic overcrowding; and Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923), who worked in sweatshops in London and New York, describes what it was like working with ‘thirty blighted women and men/ spirits broken, bodies spent’.6 Yiddish was a unique, dynamic proletarian phenomenon, the literature of poverty par excellence: but as Jews moved into the middle class, Yiddish fell into disuse and its literature died, though its intense sympathy for the poor can occasionally be detected among writers in other languages, including Henry Roth, Carlo Levi, and Clarice Lispector. Ideological failure is not usually so blatant and violent as in the case of Yiddish literature. Socialism, to which large numbers of Yiddish Jews gravitated as it rejected anti-Semitism, contributed to the destruction of Yiddish (and Hebrew) culture in the USSR, and Yiddish writers were shot on Stalin’s orders.
From the early 1860s until 1939, the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews created the first literature for and about the working class – including large numbers of women. This literature was a vital part of their transition from largely feudal, rural, impoverished conditions in Eastern Europe, steeped in religion and superstition, to the secular, liberal, urbanized, industrialized countries, to which many Jews emigrated, mostly between 1881 and 1914. Whereas the emancipated Western and Central European Jews mostly functioned in the languages of their countries, the unemancipated Eastern European Jews continued to function in many ways according to pre-1789 norms, including the use of Yiddish as their daily vernacular. Their economic conditions were largely determined by the anti-Semitic perception of the Jews in medieval Christian Europe: having little choice, the Jews became peddlers, pawnbrokers, traders in second-hand goods, money changers and lenders, petty tradesmen and shopkeepers, middle-men between town and country, peasant and nobleman.7 These professions were seen by Christians as suitably shameful to Christ murderers, branded by their religion as hated usurers. By the late 19th century Eastern European Jews were following the pattern set at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, moving in large numbers from rural villages where they had lived for centuries to the cities where many worked in factories and gained secular education. These changed circumstances had a revolutionary effect on Yiddish and Hebrew, making them driving forces for the realistic depiction of the conditions of the Eastern European Jews. Both were chiefly literatures of the poor.
Prior to 1917, Tsarist Russia had a Jewish population of about five million, mostly living in poverty so extreme that from 1881 to 1914 about two million emigrated, mostly to America but some to England, Palestine and elsewhere. This population had an unusually high level of literacy, producing outstanding literature in several languages, but mainly in Yiddish and Hebrew.8 Yiddish fiction had three founding ‘classical’ writers: apart from Mendele, I.L. Peretz (1852–1915), and Sholom Aleichem (pen name of Solomon Rabinowitz, 1857–1916). There was a huge expansion of the Yiddish press, in Europe and America. In the early 20th century, the New York Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish Forward, had over a quarter of a million readers. The Yiddish press both in Europe and America published fiction and poetry. The fame of this literature survived after 1945 chiefly in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), based on stories by Sholom Aleichem, but the musical was written for an American middle-class audience; the Yiddish stories were written in totally different conditions over a half-century earlier, for an exclusively Jewish working class, mostly still observant, struggling to make a living in a time of socio-economic upheaval and mass migration.9 Simultaneously, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hebrew underwent a renascence unique in cultural history, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.
Mendele, in half a dozen novels, explored East European Jewish economic decrepitude leading to mass migration. Mendele’s stories are an unparalleled cry of rage against the disgrace of poverty. Unusually, Mendele wrote most of his fiction twice, first in Yiddish then Hebrew: he can be considered the founding father and the first major novelist of both as modern literatures, the leading chronicler in fiction of Jewish poverty in Eastern Europe and the first writer to take Jewish poverty as his main subject, particularly its effects on children.10 Though after 1945, Mendele had few readers outside the academic world, he was famous throughout the Jewish world in his lifetime and until World War II, and his five twice-written novels are generally agreed to be the most important and influential achievement in 19th-century and early 20th-century Jewish fiction. His novels reveal the economic and psychological strains leading to mass emigration of Russian Jews prior to 1914. Practically all Mendele’s fiction concerns the Jewish poor, but with a duality virtually unique in literature: whereas the Yiddish versions describe the poor in everyday jargon for a Yiddish-speaking proletariat, including women, the Hebrew versions of the same stories were read by a much smaller readership, mostly male, usually better educated, certainly in Jewish literature but often also in European literatures as well. The same stories read differently in the two languages: Mendele’s Hebrew fiction, through its inevitable echoes of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature – this is done with dazzling effects, ranging from the hilarious to the lacerating – communicates a level of anger, mockery, and contempt largely absent in the Yiddish: here is a people with a glorious ancient history, now a byword for poverty and degradation. In Mendele, the generally negative 19th-century image of the poor, satirized by Dickens in Oliver Twist, fuses at times with anti-Semitic stereotypes and the merciless rational self-criticism of the Haskalah movement (the Russian-Jewish Hebrew Enlightenment) in a literary portrayal of an ancient ‘kingdom of priests and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19: 6) transformed to a swarm of noxious parasitical beggars.11
The pogroms of 1881–2 were a major event in modern Jewish history: they largely shattered Haskalah hopes that emancipation, civil rights, and reform were possible under autocratic Tsarist rule. Most Jews who left Russia thereafter did so for reasons of poverty, made worse by anti-Semitic government policy, limiting their movements and occupations in the so-called Pale of Settlement, where the Jews were confined by law, on the western frontier of the empire.12 Russian Jews were ready to emigrate and undergo poverty elsewhere – for example in Lower Manhattan, in the East End of London, or the malarial backwaters of Ottoman Palestine – largely because life in Russia was worse, and the future in Russia could seem even worse. The sweatshops in New York and London, though exploitative and unhealthy, were at least located in democratic states where Jews were equal before the law, with strong economies and effective secular free school systems, allowing unprecedented upward social mobility and life chances for the second generation. Similarly, those who emigrated from Russia to the land of Israel often felt their lives enriched, despite their poverty, by being in their ancestral homeland, site of their holy places, birthplace of the Jewish people and the guiding texts of Jewish life – the Hebrew Bible, the Mishna, the siddur (prayerbook), and the main book of Jewish laws, the Shulchan Arukh. For Jews in the free world, the literature of poverty mostly ended by 1939.
The East European Jewish masses were poor in income: ‘plain Jews, with beards and sidelocks, thin and poor, bent and broken … with all kinds of trouble and poverty’, as Mendele, writing in the 1890s of a period a half-century earlier, describes their uniform, colorless life, defined by negatives: nothing exotic or extravagant, no pomegranates or roses, no heroism or magnificence, no kings and queens, no explorers or adventurers, no spectacle or romance, no bloody combat or love trysts.13 Yet, Mendele’s Jews were rich in culture. They had an unusually high rate of literacy (though far more in Yiddish and Hebrew than in Russian), a fact of critical importance in their ability to adapt, despite their disabilities, to the modern world. The Jews valued culture highly and had much pride in their writers, particularly in Yiddish: apart from Mendele, Peretz and Sholom Aleichem, Abraham Reisen (1876–1953) and Shlomo Zangvil Rapoport (S. Ansky, 1863–1920), were natives of Tsarist Russia. There were also outstanding Hebrew writers, including J.H. Brenner (1881–1921) and Samuel Joseph Agnon (1888–1970), who lived in Palestine; and some native Yiddish-speakers, notably Isaac Babel (1893–1940), who made their name in Russian, while others, such as Abraham Cahan (1851–1950) and Michael Gold (1894–1967), wrote in English about American Jewish immigrants.14
Jewish poverty in Tsarist Russia as depicted by Mendele is Russian poverty, with countless similarities with Russian writers, including Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov – but made worse by hundreds of anti-Jewish laws, which filled a fat volume and were not rescinded until the revolution in 1917.15 As a social reformer, Mendele has much in common with Turgenev, whom he read and admired. Mendele’s commitment to the reformist ideals of the Haskalah is the driving force of his Yiddish novels in the 1860s and 1870s, narrated by the first outstanding character in modern Jewish fiction – Mendele the Bookpeddler. The fictional character was so closely linked with the author that the name Mendele stuck to him. The character of Mendele recalls Chaplin’s Tramp in his combination of pathos and laughter. Wandering through the Pale of Settlement, Mendele observes his people with bitter affection, for they are humiliated, yet they preserve vestiges of their former nobility. Drawing heavily on biblical and rabbinic sources, Mendele forged a powerful satiric style for the depiction of the lower elements in Russian-Jewish society – the beggars, cripples, prostitutes, misfits. From the 1880s until his death in 1917, Mendele reworked (not merely translated) most of his Yiddish fiction into Hebrew, and this was the basis for much later Hebrew fiction.
Still, the Russian Jews were not serfs or former serfs. They were not owned by their masters. Most were proud of their Jewish heritage, though their religion was a disadvantage in an anti-Semitic society. Judaism made their poverty worse and came to be associated with poverty.16 Their literature tells of the poor, mostly in small towns and rural villages, unemployed or dependent on various Jewish customs and institutions: the hekdesh, the poor house and/or hospital/asylum for the poor; the tamchuy, the soup kitchen providing daily meals for the poor; the kupat tzedakah, the communal box for charity, distributed to the poor on Fridays; and the teudat aniyut (the equivalent of the Testimonium paupertatis), the letter from a rabbi or other communal official declaring that the holder was a genuine beggar, entitled to aid.17
The Russian Jews were unbroken by poverty and anti-Semitism, by the legal discrimination against them and the pogroms. Poverty helped loosen the ancient, conservative grip of rabbinic Judaism and drove some Jews to radical solutions. To some, escape from poverty meant flight from Judaism, or at least acceptance of the need for religious reform and modernization. Eastern European Jews, unlike those in Western Europe, were too conservative to tolerate a Reform movement. The emerging secular Jewish literatures, in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, pointed the way to religious reform. Many of Mendele’s readers saw the degradation of Jewish life in his writings as a justification for Zionism. Few Western writers were so fully immersed in a world of poverty as Mendele, or understood poverty so thoroughly in its physical and psychological effects. In one of his most hard-hitting stories, the allegorical satire The Mare (Yiddish version 1873; Hebrew version 1909), written in shocked reaction to the first Russian pogrom, in Odessa in 1871, Mendele depicts the Jews as a prince metamorphosed by persecution and misfortune into a battered mare.18 The Mare is at times cynical to the extreme toward the human species, with political and social satiric recalling Machiavelli, Mandeville, and Swift, in a pastiche of biblical and rabbinic Hebrew (the Yiddish version, too, includes much Hebrew), profound, hilarious, and disturbing, and unique in European literary history. Mendele includes a sharp kick at the Russian government’s efforts to spread secular education among its Jewish population while failing to deal with their lamentable material conditions and tolerating anti-Semitism. It is also a powerful and not unbiased attack on Jewish local government, and on the proliferation of charities without tackling root causes: the Jews are ‘looked after’ – as a corpse by a dog.19 Mendele’s outrage recalls Blake; indeed, as in Blake, it is the Devil who talks sense, asking why the Jews have so many charitable societies: ‘Because cruelty, aggression, and violence dominate among you! If there were truth and justice, you would not need pity.’20 More broadly, even the Devil does not do as much harm as human beings: industry is seen as a destructive force, in language similar to Zola’s Germinal: altars for human sacrifice; machines of death (arms factories) and lies (newspapers). Mendele, influenced by Russian liberals such as Turgenev, sees education as the answer, but in practice education is hardly more use to the Russian Jews than to the Russian peasants.21 As for those Jews who obtain a Russian education, as the young student, Israel, does in The Mare, there is a high price in alienation from the Jewish community.22 In some respects, Mendele underestimated his own people. Estrangement of the Russian Jews from Russia increased toward the end of the Tsarist regime, but this was not entirely to their disadvantage as they proved to be unusually adaptive and unified, socially and culturally and, in an openly anti-Semitic environment, far less hindered by the patriotism of their West European brethren from emigrating.23 Most Russian Jews who escaped or survived dire poverty, persecution, war, revolution, civil war, Soviet purges, and the Holocaust became among the most rapid upwardly mobile people in economic history: within a generation or two, a largely working-class population had emigrated to developed countries and entered the middle class. In retrospect, Russian-Jewish poverty was structurally linked to the flawed Tsarist economy. Mendele rightly attacked anti-Semitism as a cause of Jewish poverty but exaggerated in blaming the Jews for their alleged corruption and lack of education and enterprise – though his perspective was somewhat distorted not just by his biases but also by censorship.
In Mendele’s writings, we see with hindsight an entire world on the verge of destruction. Together with a gallery of Breughel-like portraits, Mendele gives a wrenching account of the debilitating conditions which led to mass emigration. Likewise, he left a unique literary record of the effects of the pogroms of 1871, 1881–2 (and to a lesser extent, those of 1903–6), the demoralization, the sense of being unwanted, disoriented, isolated, not entirely human. Many of Mendele’s readers, both in Yiddish and Hebrew, were astonished at his ability to articulate their deepest feelings, as no previous writer had done. Mendele was adulated and loved to an extent virtually unknown among Jewish writers before or since (with the exception of Sholom Aleichem), yet he was a mordant critic of the Russian Jews, portraying not their moral grandeur as much as their physical degradation and moral corruption. Nor does he spare his readers the crudest clichés of anti-Semitism: the dirty, hook-nosed, uncouth, unproductive, devious Jew, smelling of onions and garlic, worshipping money. One would hardly guess that the Russian Jews whom he describes belonged to the most dynamic and creative Jewish community prior to the Russian Revolution. Mendele was repulsed by the degradation of the poor. In his focus on lives of extreme poverty, he gives insight into the lives of the majority of the world’s population; and his own life followed the sad and twisted course of Russian Jewish history, illuminating the ambivalence towards the impoverished Jews in his art.
Mendele’s life and identification with the poor
Born in the Lithuanian village of Kapuli, Mendele grew up during the tyrannical reign of Nicholas I (1825–55). Like Dickens, whom he read in Russian, Mendele came from a middle-class family that suddenly became poor. After his father’s death around 1848, he lived as a down-and-out – perhaps as harrowing an experience as Dickens’ period as a child laborer – and saw the worst in Jewish life.24 Scenes from his life as a wandering beggar recur in his Yiddish novels, particularly The Beggar-Book. Mendele knew how it felt to be abandoned, cold, hungry, without a home, without a bed to sleep on, dependent on the charity of strangers. He does not romanticize poverty in his fiction but presents poor people as human beings, warts and all. In his dedication to the 1888 Yiddish version of The Beggar-Book, Mendele confesses the close link between his own experiences and his fictional accounts of the Russian Jews. In his dreams, the old, familiar sack carried by beggars was recurrent. In a memoir, he declared himself, in his poverty, a wretched ‘Jew of Jews’, living in the lower depths among his people, enduring a double portion of their grief.25 Part of Mendele’s stock in trade against poverty in The Beggar-Book is a sharply honed ironic sense of humor: ‘to be rich among us Jews it’s enough to be lucky; to be poor, luck is not enough’.26 The Beggar-Book is practically a survival manual for beggars, the beggar’s equivalent of Machiavelli’s The Prince: this is what Jews must do to survive, if necessary through cunning and dissimulation, deceit and force. It is a huge painful howl of indignity, frustration, and self-loathing, with grotesque echoes of the curses in the book of Deuteronomy, which are so horrifying that in synagogue they are customarily read in a whisper. The novel, set in the latter half of the 19th century, tells of a band of wandering beggars, including Fishke the Lame and his blind, unfaithful wife. Their marriage was hastily arranged by their community during a cholera epidemic to defeat the evil eye (for this reason, Fishke is known as a ‘cholera groom’).27 The beggars carry all the social and psychological marks of poverty: crime, ignorance, sickness, violence, physical and psychological deformation, and low self-esteem. They quarrel all the time and treat one another cruelly.28 As in Dickens and Hugo, the children suffer most and are the most exploited. Mendele’s observation that poverty frees the poor from ordinary standards of behavior echoes many other writers, notably Hugo in Les Misérables, and Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London.
Mendele and fake beggars
The Beggar-Book is one of the first works of modern Jewish fiction to follow European literature in its portrayal of fake beggars; and its Hebrew version is especially striking in contrast with the idealized image of the poor in the Hebrew Bible.29 The relationship of the Bible to Mendele is an unremitting counterpoint of dignity and indignity, love and loathing, moral purity and moral corruption, laughter and tears. In a passage scathing in its poker-faced tone of scientific objectivity, Mendele gives a bitter satiric comprehensive categorization and cataloguing of the many species of Jewish beggars, as in the medieval Liber Vagatorum,30 or as a parody of the 19th-century scientific textbooks such as the three-volume Natural History he translated in the 1860s and 1870s from the German into Hebrew (and perhaps also Darwin’s The Origin of Species), or as the tribes listed in the Bible or, profanely, as in a calling up (aliyah) to the Torah. The Jewish poor, he writes, like the poor throughout Europe – even the cripples among them – are industrious mainly in fakery. Some value their disabilities as a source of income, and the legitimate beggars are outraged when a town builds a workhouse for able-bodied beggars, for they are regarded as lazy as fleas.31
As Jewish culture, the Hebrew Bible above all, elevates the poor – ‘the first to conceive of charity as a religious obligation’32 – it is remarkable to see 19th-century Hebrew literature via Yiddish catching up, as it were, with European literature in the cynical depiction of fake beggars: in England, there is a literary tradition going back to medieval times of beggars pretending to have deformities;33 in Les Misérables, where the villain Thénardier is a master of disguise, pretending to be various types of unfortunates (though he is in reality a down-and-out) to elicit charity from kindly people such as Jean Valjean; and anticipating later literature of beggar-frauds.34
Though there are common elements in literary portrayals of the dishonest poor, Mendele’s beggars, as we have seen, have the added affliction of Russian anti-Semitism: their poverty provokes hatred, prejudice and discrimination, which worsens their poverty. To Mendele, Jewish poverty is a national disgrace, symptomatic of exile among hostile goyim, though his critique of Jewish degradation applies in his time less to Western and Central European Jews, and to Jews in Oriental countries, than to those in Eastern Europe.35
All Israel = one beggar
In The Beggar-Book, Jewish beggars swarm like flies through the Pale of Settlement, crawling, limping, whole armies on foot and on cart, in town and country, kaddish sayers and shofar blowers, Talmud Torah teachers and yeshiva students, charity collectors and mezuzah inspectors, pilgrims en route to the land of Israel, the homeless and the sick … and a multitude of others.36 Mendele nowhere supports emigration from Russia as a solution to overwhelming Jewish poverty, but his writings make clear why as much as one-third of the Russian Jewish population left between 1881 and 1914, mostly for America. The infinite categories of Jewish poor can be simplified: ‘all Jews are beggars!’37 Fishke the Lame hardly stands out in his crippled, impoverished state. His home town, Kesalon, is a mecca of disability: ‘even England does not have such cripples’.38 In the picaresque satire, The Travels of Benjamin the Third (Yiddish version 1878, Hebrew version 1896), Mendele again draws on his experiences as a down-and-out on the road. It opens with a wicked parody of the Midrash on the Genesis passage describing the third day of Creation, including grass, and affirming the hand of Providence in the least thing – ‘Each blade of grass has its guiding star, which beats it, saying: Grow!’ (Genesis Rabbah 10: 6). Providence has not neglected the Russian Jews either, for the angels in heaven exhort them to go out and beg, this being as ‘natural’ to them as grass to grow.39
Mendele mines poverty like a vein throughout his work. Even in later life in Odessa, where he lived in relative comfort, his mind remained fixed, as Dickens’ was, on his youthful days of sudden impoverishment and humiliation.40 Like Dickens, Mendele’s hatred of poverty found an outlet in satire, through which both aimed at reform, mainly through education but also through government legislation. After training as a teacher and marrying in 1853, Mendele lived in Berdichev, which he described as one of the most depressed towns in Europe, a hell-hole of unemployment, overcrowding, semi-starvation, and disease.41 For the rest of his life, mostly spent in relative comfort as headmaster of a Jewish school in Odessa, he continued to regard the Jews collectively as beggars and himself as an indigent ‘Jew of Jews’. His world-outlook was further distorted by personal tragedies, the most important of which, as mentioned, was the death of his father which brought about the impoverishment and break-up of his family.42
Until the pogroms, and especially during the reforms of Alexander II (1855–81), Mendele passionately hoped that by means of education and enlightenment, the Russian Jews would be granted civil rights and emancipation. The Jews might originally have been unwanted in Russia, having come under Russian rule with the conquest of Poland in the late 18th century. But by learning the Russian language (which most Russian Jews did not know, even by the end of the 19th century), by becoming useful and assimilated (or ‘russified’) – so Mendele and other Jewish intellectuals believed – the Jews would gradually be accepted and integrated into Russian society. The pattern would follow that of emancipated Jews in Western Europe, particularly in Germany. Mendele was deeply influenced by Russian reformers such as Belinsky and Turgenev. His main pre-1881 work was not fiction, but educational textbooks (notably the Natural History, the first of its kind in Hebrew), as well as polemical works calling for social reform. The spirit of reform in his early works was strongly universalistic. Mendele was a pioneer in causes such as women’s rights (two of his daughters became among the first women doctors in Europe), improvements in the raising and education of children, and the humane treatment of animals. Mendele’s polemical works of the 1860s and 1870s (which he signed with his real name, S.J. Abramowitz), were written in Hebrew as most Russian Jews knew some Hebrew and, unlike Yiddish, the Hebrew language had high status in the non-Jewish world as the language of the Bible. By the 1860s, he was also writing Hebrew fiction, which despite its initially wooden, didactic Haskalah style, proved to be revolutionary in the history of modern Hebrew. At the same time, starting from 1864, Mendele wrote Yiddish fiction under the pseudonym Mendele the Bookpeddler, a situation which Mendele compared to that of a married man having an adulterous affair: Hebrew was his wife, Yiddish his mistress.
After the pogroms of 1881–2, Mendele was silenced by sorrow, bitterness, depression, and rage.43 It was not the pogroms alone which shocked Mendele and affected as many as 100,000 Jews, mostly in southern Russia. The so-called May Laws (passed in May 1882) actually blamed the Jews for bringing the violence on their own heads. These laws forced about one-and-a-half million Jews living in rural areas to move to the cities of the Pale. As indicated earlier, the pogroms put the Haskalah in doubt and undermined hope for civil rights and emancipation under Tsarist rule. They started a major emigration of about one in three of Russia’s five million Jews. The pogroms redirected Mendele’s aims: he was less concerned after 1881 with educational reform than with the perfection of his art, with the Jewish people his main subject. He ended his previous authorial dichotomy of Hebrew polemics (Abramowitz) vs. Yiddish fiction (Mendele). It no longer mattered if the shabby, observant Yiddish Mendele entered a Hebrew story. In 1886, in the story ‘Shelter from the Storm’,44 Mendele for the first time since he began publishing in Hebrew in 1857, put the character of Mendele the Bookpeddler in a Hebrew story. It is as though the wife turned out to have been the mistress in disguise. In this story, he confronts the reality of violent Russian anti-Semitism which made unrealistic the Haskalah program of educational reform and Jewish assimilation, to which he had dedicated his professional life:
In normal times when thieves behave properly – i.e. in secrecy and modesty – they are punished normally and the theft goes back to the owner. In our case, however, they were open about it, smashing windows and rioting through the town, besieging our houses as if they were part of an army – why, this was the pandemonium of war.45
In ‘Shelter from the Storm’, the Russian Jews are no longer an ethnic minority struggling to overcome their lack of secular education and become assimilated and useful to Russia. They are a nation with a religious culture, a history, and a national identity of their own. The story can be read virtually as a declaration of national independence. It makes clear that Mendele is no longer looking to enlightened Gentiles for direction, but to the Jews themselves, whatever their background or class.
Several years later, in the superb Introduction to Mendele’s autobiography, published in Hebrew in 1894, character and author would finally meet: by now there was little in this meeting to be ashamed of; there was so much more to fear in Tsarist Russia, which in the pogroms and after seemed a barbarous enemy intent on a ‘war’ of destruction against the Jews. Anti-Semitism in effect freed Mendele from the didactic straightjacket of Haskalah Hebrew. He virtually gave up his educational writings and until his death in 1917 was mainly a Hebrew fiction writer, mostly reworking his Yiddish novels, using his great Yiddish character to give his Hebrew stories the breath of life. Mendele also had the confidence of holding the moral high ground in depicting the lower elements in Jewish society, presenting them, as Turgenev did the peasantry in Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, with sympathy and dignity, not primarily as satiric targets. He inspired later Jewish writers, such as Sholom Aleichem and Agnon, to write of the poor realistically and without sentiment; and the mostly poor Hasidim, a target of Jewish satire throughout the 19th century, were treated with greater seriousness, as were the peasants in Russian literature, as a repository of folk wisdom and precious national culture.46
Portraying poverty in pastiches of classical texts, Mendele was a forerunner of modernism, ironically playing his classical sources against the realities he describes. In his mastery and satiric manipulation of the sources, Mendele did for Hebrew what Joyce and Eliot later did for Greek myth in Ulysses and The Waste Land. He adapted the ancient world-view to a modern sensibility, denying through mock-heroic satire the sacred authority of the sources but implicitly accepting their imperishable value and their power to inspire. The opening of ‘Shelter from the Storm’, depicting the aftermath of a pogrom, parodies the cantorial preamble to the Musaf (Additional Service) of the High Holy Days, Hineni he’ani. The sight of household articles broken and scattered might serve as a description of Mendele’s Hebrew style from then on: chaotic and discordant, but structured in its chaos, harmonious in its discord.
Mendele’s disillusionment with education recalls that of Turgenev and Tolstoy among the great Russian writers who felt the overwhelming burden of Russian illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition.47 For Jews as for many Orthodox Russians, secular education threatened their traditional way of life. Mendele, came to understand increasingly how Jewish striving for secular education, social reform, and assimilation could lead to self-hate: ‘No creature on earth is more unhappy than Jews who think. They feel the hump on their back and are ashamed’.48 There was an especial torture in belonging to a small group of enlightened Jewish intellectuals alienated to varying degrees from the wider Jewish community, yet not fully accepted in any part of Russian society. Censorship, in addition, made virtually impossible open blame of the Russian government for its discriminatory laws against the Jews (these filled a fat volume), for the existence of the Pale and the economic hardships which the Jews suffered in consequence. If anyone was to be blamed, the Jews themselves had to be the victims, with all the more bitterness and distortion as the outrage had to go somewhere. There are no Christian criminals in Mendele’s stories: though ‘Shelter from the Storm’ is set during a pogrom, the Christian perpetrators are not depicted as criminals – in keeping with the May Laws of 1882.
The lower depths
Hunger is widespread in Mendele’s stories. Most Russian Jews, in common with most Russians, survived on a meager, irregular diet, whose staple was often bread or potatoes. In his autobiography Mendele recalls that his daily fare in childhood was rye, buckwheat, and potatoes – and his family was comparatively well-off.49 In Mendele’s writings, women and children are the worst victims of poverty. His deepest feelings are for the children ground down by hunger and anxiety to a geriatric state. He describes a typical child of the Pale who would be perfectly happy if not for the daily gnawing hunger: ‘he would come home hungry and tired, to find not a scrap of food in the house … There were days when he would cry and scratch at himself and tear at his hair and roll on the floor, fainting eventually into an exhausted sleep’.50 Mendele envisages the evolution of a species of Jew that can live without food.51
In turning to Hebrew fiction in his last 30 years, Mendele declared artistic independence, part of a growing Jewish national feeling during and after the pogroms, which increased the market for Hebrew books. Paradoxically, though Mendele’s subject was mainly the poverty and ignorance of the Jews, their indignity and suffering, the perfection of his art gave his people a sense of dignity and national pride. Perhaps for this reason few satirists have been as much loved as Mendele. By holding up the mirror of nature, however distorted, to his people, he helped repair their shattered identity.
Mendele’s influence on the depiction of the poor in Jewish literature
Mendele was a dominant force in pre-1939 Yiddish and Hebrew literature, particularly among writers such as Agnon and Bialik who continued in the vein of Mendele’s empathetic mockery of the East European Jewish poor. Agnon, in And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (ve-Haya he-Akov le-Mishor, 1913), continues the motif of the itinerant beggar, suggesting that his protagonist, Manasseh Haim, a small-town bankrupt, is himself to blame for the failure of his grocery store; but, at the same time poking sly fun at the Jewish community for its ineffectuality. In an echo of the devil in The Mare – ‘Be merciful – but too late’52 – Agnon cites a Poor Society which awards a widow with a pension, but she might die of hunger before payments start; like Mendele, too, Agnon records the soul-destroying conversations of beggars, mixing empathy with mockery: where did you last eat? what did you eat? where will you eat? – the spittle dribbling from their mouths at the thought of a sumptuous meal, their curses of the rich and envy of their luxurious lives, how stingy they are to the poor, how mean.
Bialik, too, was a ‘student in Mendele’s bet midrash (house of study)’, as Agnon put it. Mendele’s influence in the use of the beggar as symbol of Jewish degradation is evident in Bialik’s famous poem, In the City of Slaughter, written in reaction to the pogrom at Kishinev in 1903. At this time, Bialik was close to Mendele as part of a circle of Jewish writers in Odessa. His feeling for Mendele, who was 40 years older, was a mixture of love, admiration, and awe. He translated part of The Beggar-Book into Hebrew, and Mendele’s jeering contempt for Jewish beggary in The Beggar-Book and The Mare – ‘Go beg from one another, eat your brothers’ flesh, skin them alive – the devil take you!’53 – echoes in The City of Slaughter. Rather than blame the perpetrators, Bialik blames the victims for their self-abasement as beggars:
Dig up the bones of martyred father and brother,
fill your sacks, sling them on backs
and hit the road
to do business at all the fairs;
advertise yourselves at the crossroads so everyone sees,
in the sunshine on filthy rags spread the bones
and sing your hoarse beggar song,
beg the decency of the world!
Beg the pity of goyim!
Eternal beggars!54
Bialik presents beggary as a Jewish national disgrace – this being a common interpretation of Mendele’s portrayal of the Jewish poor – a consequence of the ongoing disaster of exile. The poem galvanized the early readers of the poem. Within a few months, Jews for the first time since the Roman period were organizing self-defence groups to fight the Russian pogroms.
In Yiddish literature, too, Mendele was a crucial influence, partly through Sholom Aleichem, who designated him his literary ‘grandfather’ (saba) and whose feeling for Mendele as a Yiddish writer was comparable to Bialik’s feeling for Mendele as a Hebrew writer. Yet, the nature of the Hebrew influence was different from that in Yiddish, perhaps reflecting a split between an elite Eastern European Hebrew reformist culture highly critical of Jewish life, and Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses, which was more sympathetic to the poor than Hebrew. Sholom Aleichem’s Yiddish monologues by poor Jews, such as ‘The Pot’ (Dos Tepl, 1901) and ‘Geese’ (Gendz, 1902), are masterpieces in the literature of poverty. These stories recall Dickens in their combination of comedy and heartbreak. The critical mocking tone of Mendele is gone. Here the poor speak directly in their own voices, of their anguish and joy, despair and hope, spilling out the psychological intricacies of the struggle to survive. In ‘The Pot’, a young widow who sells geese comes to the town rabbi with a problem: her only son, Dovidl, has TB; she makes him chicken soup as a kind of remedy; however, she has only one pot, possibly touched by a drop of milk, making it unusable according to Jewish law: ‘what will Dovidl eat? … I am left without a pot’.55 The story ‘Eternal Life’ (Olam Habo, 1904) depicts a world inundated with the grasping desperate poor, all dignity gone. The newly married narrator, struck by a disaster so strange as to be comic, finds himself at one point surrounded by beggars who think mistakenly that he is fabulously wealthy: ‘the poor – an endless multitude! Never, never have I seen such a quantity of paupers’.56
Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye stories were written and set in the 20 years from 1894 to World War I, the final years of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the age of Nicholas II. Like Oliver Twist and Les Misérables, the Tevye stories are distinct from the musical versions that made them internationally famous: the stories are comic, but with a harsh underside mostly lost in the musicals. Tevye and his family, for example, are desperately hungry. Tevye describes himself as ‘such a miserable beggar that rags were too good for me … I was poor as the devil. No Jew should starve as I did. Not counting suppers, my wife and kids went hungry three times a day’. Tevye’s wife, Golde, declares apropos their children that it was a mistake ‘not to have taken them all and thrown them into the river’. When Tevye gets lucky and brings home a cartload of food, his children attack it like starving animals: ‘When that gang of mine saw all the rolls and smelled all the meat, they fell on it like a pack of wolves. Their hands trembled so they could hardly snatch anything up. I stood there with tears in my eyes, listening to their jaws work away like a plague of starving locusts.’57
It is strange, perhaps, that such stark realism should coexist with humor, but this is the case also with Dickens. It may be that economic improvement in Dickens’ London and Hugo’s Paris by the latter half of the 20th century is signified in the adaptation of novels of social reform into musical light entertainment; the same is true of Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye stories. P.G. Wodehouse’s satire on Oxbridge-educated Christian Socialists in The Code of the Woosters (1938) also presents poverty in a lighter register, suggesting that by the interwar period poverty, though not conquered, could be a humorous subject. The bumbling curate, Harold (‘Stinker’) Pinker, works in the East End of London (presumably in a settlement house) conveying soup and blankets ‘to the deserving bed-ridden and all that sort of thing’ (ch. 8); his main distinction, however, is his theft of PC Oates’ helmet at the bidding of his fiancée, Stephanie (‘Stiffy’) Byng. Greater love hath no man …
The musicals (Oliver!, Les Misérables, Fiddler on the Roof) are far removed from the world of desperate need in their fictional origins. They become musicals only when the extreme poverty they depict is largely conquered, and as musicals they themselves come to represent the distancing and conquest of poverty. A similar motive might be detected in the emergence of the ‘hunger-artist’, as seen in the next chapter.
Notes
1 The unusually high literacy rate among Russian Jews was the main reason for the large Jewish representation in the early Soviet government.
2 On Mendele and the Russian Jews under Tsarist rule, see Aberbach (1993b).
3 Like four of Mendele’s other novels, The Beggar-Book was written first in Yiddish, as Fishke der Krumer (1869, 1888), then in Hebrew, as Sefer Ha-Kabtzanim, or The Beggar-Book (1909). On poverty and the poor in Mendele, see Aberbach (1993b). On The Beggar-Book, see pp. 161–2.
4 On the rejection of the biblical image of the ‘holy poor’ in medieval literature, see Chapter 2, this volume.
5 Mendele lived his entire life in Russia, with the exception of a short period in Geneva during the pogroms of 1905. Though he writes about ‘the Jews’ as a people, he is mainly writing about the Russian Jews, who at their maximum (about five million in 1900) comprised less than half the world Jewish population. Nevertheless, in Mendele’s lifetime it was still possible to define ‘authentic’ Jewish identity primarily on the basis of characteristics associated with Eastern European Jews.
6 Howe et al. (1987: 85, 89).
7 On the modernization of Jewish life, in which German Jews were pioneers, see Meyer (1967, 2003) and Mosse (1987); also see Slezkine (2004). By the second half of the 19th century, the more enlightened Eastern European Jews began to see the German Jews less as loathsome heretics than as rational and successful experimenters in new and better ways of life; this new perception opened the way to a Hebrew and Yiddish literature promoting change.
8 Though the early 20th-century market for Hebrew literature was relatively small as few people spoke or read modern Hebrew, Ha-Shiloach, the leading Hebrew literary journal, is estimated to have had a readership of several thousand – more than T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, the leading English pre-1939 literary journal, which never had more than a thousand subscribers. The majority of Hebrew speakers and readers at that time could be described as working class.
9 Similarly, the social conditions at the time the musicals Oliver! (1960) and Les Misérables (1980) first appeared differed strikingly from those at the time of publication of the novels on which they were based, in 1837–8 and 1862, respectively.
10 As there are several versions and translations of Mendele’s works (see the Bibliography), references here are mostly to chapter numbers. In this chapter, translations from the Yiddish and Hebrew are by David Aberbach unless indicated otherwise.
11 On Mendele in the context of late 19th-century Hebrew literature, see Patterson (1964) and Aberbach (1997). For texts pertaining to the history of the Haskalah from its origins in 18th-century German lands to its growth in late 19th-century Eastern Europe, see Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (1995). On the parasitical image of Jews in anti-Semitic discourse, see ibid., and Penslar (2001). The European distinction between the ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ poor, which is integral to Poor Law, evidently influenced the policy of Jewish communities from the 13th century (ibid., 93).
12 On the general poverty in Russia as reflected in literature, see pp. 126–36.
13 In the Introduction to Of Bygone Days (1894) (Mendele 1947: 259).
14 Joseph Roth depicts the poverty of Russian Jews under Tsarist rule in the novel Job (1930), not as in Mendele’s works as a call for social change but as a fact of daily life affecting most Russian Jews.
15 On the legal status of the Jews in Tsarist Russia, see Goldenweiser (1966). The most notorious of Tsarist anti-Semitic laws were the conscription laws of 1827 which obliged Jewish communities to fill a quota of conscripts (‘cantonists’) between the ages of 12 and 25 for 25 years’ military service starting from age 18.
16 The association of poverty with Judaism was mainly in Eastern Europe, where poverty was worse than in the West; yet, the tendency to see Judaism as the religion of the poor was occasionally also found among the better-off Jews in the West. Heine, in ‘Das neue israelitische Hospital zu Hamburg’ (1844), his poem on the newly-built Jewish hospital in Hamburg (‘Ein Hospital für arme, kranke Juden’), regards Judaism as an even worse sickness than poverty and pain. He pays tribute to Salomon Heine, his millionaire uncle who built the hospital, whose tears were his greatest gift, for the ‘great incurable malady of his brothers’ (der unheilbar grossen Brüderkrankheit) (Heine 1982: 399). Heine was well aware of the irony that although most Jews lived in impoverished conditions, their popular image in the Christian world was of rich usurers.
17 On biblical sources of the charity box, see II Kings ch. 12; also 22: 7; and the tamchuy evidently has talmudic origins (Bava Batra 8b). The te’udat aniyut seems to have originated in the Middle Ages, when unemployment and vagrancy became major problems. Perhaps the best-known Hebrew literary work hinging on a te’udat aniyut is Agnon’s novella, And the Crooked Shall Be made Straight (Vehaya he’akov le-mishor, 1913).
18 For a parallel allegory in Russian, in which the beaten-down horse represents the Russian peasants, see Saltykov-Schedrin’s ‘The Nag’. Marx in 1844, used similar imagery to describe the proletarian who, ‘the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work’ (Marx 1964: 72). French and Italian literature also refer to animals in describing the peasants. See pp. 144, 191, 203, 214 note 11. For further instances of horses as allegorical figures, see p. 147 note 47.
19 Mendele (1947: 335). Compare Mandeville, in ‘Fable of the Bees’ (1705): ‘The worst of all the Multitude,/ Did Something for the Common Good.’ Adam Smith echoes Mandeville in The Wealth of Nations (1776): ‘I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the common good’ (IV ii).
20 Mendele (1947: 334). Compare Blake, ‘The Human Abstract’ in Songs of Experience (1794): ‘Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor’. See p. 94 Mendele, speaking in the voice of the Devil, in effect curses his own people in language not unlike the admonishments in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (The Mare, end of ch. 17).
21 On the questioning of the value of education among the Russian peasants in Turgenev and Tolstoy, see p. 14.
22 Educational enlightenment leading to alienation is similarly the fate of the Rhodesian teenager, Tambu, in Dangaremgba’s novel, Nervous Conditions: in her struggle to gain an education and make something of herself by earning the ‘privilege’ of honorary admission into the culture of the White elite in the late 1960s, Tambu finds herself cut off from her family and her native culture. For a comparison between Mendele and Dangaremgba, see Aberbach (2004).
23 On varying degrees of European Jewish patriotism from 1789 to 1939, see Aberbach (2013a).
24 On Mendele’s impoverishment and wanderings after his father’s death, when he was in his early teens, see Aberbach (1993b).
25 Mendele (1947: 3).
26 Ibid., 114
27 The unhappy marriage in The Beggar-Book and other stories by Mendele evidently has an autobiographical origin as the author’s first marriage failed (Aberbach 1993b). Among others who write about beggars and vagrants, Shakespeare, Swift, Wordsworth, Hamsun, W.H. Davies, Orwell, and Steinbeck are discussed in the present volume.
28 The acrimony among the beggars recalls Thomas More’s warning in Utopia (1516) that poverty is no safeguard of public order; to the contrary, for who quarrel more than beggars?
29 On fake beggars in the Talmud, see p. 39 note 3 in this volume. There are no fake beggars in the Bible.
30 On the Liber Vagatorum in its 16th-century context, see p. 53. Perhaps the only ‘species’ of beggar overlooked by Mendele is that which dominates Jewish folklore, the beggar whose deformities symbolize the imperfections of the world, to be rectified in the age of messianic redemption. See p. 33
31 Mendele (1947: 116). On fake beggars in literature, see Aberbach (2018, 2019).
32 Penslar (2001: 90).
33 Hitchcock (2004: ch. 5).
34 On beggar-frauds, see for example, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906: ch. 29), Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933: ch. 31), and Silone’s Fontamara (1930), describing the poor in southern Italy during the Mussolini era. In Fontamara, a beggar is taken by a policeman to hospital to cure an eye disease. He does not want his eye cured as he needs it to beg. When cured, he remarks: ‘there’s never been real liberty in Italy’ (Silone 1934: 140).
35 See note 5 in this chapter.
36 Mendele (1947: 115). Mendele’s classification of Jewish beggars might be compared with similar lists in 16th-century rogue literature, such as Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) and Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursetors (1566) (Hibbert 1988: 179–81). However, Mendele is unique in his satiric tone as he lists, with the enthusiasm of a connoisseur, the particular attributes of Jewish beggary; his semi-Darwinian mock seriousness in identifying common and rare species; the depth of sympathy for the poor, and the underlying desire for reform. For mockery of ‘species’ of charity societies, which might have influenced Mendele, see Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (ch. 6).
37 Like Mendele in The Beggar-Book, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (I i 1, 3) writes of uncontrollable itching at the sight of a beggar: in this way, these outstanding exponents of the Jewish and Scottish Enlightenment respectively, express identification with the poor.
38 Mendele (1947: 114).
39 Mendele (1949: 9).
40 From 1881, Mendele lived in Odessa, the most western of the cities in the Pale of Settlement. Mendele often draws attention to the abysmal sanitary conditions in the Pale, but Odessa, though squalid and with a large population of the poor, was more modernized; the contractor for the London Embankment, which vastly improved the sanitary conditions in London, freeing it from plague by separating drinking water from sewage, also worked in Odessa (Halliday 2008: 90–1). Elizabeth Gaskell, in Mary Barton (1848), refers to English engineering firms which sold engines and machinery to Tsarist Russia (opening ch. 4).
41 Mendele in his stories (e.g. The Beggar-Book) frequently alludes to disease among the Eastern European Jews, which he links to their poverty, malnutrition and poor sanitation. John Snow, in his influential pamphlet during the cholera epidemic in London in 1849, gives practical guidelines, including attention to hygiene, by which plague can be avoided or limited; he refers to a precedent in Berdichev in 1831 in which the vast majority of victims were Jews, a fact allegedly owing to ‘the excessive disregard of cleanliness among the Jewish inhabitants’ (Snow 1849: 10). In the 1850s, when Mendele lived in Berdichev, its Jewish population rapidly increased, to over 40,000, constituting about two-thirds of the total. Though Berdichev was a backwater of the Tsarist empire, Balzac was married there and Joseph Conrad was born there.
42 Mendele’s life was troubled also by the mental illness of his first wife, whom he was forced to divorce in 1856; the deaths of two children around the same time; and, in the 1880s, the exile of his only son, Michael, to Siberia (he was active in the revolutionary movement as a student in St. Petersburg); Michael’s conversion to Christianity was a scandal in the Jewish community and caused Mendele much distress. See Aberbach (1993b).
43 On the effects of the pogroms on Mendele’s fiction, see Aberbach (1993b).
44 For a translation of part of ‘Shelter from the Storm’ (in Hebrew: Be-Seter Ra’am), see Aberbach (2001).
45 See Mendele (1947: 384). To bensch Gomel means to recite in synagogue the prayer of deliverance (ha-Gomel) from danger or sickness. A kapore (Hebrew and Yiddish; atonement) usually refers to the rooster traditionally slaughtered on the eve of Yom Kippur as an atonement for sins committed during the previous year.
46 The celebrated Hasidic tale, ‘The Seven Beggars’, told by Nachman of Bratzlav (1772–1810), illustrates the idea of the ‘holy poor’ in a series of allegories in which the deformities of a group of beggars represent the defects of mortal existence, to be rectified in the World to Come. Poverty is not a misfortune to be fought but a human condition to be accepted. Mendele was contemptuous toward Hasidism for its faith-based passive submission and its rejection of secular education which might help Eastern European Jews to escape poverty.
47 On ambivalence toward education for the common people in Turgenev and Tolstoy, see p. 14.
48 See Mendele (1947: 413).
49 Ibid., 272.
50 Ibid., 151.
51 Ibid., 94.
52 See ibid., 335.
53 The Mare, 335.
54 See Bialik (1990: 173–4).
55 See Sholom Aleichem (1979: 80).
56 Ibid., 56. Henry Mayhew was among the first to give the swarms of the urban poor the voice of living human beings, in London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851. Crowds of watercress girls in Farringdon Market shiver in the early-morning cold, many without shoes, ‘thick as crows in a ploughed field’ (i 146). To Mayhew, their unknown lives were heroic. In contrast, Yiddish writers such as Mendele were often outraged by the disgrace of poverty.
57 Sholom Aleichem (1979: 135, 136, 148).