(Author: Joseph Sherman, Vol. 65 #1, Pesach 2020/First published in Jewish Affairs, Summer 1994)
Truth shall spring out of the earth: and righteousness shall look down from heaven.
On such assurances of God’s justice, a leitmotif of the Psalms, was the faith of Eastern European Jewry built. At the turn of this century, the devout of the shtetl maintained this conviction in the teeth of divisive forces that eroded both their spiritual and their physical security.
Among the most dramatic challenges to this kind of faith was the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus between 1894 and 1906. The Dreyfus Affair not only undermined the basis of conventional piety, however, it severely damaged that secular belief in the benefits of Emancipation to which the Jews of Europe had clung since the French Revolution. It destroyed the hope fostered by the Haskalah, the Jewish
Enlightenment, that under the protection of a liberal secular state, Jews could live out their lives in security, practice their religion in tolerance, and preserve their culture unmolested. At the very moment that Yiddish was being wrought into a literary language, its authors confronted, during the Dreyfus Affairs, shocking proof that whatever they produced would never become part of the literature of a Europe that persisted in hating its Jews. No Yiddish writer was more earnestly engaged in creating that literature than Sholom Aleichem. None was more alive to the devastating consequences of the Dreyfus case for Jewish survival, or better equipped to dramatise with startling prescience its central ambiguity.
The narrative method Sholom Aleichem chose was, as always, a uniquely ambivalent humour which exposes terror in the act of laughing at it. He himself defined the origin and purpose of a technique which made him the most widely loved and perhaps least properly understood of early modern Yiddish writers:
I tell you it is an ugly and mean world and only to spite it one mustn’t weep!If you want to know, that is the real source, the true cause of my constant good spirits, of my, as it is called, ‘humour’. Not to cry out of spite! Only to laugh out of spite, only to laugh!1
To assess the catastrophic ramifications of Dreyfus on that third of world Jewry who lived in Eastern Europe, doggedly attempting to preserve their fathers’ faith against multi-dimensional assault, Sholom Aleichem sets his tale in his metonymic shtetl of Kasrilevke. Kasrilevke cannot be found on any map of the Pale of Settlement, yet each shtetl which can so be found is Kasrilevke, the hamlet of Psalm 85:11
No living Jew ever emigrated from Kasrilevke, yet every Eastern European Jews immigrant is a Kasrilevker. This famous literary trope offers its creator a perfect crucible in which to test the consequences of the Dreyfus explosion on the elements within it. Here, as the tale’s narrator informs us from the outset, the Jewish world is cut off from direct contact with the contemporary world and the cataclysmic events which shape it. Whether they want it or not, however, that world will engulf them.
The Kasrilevkites have no direct access to information about political and economic pressures which spark the Anglo-Boer War, which stimulate China’s trade with the West, which convulse Paris with intrigue (pp.61-62).2 Yet all these events are forced upon their consciousness through the maskilic innovation of Jewish newspapers. The shtetl’s most ‘enlightened’ inhabitant, Zaydl Reb Shayes, subscribes to one of the most influential of these, the moderate Hebrew-language Ha-tsfirah (The Dawn), founded and edited in the last decade of the 19th Century by Nahum Solokow, later to become a world leader of the Zionist movement. From Zaydl’s readings of this newspaper the Kasrilevkites receive international news – but not, the narrator emphasizes, their understanding of it. Neither Zaydl nor his newspaper is granted final authority; on the contrary, they merely supply raw material which the Kasrilevkites interpret for themselves:
Zaydl reb shayes iz der eyntsiker in shtot, vos shraybt-oys dem ‘tsfire’. un ale nayesn, vos tuen zikh op oyf der velt, verd men gevar fun im, dos heyst, nit fun im, nor durkh im. er leyent zey, un zey fartaytshn; er dertseylt, un zey lernen dem pshat: er zogtvos se shteyt, un zey dringn oft farkert, vorem zey farshteyen beser. (p62)
Zaydl Reb Shayes is the only person in town who subscribes to Ha-tsfirah. And from him the people are made aware of all the events which take place in the world, that is to say, not from him, but through him. He reads to them, and they explain; he tells them, and they explicate the meaning: he says what is printed there, and they often deduce incorrectly, because they know better.
Through the stubborn insistence of the Kasrilevke shtotslayt, we are confronted with the ambivalent demands of two kinds of truth: the truth of newspaper reportage, as opposed to the truth that Kasrilevke upholds. Cunningly tempted by the narrative voice to laugh at the apparently invincible ignorance of unworldly kleynshtetldike yidn in the face of the testimony of press journalism, we will soon be confronted with the essential relativity of truth. We shall have to contrast the truth of men and the transient world with the truth of God and the everlasting world. The difference – as Sholom Aleichem well knows – will not sustain an unequivocal answer in the aftermath of Dreyfus’s second trial and conviction, because that verdict blows to pieces the sustaining devotion of centuries, and leaves nothing in its place.
Initially, Dreyfus’s difficulties bolster Kasrilevke’s contempt for assimilation and the corrupting effects of emancipation. When the shtetl first hears of his arrest and conviction vos er hot aroysgegebn noytike papirn fun der melukhe, ‘because he had distributed essential government documents’, they blend reprobation with dour pleasure at what seems to them his well-merited come-uppance:
-vos tut nit a yid tsulib parnose? …
-a mitsve! Loz a yidele nit krikhn oybn-on unzikh nit mishn tsvishn kisrim! (p62) – What a Jew won’t do for a living!
-Serve him right! A little Jew shouldn’t try tocreep up to the highest places and mix with royalty!
This exchanged painfully exposes the extent to which Eastern European Jews have passively accepted the definition imposed upon them by the antisemitic prejudices of others. They have wholly internalised the denigration of centuries which withholds from a Jew any right to identify or rank in the Gentile social formation of which he is an unwanted part. The automatic conviction of these two colloquists is that Jews are forever destined to be deprived of state, citizenship or rights.
Having taken over as their own self-evaluation the evaluation made of them by Jew-haters, the Kasrilevkites console themselves by disparaging the dignity of equality in the secular world. They voice this self-protective contempt in the unconscious Yiddish malapropism frantsehoyzndike, by which they refer to the French for whom the correct Yiddish word is frantsoyzn. By punning on the word frat, ‘dandy’, and hoyzn, ‘trousers’, Sholom Aleichem amusingly makes his kleyne mentshelekh dismiss the French with a term which literally means ‘fancy pants’. This word-play consequently ends up making a contemptuous appraisal of that people’s claim to moral, cultural and social superiority, reducing them instead to mendacious poseurs. At the beginning of his career, Dreyfus seemed to have validated Napoleon’s promise that all Frenchmen, of whatever religious conviction, could be promoted on merit to the highest ranks of French service and society. Now his scapegoating shows the whole world that this promise was a lie.
This point is made with devastating wit through the seemingly myopic eyes and bumbling tongues of Sholom Aleichem’s Kasrilevkites. But in making this error, are they really so short-sighted or speechimpaired? Do they not instinctively perceive that Dreyfus – and by extension all Western European Jews – are living in self-delusion? In Paris, the glittering capital of Western Europe, Captain Dreyfus is a victim of the identical Jew-hatred to which zhidi parkhatie are daily exposed in a provincial backwater of Tsarist Russia. Enlightened France treats its Jews in the same way as despotic Russia, an equation deftly pointed by one Kasrilevker who deplores the nature of Dreyfus’s punishment in Russian phrase vetchnoe poselenie, ‘perpetual banishment’ (p63). How different, then, are the lives of Jews in the West? Unlike Dreyfus, though, Kasrilevke has accepted this treatment as part of the unchangeable order of things. Their postmaster Yeremei, an archetypal Russian Jew-hater, curses them in the foulest language as they gather in his post office to await the latest issue of Zaydl’s newspaper; zey hobn im ober gehert, the narrative voice tells us, vi haman der groger, ‘they heard him as much as Haman hears the Purim rattle’ (p64). A double irony is manipulated here. On the most obvious level, the Jews through long exposure have grown impervious to abuse. On another level, however, Haman is equally impervious to the annual execrations of Jews, not because he is dead but because he continues to exist. The childish noises by which Jews attempt annually to blot out his name are exercises in futility. Haman exists perpetually, reincarnated as much in the crude figure of Janitor Yeremei as in the sophisticated person of General Boisdeffre (p64).
Now suddenly a crack appears to have opened in the wall of Jew-hatred. Dreyfus, so far from deserving to be put down from a station to which he should never have aspired, is revealed as the innocent victim of a malign conspiracy; his case is taken up by welldisposed Gentiles in search of justice; his sentence is to be reconsidered. This is the turning-point for Kasrilevke, offering them invincible proof that Gd’s justice still operates in the world. Suddenly Dreyfus becomes one of them, or equally to the point, they themselves stand Dreyfus’s place. He becomes the embodiment of all victimized Jews. This is why, in the tale’s opening sentence, the narrative voice assets that ikh veys nit, oyb di mayse fun dreyfus hot nokh ergets ongemakht aza rash vi in kasrilevke, ‘I don’t know whether anywhere else the Dreyfus Affair made as great a tumult as it did in Kasrilevke’ (p61). In Paris, the event takes on the aspect of a carnival, in which opposing sides, as if participating in some kind of game, throw their hats into the air and shout for the team they are supporting (p61). In Kasrilevke it becomes a matter of life and death because yidn hot men dervayl geshmirt, gemakht mit der blote, vi gevoynlekh, ‘Jews were meanwhile reviled, besmeared with mud, as usual’ (p61). Dreyfus’ retrial offers at last the potential confrontation of truth with lies, of justice with injustice. Here is the opportunity for God to honor the promise of the Jewish faith. The fervor with which the Kasrilevkites long for Dreyfus’ return from imprisonment on Devil’s Island is expressed in liturgical language; it becomes a prayer for the salvation of the whole Jewish people:
reboyne-sheloylem! – hobn zey mitpalel geven bay zikh in hartsn – zolst im khotsh brengn besholem aheyim, vu der mishpet badarf zany! Zolst khotsh efenen di oygn fun di rikhter un klor makhn zeyere moykhes, zey zoln gefinen dem shuldikn, un di gantse velt zol aroyszen undzer gerekhtikkayt, ameyn sele! (p65)
Master of the Universe! – they prayed in their hearts – May you at least bring him in peace back home, there where the judgment needs to be given. May you at least open the eyes of the judges and clear their minds to they may discover the guilty one, and the whole world may behold our vindication, Amen Selah!
The narrative style subtly manipulates language to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, believers from unbelievers, victims from persecutors. The Kasrilevkites’ ignorance of any other language but Yiddish (and some Hebrew) transmutes their educational shortcoming into a moral advantage. Their prayers for Dreyfus and for themselves are articulated in loshn koydesh, the morally unequivocal Holy Tongue. By contrast, Yeremei reviles them in jargon, jumbling together bits of Ukrainian, Russian and German in a torrent of gibberish which bespeaks a disordered hatred as uncontrollable as it is pathological. Vindictively driving them from his post office, he shouts:
mut ne zhidovska skola, zhidi parkhatie, mut ne kahal sakhermakheri! (p64)
This isn’t a Jew-boy school, mangy Yids this isn’t a gathering-place for huckstering!3
To the ears of Kasrilevke, the French language reduces the antisemites who persecute Dreyfus to a single faceless menace sharing one common name. What, the linguistically uncomprehending Jews of Kasrilevke imply, is the difference between one French Jew-hater and another?
es iz tsugekumen ale mol a frisher parshoyn: frier ‘esterhazi’, nokhdem ‘pikert’, nokhdem general ‘mersi’, ‘peli’, ‘gonzi’, un derbay iz gezogt gevorn a hamtsoe, az bay di frantsehoyzndike’ vi bald a nomen fun a general, azoy muz zikh oyslozn mit a ‘yud’. (p64)
Every time some personage appeared on the scene: first ‘Esterhazy’, then ‘Pikert’ [Picquart], then General ‘Mersi’ [Mercier], ‘Peli’ [Pellieux], ‘Gonzi’ [Gonse], and a novel idea was derived from this, that among the fancy-pants French, as soon as there’s a general, his name must end in an ‘i’.
By contrast, through their own language, the people of Kasrilevke salt their longing for the return of Dreyfus with Hebrew pietisms, visualizing Dreyfus not merely as a disembodied symbol of oppressed Jewry, but also with touching fellow-feeling as a man, a husband, and a father. When they hear Dreyfus has arrived safely back in France they thank hashem yisborakh, ‘the holy One Blessed be He’; they long to see beshas mayse, the God-given holy moment of Dreyfus’s reunion with his wife and children; bes mayse, in the same holy moment, women bury their faces in their aprons to hide the fact that they are weeping (p66). When the second trial begins, they pray that got zol shoymer umatsil zany, ‘God should guard and protect’ him who has been falsely accused. They have not the slightest doubt that the truth of the Scriptures, which is the justice of God, will assert itself.
They idolize Zola and Labori as agents of this absolute. For Zola volt zikh yeder eyntsiker mafkir geven, ‘every single person would have sacrificed himself’ (p64). Labori and his eloquence body forth oylem-umloye, literally ‘the world and its fullness’:
Khotsh horkhn hot im in kasrilevke keyner nisht gehorkht, nor m’hot farshtanen mint seykhl az er badarf konen reydn. (p65)
Although no one in Kasrilevke had ever heard him, nevertheless they understood as a simple matter of logic that he was absolutely capable of speaking.
Consequently the news that Labori – one of the advocates defending Dreyfus at Rennes – has been shot4 is greeted with exclamations which consciously recall the worst of Biblical afflictions. ‘Khoyshekh! Khoyshekh!’ they cry, evoking the darkness which overcame Egypt in the time of its plagues; the crime iz erger vi in sdom, ‘worse than in Sodom’ (p66). The murderous attempt is seen as a direct attack upon themselves personally; for them it is a monstrous defiance of God’s order:
der doziker shos hot zey dem kop arop-genumen. di dozike koyl hto zey getrofn glaykh in hartzn arayn. Glaykh vi er hot geshosn oyf kasrilevke. (p66)
This same shot had blown off their heads. This same shot had penetrated directly into their own hearts, exactly as if he [the assassin] had taken aim at Kasrilevke.
They immediately pray for a miracle, and before their eyes and to their complete understanding their prayer is answered: got borukh-hu hot a nes geton, the Holy One, Blessed be He, performed a miracle’ (p.66) and Labori lives.
The narrative structure deliberately balances in ironic suspension unquestioning faith in God’s judgment with the vagaries of human determinations. As Kasrilevke waits for the second verdict, they have no doubt that truth will shine forth. At the same time, however, they are aware that like everything else in the world this is conditional – im yirtse hashem, if God wills it’. Therefore the night before the verdict is due they cannot sleep a wink; in anguished suspense they converge on the post office at first light, impatiently willing it to open and Zaydl to appear with the newspaper which, for them, must trumpet forth the affirmation of God. Even as they wait, they unconsciously seek assurance in the signifiers of their faith: [zey hobn] gedreyt dip peye un gezungen shtilerheyt fun halel, ‘they twisted their earlocks and quietly sang snatches of the Hallel.’ The touching of the earlocks, one of the outward signs of their covenant with God, is linked to their singing that part of the liturgy used on days of special thanksgiving to God for His mercies to humankind.5
The possibility that all may not turn out in accordance with the expectations of conventional belief has been prepared for earlier. In discussing the chances of a different verdict being handed down at the second trial,
der hot gezogt, az der mishpet vet nokh a mol gemishpet vern, un der hot gedungen az neyn: eyn akher mayse bezdn klum–opgemishpet, is farfaln (p63)
One said that the judgement would be revised, and another insisted that it would not: after a verdict has been given, there is no appeal; once judged, all is lost …
The existence of two kinds of judgment is pointed in the application of the Talmudic principle eyn akher bezdn klum to the workings of a secular court. In the administration of justice in rabbinical courts, to which the phrase refers, the litigants agree beforehand to accept without further question the verdict of the dayonim whose probity is taken to be beyond question. Since in handing down a din toyre, rabbinical judges theoretically speak in God’s name through His Revealed Word, there can be no appeal against their judgments. Secular courts do not inspire the same confidence, as Dreyfus’s trials painfully demonstrate. The judgment twice handed down has nothing to do with absolute morality and everything to do with the protection of vested interests by biased judges. A secular court is not a bezdn. Hence the irony operates on mutually disturbing levels. Since a secular court, unlike a rabbinical court, recognizes the possibility or error, it offers the right of appeal to amend injustice. Because the innocence of Dreyfus has been protested throughout all Europe, it is confidently expected that the secular court will now recognise its mistake. But, in a bitter reversal, the second speaker of the above exchange is proved correct. The second trial does indeed uphold the letter of the Talmudic principle, but in a manner directly contrary to its spirit. Hence Kasrilevke’s appalled and uncomprehending outrage.
This response exposes the full irony of faith. Having placed an unquestioning trust in Divine justice, Kasrilevke cites the recurrent theme of the Psalms in confirmation: himl un erd hobn geshvorn, az der emes muz aroyf, viboyml oyfn vaser, ‘heaven and earth have sworn that the truth must rise to the top as oil on water’ (p68). From this conviction nothing can shake them – as always, ‘they know better’. So their final confrontation cannot be with the perversions of the impious Gentile world, but with Zydl as the disseminator of secular falsehood. The pious of Kasrilevke have not the slightest trust in the solemn assurances of Zaydl and his maskilic newspaper (p67). Zaydl’s enraged bafflement vividly dramatises the irreconciliable demands of the truth of faith and the truth of reality:
– beheymes!–shrayt nebekh zaydl mit ale koykhes un shtupt zey dos blat glaykh in ponim arayn. – nat, zet vos se shteyt in blat! – blat-shmat!– shrayt kasrilevke – un az du vest zikh shteln ot do mit eyn fus oyfn him! un mit der anderer oyf der erd – veln mir dir gloybn? s’iz a zakh, vos es kin nit zayn! Es kon nit zayn! … a simen – ver iz geven gerekht? … (p68)
–Cattle!–poor Zaydl shouted with all his strength, and shoved the newspaper into their faces.– Here, see what it says in the paper! – Papershmaper! – Kasrilevke yelled. – Even if you stood here with one foot in heaven and the other on the earth–would we believe you? This is something which cannot be! It cannot be! … An omen – who was right?
The tale’s crowning irony is summed up in its last, ambiguous line. The word simen, meaning as it does a sign or an omen, is linked to the tale’s central demand – who was right, the secular newspaper with its maskilic bias, or the truth of God Most High who has sworn to reward the righteous and punish the wicked? This question, by juxtaposing the demands of faith with the coercions of secularity, sharply interrogates the promises of the Emancipation at the same time as it challenges the basis of received religion.
The Dreyfus Affair was the first event of modern history to turn the question of continued Jewish survival into a conundrum that demanded immediate solution even as it made clear that such a solution could never be found. The ‘Affair’ dispelled all possibility of reconciling religious preachment with secular practice. It made it clear that a religious solution could not be found in secularism any more than a secular solution could be found in religion. The possibility of a Jew living in dignity in the European diaspora was conclusively proved to be an illusion. Yet for Jews to maintain an unquestioning belief in God’s beneficent providence was show to be equally hopeless. Such faith had not protected them in their past, and it has again failed to protect them in their present. This tale starkly poses the insoluble 20th Century Jewish dilemma. How are Jews to live, if at all? Sholom Aleichem has no solution to offer. But Kasrilevke’s agonized reception of the Dreyfus Trial becomes, as he puts it with startling foresight, a simen, a prognostication of still greater perplexity to come.
A further intriguing question is raised by the story’s date of composition. Sholom Aleichem’s tale was written in 1902, four years into Dreyfus’s quest for the Révision, in the year of Zola’s death, by which time most of the other parties involved had been thoroughly discredited. Yet Dreyfus remained unexonerated, and the Jews of Eastern Europe were only months away from the catastrophic pogrom of Kishinev, a barbarity which finally convinced the Jewish world that only they themselves could provide a solution to the problem of their continued survival. By 1902 Herzl, two years from death himself, was desperately seeking a territorial solution to this ‘Jewish Question’, once posed by hostile Gentiles about the people they most hated, but now of frenzied immediacy to Jews themselves. For ultra-orthodox believers, however, such a solution was and remains a blasphemous desecration of God’s name. Kasrilevke and its inhabitants have long been reduced to unidentifiable ashes scattered irrecoverable all over Poland. Yet even after Auschwitz, its pious descendants continue to believe that faith alone will sustain the Jewish people, that the verdict given against Dreyfus – and by genocidal Nazi extension against the whole of Jewry – cannot be true. As human apprehension perceives it, God – if He exists and, existing, cares – not only allowed the sufferings of Dreyfus, but the even more extensive savagery of Auschwitz of which Dreyfus was the precursor. It is this recognition that lends such potency to the simen which Sholom Aleichem so early identified in his reading of l’Affaire.
NOTES
- Quoted in Charles Madison, Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers (New York, 1971), p96.
- All references to and quotations from Dreyfus in Kasrilevke are to the Yiddish text published in Kleyne mentshelekh mit kleyne hazhgokhes, 6 of Ale verk fun Sholem Aleykhem (Vilna-Warsaw, 1925), pp.61-68. All translations in this essay are mine. A competent English translation of the whole story, made by Hilde Abel, is published in Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (eds), a Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York, 1973), pp187-92.
- The jargon word sakhermakheri is a corruption of the German word Schacherei, the term used by Marx to attack the ‘economic degeneracy’ of world Jewry. The word first appears in Marx’s review-essay Zur Judenfrage (1843), where he gives the following notorious definition: ‘What is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering [Schacherei]. What is his worldly god? Money’. See T.B. Bottomore (trans.), Karl Marx: Early Writings (London, 1963), pp.3240.
- Fernand Labori (1860-1917) was the distinguished French advocate who represented Zola in the libel action brought against him in February 1898. As a result of his impressive defence, Labori was invited to assist Edgar Demange (18411925), Dreyfus’s original advocate, at the retrial at Rennes in August 1898. Demange and Labori could not agree on the correct strategy to be used at Dreyfus’s second trial; to complicate matters further, Labori was shot in the back by an unidentified young man on 14 August 1898. the wound was not severe, and Labori was back in court a week later, on 22 August 1898. See Guy Chapman, The Dreyfus Trials (London, 1972), pp.131, 230 236-37.
- Hallel is a prayer of praise composed of sections of Psalms 113-118. It is sung on most Jewish festivals of jubilation, either in full or in an abridged version.
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