“whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.” ― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Tevye is one of those rural Jews, living in a tiny village out among the Gentiles. If the Jews of 1964 were searching for a lost connection to their forebears, those of 50 years before wanted nothing more than to assert their differences from theirs. Mark Twain - "The Awful German Language". By staking out a new rhetorical position, you triumph over the butt of the joke. Fiddler on the Roof, as Solomon points out, both took up the theme of cultural adaptation and embodied it. Like every mythic figure, he’s been shaped and reshaped in the telling, adapted to the needs of successive artists and audiences. If Zionism, which was emerging around the same time, was a belated form of political nationalism, the Yiddish literary movement was a belated version of what other European peoples had already undertaken: the development of a high aesthetic tradition out of the materials of folk culture. Mark Twain: The Horrors of the German Language / Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache Address to the Vienna Press Club, November 21, 1897, Twain wrote this speech in excellent German, and is said to have delivered it without reading (contrary to what he says in the first paragraph). Sholem Aleichem uses the devices of metafiction, the modernist repertoire of frames and masks, not to distance but to draw us closer, not to hide but greet. He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a “unique”; … On German genders: "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Third in Sholem Aleichem’s pantheon is a sap called Menachem-Mendel, hero of his own eponymous volume, forever managing to float his schemes just long enough for them to burst. This page is intended as a humorous plea on behalf of the German language! THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE A little learning makes the whole world kin. Intellectuals and experts barked at what they saw as a travesty both of Jewish life in the Old World and of the work of Sholem Aleichem, its greatest literary exponent. ... whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people. THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE by Mark TwainABOUT THE BOOK:The Awful German Language is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. It was released on DVD in January 2006.. an interlude cxxiii. In “Cnards,” another late story, the process comes full circle. Schlosshotel Hirschhorn One of Twain’s favorite sites, the castle ruin and hotel sit on a mountain above a medieval German village. In “On Account of a Hat,” a real-estate broker, waking from a nap in a station, accidentally grabs the cap of his bench mate, a Russian official. Sholem Aleichem’s favorite figure is the schlimazel, the dupe of chance and other men. germany and german cxviii. Play Crossword. In 'A Tramp Abroad,'Mark Twain is the tramp, and he and his friend, Harris, are abroad, investigating life throughout eastern and southern Europe. He’s a wise guy, an angle-player, maybe even a bit of an operator. Then came something out of a fairy tale. On the other end of the spectrum, as secular writing began to circulate in Yiddishland, was the shund, or trash, of popular Yiddish fiction, melodramatic potboilers that bore no connection to their readers’ lives. - Mark Twain's Notebook Mark Twain was a humorist and author of essays, short stories, and novels, including the American classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Howells' review of A Tramp Abroad begins with the admonition that America seems about to be plagued with an excess of drollery, Its distinction, as is often said, consists in its being pointed at the self. Named after the 19th-century humorist Mark Twain, it is presented to individuals who have "had an impact on American society in ways similar to" Twain. This is who we were, Fiddler told its spectators, and this is how we got to where we are. Tevye is forced to adjust to three successive daughterly rebellions. In his youth, Robbins had run away in shame from what he’d seen as Jewish weakness, and had Christianized his own last name, by happy coincidence, from Rabinowitz. He was with the Jews of Russia every step of the historical way. In Kasrilevke there is envy, and spite, and hatred of the rich. Mark Twain — A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, chapter 22 (1889) You’d almost have to be a Yiddishist to recognize the name of his creator, Sholem Aleichem. The Jews of the great immigration were trying to become American. Mark Twain does have a point! There is also his taste for the typical. At last, the family is expelled from Anatevka altogether. (It is he, for example, whom Tevye regales with his troubles.) In the original, Tevye wanders off he knows not where, his narrative concluding on a note of fatalism and disorientation. Robbins was aware of the pitfalls of sentimentality, but the very tones in which he communed with himself, in the notes he kept on the process, betray its inescapability. New; Used; Discount. A little learning makes the whole world kin.--Proverbs xxxii, 7. In his “The Awful German Language", Twain presents a collection of satirical observations about the German language in the form of a short essay. Anyone who’s tried to learn German knows how frustrating it can be. (“You Bible a person half to death,” his wife rebukes him during yet another filial crisis, “and think you’ve solved the problem.”) But quotation is only the half of it. They sit down at the table and proceed, it hardly need be said, to clean the locals out. New money was coming in, upsetting old arrangements and values. He often structured his stories like folktales, or like jokes. Fiddler was indeed a show for grandchildren, bespeaking a grandchild’s gilded view. Yet usually, in Sholem Aleichem, it’s only the readers who get the point. L’chaim! hartford and billiards cxvi. The pseudonym is a familiar greeting, roughly equivalent to “how do you do?”: friendly, haimish, demotic, just like the persona that it designates. Sholem Aleichem reveled in the chaos, leveraging it to characterize and differentiate his figures in a multitude of ways. They play around the clock in a house they call the Chapel, smoking on the Sabbath, eating pork, and reading secular books. Alisa Solomon’s subtitle is, if anything, too modest. Coming from Fiddler, you’re struck, above all, by his solitude. All Rights The show was proposing itself as an origin myth. Mark Twain in the Atlantic Monthly to 1910 : An Annotated List of Allusions 23 manager's strength had only held out until he had erased the whole it would have been the very best drama he ever saw in all his life." Those struggling with the language are not alone; people have been doing for centuries, including one of the most … The story that began onstage concluded with its audience. This is the Jewish humor that Sholem Aleichem exposed to the world—though surely he didn’t invent it, for so titanic a power, so instinctively possessed, can only be the product of a whole civilization. By 1897, the area contained some 5 million Jews, nearly half the number on the planet. Amazon Asia-Pacific Holdings Private Limited; Atlantic Publishers and Distributors; Peacockbooks; Repro Books-On-Demand; Bookswagon; Fast Media 2; Audible Singapore Pvt. italian days cxx. The writer who inspired Fiddler on the Roof shouldn’t be mistaken for a mere spinner of artless folktales. The play of liturgical and scriptural allusion and quotation, especially in contrast to the ground bass of Yiddish vernacular—“holy tongue” against “mother tongue”—is crucial to the way that Sholem Aleichem evokes the texture of his characters’ consciousness as Jews. Jewish humor arises in the gap between reality and dreams, reality and justice. He was Sholem Rabinovich, born in Pereyaslav, near Kiev, in 1859. If “tradition” is the crux for Anatevka, for the critics it was authenticity. After a couple of decades of postwar assimilation during which Jews, like Catholics, won gradual mainstream acceptance, ethnic identity was beginning to reassert itself. And as with Twain, as Dauber shows, such condescension gets him badly wrong. Ltd. I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle,and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. Yiddish was “jargon,” the mongrel idiom of the kitchen and the street, an unstandardized hash of German, Hebrew, Slavic, and whatever else Ashkenazi Jews had picked up during their millennium-long migration east from the Rhineland. This traditional format session (20-minute papers) welcomes submissions on any aspect of Mark Twain’s life or work. The tradition, now, was “Tradition” itself. As the century came to a close, enormous changes in their lives were under way. The JFK Center chose Twain due to his status as a controversial social commentator and his … The paintings of Chagall, the photographs of Roman Vishniac (redacted to eliminate signs of prosperity or modernity), books like Life Is With People (1952) and, indeed, The World of Sholem Aleichem (1943): for the new suburbanizing Jews, those Unitarians with yarmulkes, such artifacts performed a complicated kind of psychic work. The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is an American award presented by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts annually since 1998. Fiddler, which debuted in 1964, is placed within its moment. By then he was already a writer; in fact, he was already “Sholem Aleichem.” Soon he undertook to use his fortune, as publisher and patron but above all as author, to shape the future of Yiddish literature. mark twain at forty cvi. Like many of Twain's novels, this tale intermixes Twain's real-life experiences with his creative imagination. The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress is a travel book by American author Mark Twain.Published in 1869, it humorously chronicles what Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion" on board the chartered vessel Quaker City (formerly USS Quaker City) through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American travelers in 1867.. The Pale was the vast territorial ghetto to which the Russian empire confined its Jews, and in which it spasmodically oppressed, attacked, and immiserated them. But that trip never happened – a fact documented in Twain’s travel journal. (The region roughly corresponds to modern-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, and a sizable chunk of Poland, including Warsaw—essentially the old Polish commonwealth, which Russia had absorbed in the 18th century.) Less than two years later, her father suddenly dropped dead, leaving Sholem, at the age of 26, among the richest Jews in Eastern Europe. Like those “folk songs” that are actually the products of a single pen (“This Land Is Your Land,” say), such figures come to seem as if they’d sprung directly from the popular imagination, effacing their originators altogether. The writer—who wasn’t observant, spoke Russian at home, and gave his children names like Emma and Misha, not Motl or Hodel or Tzeitel—was deeply ambivalent about the prospect of assimilation. All the young men are addicted to cards, figured as a kind of anti-orthodoxy. They gave them a past to adore, but also one that they could proudly leave behind. The assassination of the tsar in 1881 (Dauber calls it the inaugural event of modern Jewish history) had ignited an unprecedented round of persecutions: the first major wave of pogroms; restrictions on movement, education, and ownership; expulsions from rural areas into towns and “townlets” (that is, shtetls, which were not exclusively Jewish). Tevye’s greatness lies in being the exception. On German separable verbs: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." He had wanted to be treated like his neighbor (“It’s not such a bad life to be a Gentile”), and now he is. Who better than Sholem Aleichem to stand for everything they’d left behind? In the introduction to The Mark Twain Collection — a short but endlessly enjoyable compendium of the beloved author’s critical essays, short stories, and recollections published in The Atlantic during his stint there between 1874 and 1880 — Ben Tarnoff, author of the forthcoming The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, traces … There is no shtetl here; Anatevka is merely the name of a place where some of the characters live. Just like when they put on Fiddler. Join our quest as we peruse the summary and explore various quotes about the tramp and his travels. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language. (“Not counting suppers, my wife and kids went hungry three times a day.”) He is Job with a punch line, a Kafka who has yet to lose his faith. For many of his fellow writers, the challenge lay in fashioning a unitary literary idiom out of the language’s chaotic heterogeneity. The man-on-the-train, by and large, is no longer a schlimazel. There are four rules governing literary art in the domain of biography—some say five. So I took great comfort in Mark Twain’s 1880 essay, “The Awful German Language.” Vera Meyer of the Facebook group “ JEWS—Jekkes Engaged Worldwide” ( “Jekke” or “yekke” has various specific meanings, but most broadly refers to a person of German-Jewish background) sent me a link to Twain’s essay the other day, and it made me laugh out loud several times over. So great was his esteem for her life and accomplishments that he once said that it took six thousand years to produce a Joan of Arc, and the world would need another 50,000 before anyone of her stature would ever appear again. The Pale undergoes, in the person of a common man, its cycles of hope and despair. Being a Folkschreiber did not mean purifying the dialect of the tribe, but drawing on the fullest range of its resources, incorporating all the forms of expression that the people had already built up during the unrecorded history of their everyday speech. The Awful German Language Mark Twain from A Tramp Abroad. If Fiddler marked the early days of multiculturalism, it also represented the climax of the process by which the Jews of Eastern Europe were rendered safe for their grandchildren, reduced to a set of reassuring stereotypes—poverty and piety, laughter and tears, candlesticks and chicken soup and “warmth”—that preserved them not so much in amber as in schmaltz. The Tevye stories—nine all told from 1894 to 1916—unfold in real time. German; Italian; Spanish; See more; Item Condition. When Did Following Recipes Become a Personal Failure. And not the picturesque variety, either: Poverty is not conducive to the virtues. This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently", Part III. ... (just as Mark Twain was not exactly Mark Twain). Motl comes from Kasrilevke, Sholem Aleichem’s Yoknapatawpha, the composite shtetl of his imagination. Reserved. I spoke entirely in that language. Dated 1880, Twain recounts his travels through Germany, Switzerland and France with his travelling companion Harris, in which he takes on the … A little learning makes the whole world kin. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature ". Religious practice was declining. We learn how popular the writer was, but we never really get a sense of why. The Atlantic Crossword. Children were forgetting “who they were,” and parents were letting them—or fighting them. - Mark Twain's Notebook Never knew before what eternity was made for. … New Directions in Mark Twain Studies. But he’s no longer sure, completely, who he is. At the same time, the empire was rapidly modernizing, and its Jews were modernizing with it. 45 (May 1880), 686-88. Mark Twain Quotes 4 of 197 Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. Religious belief was fading. Sholem went to a cheder, religious primary school, but then to a secular high school, where he found his calling in the Russian masters and the Western classics. There is strife, and theft, and every kind of domestic upheaval. Apostasy has invaded the town itself. What are those strange cardboard squares?, the two want to know. Mark Twain was a humorist and author of essays, short stories, and novels, including the American classics. But his greatest character may be Sholem Aleichem, the author not only of the stories but, so often, in them. Working as a tutor, Sholem fell in love with his charge, the daughter of a wealthy estate manager—though wealthy doesn’t start to cover it. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. That transformation, broadly speaking, is the subject of Wonder of Wonders. * On the other hand, one of Twain’s most incredible tales – about a secret passage in the town in Dilsberg, Germany, with its entrance in the town well – turned … Tevye gets older; Sholem Aleichem gets older. The melting pot was being reimagined as a salad bowl, and the movement that Fiddler helped launch would eventuate, 13 years later, in Roots. "We walked several miles that afternoon in the bewildering glare of the sun, the white roads, and the white buildings. “What hast thou done, lately?”) The purpose of Jewish humor is to give yourself some distance from your hopeless situation. Everyone has heard of Frankenstein; not many know who Mary Shelley is. The affair was exposed; the tutor was dismissed; the lady persisted; the lovers were eventually united. He’s headed for Kiev, or just got back from Buenos Aires. … (Schlossstrasse 39-45, Hirschhorn; schlosshotel-hirschhorn.de/). “Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it … The icon who has circled the globe at the center of Fiddler on the Roof, the personification of shtetl nostalgia, at one with “tradition” and his arcadian community, is very different from the complex, ironic, ambivalent character that Sholem Aleichem built up, story by episodic story, over the course of more than 20 years, in intimate contact with his Yiddish-speaking readership. How many of Sholem Aleichem’s people would indeed remain Jews was an open question. Mark Twain's essay on German “The Awful German Language” is a scream. Nor does Dauber have much to say about the “afterlife” of his subtitle—the fate of Sholem Aleichem’s work across the decades since his death. Comes the railroad and the stock market, the legends of Rothschild and the rumors of Odessa, and he takes the fatal step of trying to enact those dreams, out in the uncharted realms of the new speculative economy. Abstracts addressing the conference theme, … paris, england, and homeward bound cxxii. Sholem Aleichem visits New York in 1906, and within a year he’s given birth to the second-most-beloved figure in his canon, an orphaned boy named Motl who will journey, in his eponymous novel, with his extended family and all his senses, from the shtetl to America—another instance of his creator’s extraordinary ability to perceive and give form to collective experience. He was greatly interested; and after I had talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a "unique"; and wanted to add … At the other end of his letters (his stories are epistolary), back in Kasrilevke, waits the leaden reality of domestic life. mark twain and his wife volume ii, part 1: 1875-1886 cv. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2021 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Not only was he the most celebrated author that Yiddishland (as Dauber calls it) had produced; he was, by proud and conscious choice, a Folkschreiber, a writer of the people. But authenticity, as Solomon wittily reveals, is a moving target. Unlike other modernists, he eschewed the extremes of experience. 5. It is a genuinely national phenomenon, for Jewish history is itself a kind of grim jest, an ironic drama of unending dispossession set against the notion of divine election. Confined to his little world, mired in “the famous Kasrilevke mud,” the schlimazel dreams of dignity and fortune. If my most pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely right any wrong I may have done him'", The final installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The sixth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The fifth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The fourth installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The third installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The second installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot, The first installment in a seven-part series about the author’s youthful training as a riverboat pilot. It isn’t Fiddler’s Anatevka. Dauber’s book has weaknesses. He also wrote the amusingly literal translation that you see below. Sholem Aleichem loved to play with sayings, was a connoisseur of idioms, and had a special relish for the virtuosic curses of the Jewish housewife. When the 2004 revival, the fourth on Broadway since the original production, dared to cast a Gentile, Alfred Molina, in the hallowed leading role, one reviewer referred to the show as Goyim on the Roof. Dracula, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe: it takes a special kind of greatness for a literary character to achieve autonomy from his creator. His work, like Twain’s, possesses a transparency, an intimacy, a quality of casual speech, and a wry but unpretentious humor that have been all too easily mistaken for artlessness, as if he were a simple figure spinning tales of simple folk. He captured how the language was evolving as its speakers’ lives were convulsed by change; the diversity of Yiddish was chronological as well as geographic. Sholem Aleichem was the great chronicler of Jewish existence in the Pale of Settlement during the decades of its simultaneous efflorescence and dissolution. "atlantic" days civ. He’s a Jew who is making modernity work. In 1911, late in his career—a time, says Dauber, by which he’d come to feel the shtetl world was disappearing—he published a collection called The Railroad Stories (available with Tevye the Dairyman in a single English volume by Sholem Aleichem’s finest translator, Hillel Halkin). Sholem Aleichem saw it all and wrote it all, in part because he lived it all. Some potential backers worried that the show would prove to be “too Jewish.” Its Jewishness, in fact, turned out to be the key to its success. On the other hand, Sholem Aleichem was not exactly Sholem Aleichem (just as Mark Twain was not exactly Mark Twain). There’s not a lot of singing. Published in 1880, this novel explores Twain's adventures from Germany through places like France, Italy, and Switzerland. cxix. (Cnards is their best attempt to render the reply.) "We never met a man, or woman, or child anywhere in this sunny island who seemed to be unprosperous, or discontented, or sorry about anything. tramping with twichell. The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. He has managed to assimilate, and now he cannot recognize himself. Yiddish is a language that’s persistently aware of being composed of other languages—and one of them is God’s. Yet once he was a giant, too: the voice of Eastern European Jewry by universal acclamation; the creator, Jeremy Dauber tells us in his new biography, of modern Jewish literature as well as modern Jewish humor; the man to whom the author of Huckleberry Finn replied, upon being introduced to “the Jewish Mark Twain,” “please tell him that I am the American Sholem Aleichem.” His death in 1916 was the occasion of the largest public funeral New York had ever witnessed. Without a doubt, however, in all of Twain’s criticisms, there does appear to be an inherent interest driving him to learn German. Book of the Week 99 The Awful German Language by Mark Twain.This week's book is about That devilishly difficult language, GERMAN! With his trio of marriageable daughters and his eternal little town of Anatevka, his largeness and simplicity, he seems to come to us directly from the pages of a folktale. Such is the case with Tevye, the jocular giant of Yiddish literature. howells, clemens, and "george" ... cxv. the grant speech of 1879 cxxiv. Tevye is famous—in the stories as well—for his compulsive need to quote the holy texts. One day, they are visited by a pair of men in full Hasidic regalia, ostensibly collecting money for yeshivas. When the Maskilim set out, around the middle of the 19th century, to create a modern Jewish literature, they turned to Hebrew, conceived of as a pure and classic tongue. The siren call of Western modernity was wafting through the Pale, luring Jews to socialism, secularism, and other idolatries, not to mention the professions and the cities. “If I were a rich man,” sang Tevye to the citizens of Tenafly and Great Neck, who were comfortable beyond his wildest dreams. But as the conductor leads him to the first-class car (“This way please, Your Excellency!”), he cannot figure out what’s going on. Her book is nothing less than a cultural history of American Jewry as refracted through its most celebrated artifact. But Dauber, a scholar of modern Jewish literature, is superb at situating the writer within his literary and historical context. Our final sight of them is on their way out of town on the train, clean-shaven and fashionably dressed, thumbing their noses at their victims. His favorite form was the monologue—that is what the Tevye stories are—and he liked to show his characters just swapping yarns. “The curmudgeonly Mark Twain was enamored of Joan. (“My Lord, my Lord!” goes the line in Woody Allen. — Proverbs xxxii, 7. The film features a series of vignettes extracted from several of Mark Twain's works, built around a plot that features Twain's … November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910. The show’s creators, Solomon explains, underwent the same “journey,” the same recovery of cultural memory and rediscovery of ethnic roots, that they hoped to induce in their audience. another … Mark Twain Circle of America. Chava, delivering the coup de grâce, intermarries. But what exactly did that Jewishness consist of? Like all Talmudic sages, Tevye shows his genius in the commentary: the Yiddish paraphrases or retorts that he invariably adds. Preparing the show, he immersed himself in sources, did anthropological fieldwork at Hasidic weddings, got his father talking about his childhood in Russia, and called up recollections of his tiny, pious, Yiddish-speaking grandmother. off for germany cxvii. 7. He catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror—and thinks that he’s still in the station, dreaming. Like Joyce, though with a lot less self-importance, Sholem Aleichem sought to forge the uncreated conscience of his race. His characters, while marvelously individuated, are always “one of those people”: who get above themselves, or run away from their own shadow, or are forever being tricked—tailors, teachers, petty merchants, little men. (“ ‘The dead do not praise God’—and why should they?”) He doesn’t talk to the Lord. "I touched the bell and this talk ensued", “‘None that have gone before me knew what love was, none that come after me will ever know what happiness is.’”, Part IV. In other words, there’s human nature. Almost all of them spoke Yiddish, and more than half of them were literate. The key figure was Jerome Robbins, Fiddler’s director, choreographer, and presiding control freak and genius. It doesn’t matter, while you’re laughing, that the butt is you. Man and boy, Sholem Aleichem’s Jews aspire to the wider world, even, sometimes, to the world of the goyim—a bit of art, a bit of gelt, a bit of air, a bit of mental freedom—only to be remanded, sooner or later, into the custody of the cheder, the matchmaker, and the wife. But the heart of his achievement was his Yiddish itself. - Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878 I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language. There was nothing cynical, it should be said, about the enterprise. "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth." A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain — Appendix D. THE AWFUL GERMAN LANGUAGE. Proceeding year by year and work by work (and there was a huge amount of work—stories, novels, sketches, satires, essays, plays), Dauber runs his magnifying glass too closely to the surface to give us a coherent picture of the whole. Fiddler had been instrumental in creating a new form of Jewish identity for the post-assimilationist generation: the “cultural” Jew whose ethnic expression consisted of eating bagels, going to synagogue twice a year, and listening to Fiddler on the hi-fi. — Proverbs xxxii, 7. Nochem was also both observant and a Maskil, a devotee of the Jewish Enlightenment, with its love of European culture. Hodel follows a revolutionary to Siberia. “I absorbed it, drank it in,” he wrote of what he learned, “let it sink to a place deep within me, quietly building up a rich & glorious storehouse of cherished sacred and touching knowledge—all stored away—deep & away.” Recapturing his childhood intimations of a worthy heritage, he cannot help but be the little boy again.