In contrast, the modernizing Jew, who abandoned those traditional rituals, regains in the tavern and its parallels a new set of experiences to replace them. If the traditional Jews in the small Jewish town in Sholem Aleichem’s work “experience the transcendent power of Jewish myth” through the holiday cycle and its rituals, then for him it was there and then that “the carnival aspect of life broke.”ĭavid G Roskies, A Bridge of Longing: The Lost Art of Yiddish Storytelling (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 167.
– then the tavern world offers all that plus a carnivalesque atmosphere. Shachar Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How cafés created modern Jewish culture (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 310. If the café is the “quintessential modern diasporic Jewish space… a thirdspace that mediates between reality and imagination, inside and outside, past and present… without the false promise of homecoming” This space corresponds with the way Shachar Pinsker used Edward Soja’s term “thirdspace” to analyze the role of cafés in the creation of modern Jewish culture. Sholem Aleichem used the tavern in his writings as a spatial literary device that juxtaposed traditional and modern sets of ideas and behaviors. While drinking inside the Jewish home is an integral part of the religious ritual, drinking at the tavern can be a gateway to sexual permissiveness and revolutionary politics. The tavern, a public drinking space, fundamentally challenges core familial and religious institutions, rendering it a threat to the main ingredients that constitute Jewish identity. ), he created a unique spatial setting that symbolically mitigated the shock of modernity for the Yiddish public. Roskies, “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing,” Poetics Today 35, no. It argues that through his masterful, talkative Yiddish prose (or to use the term Roskies coined for Yiddish literature’s emulation of the spoken word: “Jewspeak”ĭescribed by Roskies as “an essential expression of the once-living folk.” See David G. Through the lens of Sholem Aleichem’s writings, this essay explores the ways in which the tavern, and its urban-modern parallels, function in his works. Also memorable is the amusing dialogue in The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl involving the innkeeper of the most beautiful (and also the only) inn in Zhmerynka in which Menakhem-Mendel’s dream of becoming a matchmaker is crushed.
His early novel, Children’s Game, features a character with the traditionally Jewish occupation of tavern keeper. Wandering Stars (New York: Viking, 2009), 153. Sholem Aleichem, Blonzende shtern (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1920), 198 trans. In his novel Wandering Stars, the tavern is the place where the Jews of Vienna prefer to go to “gather for a beer, smoke cigars, and listen to someone singing…” rather than go to the Yiddish theater. In Motl, the Cantor’s Son, the tavern is one of the stations that Motl and his family must endure on their way to America.
Taverns, and similar public gathering places, play various roles in the works of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916).