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The Gift of Sholom Aleichem
- Abstract
One of Sholom Aleichem’s plays is called “It’s Hard To Be A Jew.” When Solomon Rabinowitz made his first appearance as a writer, it was even harder to be a Jewish humorist—if not in real life, certainly in literature. One of the most original of Jewish writers began as an imitator of Mendele Mocher Sforim, the great moralist of the Haskalah period—the period of the “Enlightenment,” when part of the Eastern European Jews joined the movement for modern European culture. And for years the first-rate humorist remained a second-rate satirist.
When Sholom Aleichem began to write, the earnest militancy of the Haskalah period was still strong. Literature was still “the temple of literature,” as it had always been in Jewish tradition. It was a serious business: it was learning and moral uplift and discipline. Haskalah satire ridiculed people in order to improve them; no one suggested publicly that it was a healthy thing merely to laugh. The young Sholom Aleichem felt it neessar4 to adopt the serious and didactic tone of his elders, and his wonderful humor was reserved for private use, so to speak, in his correspondence. In his early years, his letters make far more entertaining reading than his uninspired efforts as a writer of “serious” literature.
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