Nit dos dorf, nit di kretshme: Speaking About Jewish Taverns in the Works of Sholem Aleichem

In Eastern-Europe, for centuries before Sholem Aleichem was born, Jews traditionally held positions of tavern keepers.7 Unsurprisingly, representations of Jewish-run taverns in literature from the region abound.8 In Adam Mickiewicz’s Polish epic poem, Pan Tadeusz (1834) the architecture of the tavern run by the Jewish innkeeper, Jankiel, is personified to represent the Jew himself: “In fine, the tottering inn you might compare\ To some old Jew who nods his head in prayer:\ The roof’s his cap, his beard the untidy thatch,\ The dirty, smoky walls his frock-coat match,\ The ornaments the cyces on his brows.” ^{7 7} Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, trans. Kenneth Mackenzie, (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1992), 162. The author probably meant “tefillin on his brow.”

The Russian-Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol, was one of the main literary influences on Sholem Aleichem. ^{8 8} Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 153-156. In his story “Viy” (1835), Gogol gives the following description of a ‘Jewish tavern’:

Despite the hot July day, everybody got out of the wagon and went into the low, dingy room where the Jew tavern keeper rushed with signs of joy to welcome his old acquaintances. Under his coat skirts the Jew brought several pork sausages and, having placed them on the table immediately turned away from this Talmud-forbidden fruit. They all settled around the table. A clay mug appeared in front of each guest… [S]ince people in Little Russia, once they got a bit merry, are sure to start kissing each other or weeping, the whole place was soon filled with kissing… ^{9 9} Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (New York: Vintage Classics, 2011), 168-169. “Little Russia” is an old name for the Ukraine.

In this spatial setting of a “low, dingy room,” we meet the Jewish tavern keeper. He is well-known in the region – he has “old acquaintances” who he welcomes with “joy” at his establishment. He runs his business well, with prompt service. However, his Jewish distinctiveness is clear both to him and to his non-Jewish customers. For him there looms the danger of consuming the non-kosher foods he provides to his customers, described here as “Talmud-forbidden fruit.” Another danger is sexual temptation: drinking is expected to make the place “merry” and “filled with kissing.” For his clients, who include Cossacks and a Christian theologian on his way to combat a pagan witch, but no Jews, he never ceases to be the other, referred to by his customers as the “the Jew.” ^{10 10} The Jewish tavern keeper also appears in Ukrainian songs as the object of hostility, the cause of peasant impoverishment. See Robert A Rothstein, “ ‘Geyt a yid in shenkl arayn’: Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness,” The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore, and Literature, Fifth Collection, ed. David Goldberg (1993): 245.

Speaking about the Tavern in Modern Jewish Literature

From its earliest stages, we find depictions of the tavern space in modern Jewish literature. Drinking and taverns played a prominent role in Hasidic literature, since its founder and the protagonist of many of its stories, the Besht, was himself once a tavern keeper. ^{11 11} Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern: Jews, Liquor, and Life in the Kingdom of Poland, 39. We also find it in Joseph Perl’s anti-Hasidic epistolary satire, The Revealer of Secrets (1819), written in both Hebrew and Yiddish. The tavern here functions as another tool in Perl’s arsenal to prove the debauched and corrupted nature of the Hasidim. It is part of their terrain. In letter 14, the Hasidic protagonist reports of an attempt to conceal the identity of the melamed (teacher) who helped the Hasidim cover their tracks in order to hide from the landlord (the porets), after they tried to steal an anti-Hasidic book from him. The landlord’s servant, recognizing the melamed, is persuaded by a friend of the Hasidim to go to a “shenk hoyz” (tavern house) run by another Hasid, the “shenkir,” who “gave them fish and a few glasses of mead. They ate and drank to their heart’s content, and while the servant was drinking, the melamed fled to the cellar and from the cellar to the outside.” After the servant noticed the escape, the tavern keeper gave him two rubles from the charity box (“the alms box of Rabbi Meyer Balanes”) to keep him quiet. The Hasidim also assumed the servant wouldn’t talk out of fear his master would find out that he was drinking in a tavern while he should have been fulfilling his duties. ^{12 12} Dov Taylor, Joseph Perl’s Revealer of Secrets:The First Hebrew Novel (Boulder, CO, 1997), 40-41; see also Letter 5 in which Perl mocks Hasidim for their excessive drinking (ibid, 29). For the original text see Joseph Perl, Sefer Megale Temirin, 1-2, critically edited and introduced by Jonatan Meir, with an afterword by Dan Miron (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2013).

The common stereotype held by Eastern-European Jews of the gentile working man who comes home drunk and is violent towards his wife appears throughout modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, from Peretz to Bialik and beyond. For example, Bialik’s Hebrew poem “Jacob and Esau” (1922), itself an adaptation of a popular Yiddish song “Geyt a goy in shenkl arayn,” includes stanzas that alternate between negative depictions of the drunken goy (“To drink he must\ For that what makes him a goy”) and the pious Jew (“Wakes up early to pray\ Gives his creator praise and glory.”). ^{13 13} See: Hayim Nahman Bialik, Ha-Shirim, ed. Avner Holtzman (Or Yehudah, lsr., 2004), 437. About Yiddish songs of drunkenness, which often include ”drunken Jews,“ see Rothstein, “ ‘Geyt a yid in shenkl arayn’: Yiddish Songs of Drunkenness,” 243-62; and in Z. Skuditski Folklor-lider: naye materialn-zamlung (Folklore Songs: New Collection of Materials), vol. 2 (Moscow: Ernes, 1936), 259-270. Bialik, whose father ran a tavern, very sharply contrasted the piety of his father to the piggish drunkenness of his customers in his poem “Avi” (“My Father,” 1928):

Between the pure gate and the tainted shuttled the cycle of my days,\ the sacred wallowed in the gross, and innocence in squalor,\ In the cave of human swine, amidst the foul pollution of the tavern,\ through vapors of detested draught, and sickening mists of smoke,\ behind the casks of liquor, above his yellow-parchment book\ appeared to me my father’s face, the skull of the martyr\…\ around us roared the drunkards and the gluttons splurged in their vomit,\ monsters with leprous faces and streams of defiling tongues… ^{14 14} Bernhard Frank, Modern Hebrew Poetry (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1980), 5-7.

The bitingly sharp distinctions that Bialik drew between his pious Jewish tavern keeper father and his non-Jewish clientele are consistent with his Jewish-separatist, Zionist commitments, which Sholem Aleichem shared in theory but not in his finest art. Amongst Jewish-socialist writers, we can also find the detesting, social-moralistic attitude towards the tavern as the pinnacle of spatial corruption. These views appear most vividly in I. L. Peretz’s anti-capitalist Yiddish poem “Meyn nisht” (“Do Not Think”; 1906). In its first stanza, the tavern serves as a metaphor for the corrupt and unequal economic system. The speaker repeatedly warns the haves in the aftermath of the failed 1905 revolution that their judgment day is yet to come:

The repeated warning in this poem “Do not think the world is…” appears in each of its three stanzas, where each time the noun changes between “tavern,” “stock market,” and “lawlessness.”17 Peretz’s moralistic way of speaking about the tavern failed to see the potential subversive elements of the tavern space, as William Blake has seen it a hundred years before him, and, as I will show, as it was viewed by Peretz’s contemporary Sholem Aleichem.

Enchanted Inns and the Fall of the Small Jewish Town

Taverns play a pivotal role in one of Sholem Aleichem’s best-known stories, “Der ferkishefter shnayder” (“The Enchanted Tailor”; 1900). In the story, an impoverished tailor, who bears the unusual name Shimen-Eli Shma-Kolenu (in Hebrew the first part means “hear [or be heard] my God,” second part means “hear our voice”), is sent by his bossy wife Tzipe-Beyle-Reyze to the neighboring town to buy a goat. His small hometown of Zlodiyevke (a recurring place name in other stories by Sholem Aleichem), and its surrounding grotesquely-named towns like Khaplapovitsh (khaplap means haphazardly), and Kozodoyevke (the neighboring town he is headed to; kozo literarily means “goat”), are all part of a fantastical Ukrainian geography created by Sholem Aleichem as part of what David Roskies termed a stylized folk narrative. ^{15 15} Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 160-167.

Shimen-Eli is a comical figure, expressed by his speech which is full of misquotations and twisted expressions. ^{16 16} Roskies, “Call It Jewspeak: On the Evolution of Speech in Modern Yiddish Writing,” 248-250. He is no world traveler. Leaving his familiar shtetl space for the next town to get the goat is a novel experience for him. On the way, he has to withstand the dangers of the chaotic outdoors. He meets his biggest challenge on his journey when he stops at his cousin Dodi’s tavern. This tavern is introduced in the beginning of chapter three as follows:

This tavern, a country inn located midway between the twin shtetls, mystically attracts travelers from town to town. There are hints of the dubious businesses Dodi does on the side that provide him with extra income beyond what he earns from running a successful inn: “[He] never deal[s] with stolen goods themselves, but seems awfully chummy with all the infamous robbers” (idem). Dodi is wealthier than his cousin, a situation which contributes to the social-economic confrontation that drives the plot, and, as Dan Miron points out, eventually leads to Shimen-Eli’s mental devastation and death.21

After their first interaction, Dodi decides to take revenge on his cousin for taunting him for being an unlearned Jew. He tricks Shimen-Eli by secretly replacing the she-goat for a billy goat and vice versa in each of the three visits the tailor pays him during his trips. The tailor’s stupidity and his affection for drink make it easier for Dodi to prank him. Sholem Aleichem was borrowing common stereotypes from Polish literature that represented the tavern keeper as possessing devilish characteristics, being fond of trickery, with his tavern located “at the edge of a boundary.” ^{18 18} See Opalski, The Jewish Tavern-Keeper, 11-15; and Horvath, “The Tavern As a Place of Communication in Hungarian Jewish Literature,” 282-283.

Like Sholem Aleichem’s most famous character, Tevye, Dodi’s location in the countryside amongst non-Jews rather than in the “Jewish” shtetl, metaphorically means confronting a modern-urban set of issues and conflicts. Dodi is a rich and “connected” urbanite compared to the poverty stricken, unworldly shtetl dwellers. Sholem Aleichem deals with this set of modern issues through the stylized folksy setting that is so essential to the esthetic pleasure a reader derives from the text.

Dodi is thus parallel to the acculturated urban Jew, who is unlearned in Jewish affairs, but materially rich. Roskies termed Dodi “the most demonic character in Sholem Aleichem’s storytelling corpus,” because of his big, hairy ogre-like physical appearance, and him being a prankster. ^{19 19} Roskies, Bridge of Longing, 167. But it is doubtful whether Dodi is more devilish than the New-York business-man Mr. Baraban, the narrator of “A Story with a Greenhorn” (1916). In a righteous tone, Baraban tells a gruesome story of how he cheated a new immigrant out of his pretty wife and fortune. At least Dodi had a sympathetic motive for his actions (paying back the tailor for his insults) rather than being motivated by sheer greed and envy.

In the story, Dodi is paralleled to Hodel the Excise Lady, who runs a tavern in Zlodiyevke (termed “shenkel,” a small tavern, as opposed to Dodi’s “kretshme”). Like Dodi, she is also a connected figure, though she is connected to government officials and to the working people of the town rather than to the underworld. Her place serves as a working-class meeting ground, where class struggles are played out. We meet her at a later stage in the story (chapter 10), when Shimen-Eli, trying to cope with his goat-crisis, goes to her tavern to drown his troubles with schnapps and to seek advice.

Hodel tells him a parallel version of his escaping-goat affairs, involving her aunt Perl trying to get hold of an allusive ball of cotton. Her tavern enhances the sexual drama at the core of the story, which includes many male\female contrasts: he-goat\she goat, Shimen-Eli\Tzipe-Beyle-Reyze, etc. Shimen-Eli dismisses her story by misquoting the Talmudic verse “nashim da’atan kala” (women are light-minded), wrongly attributing it to the Bible. His mistake serves as proof of his ignorance and thus of his own “femininity,” in the context of traditional Jewish patriarchal society in which women were not permitted to study sanctified texts. For in Hodel’s story lays a warning for the tailor himself – the cotton ball began chasing her aunt, until she eventually suffered a mental breakdown.

Whether it is the enchanted country inn or the working-people’s shtetl-tavern – both taverns embody the nihilist, chaotic terrain in Sholem Aleichem’s works, a thesis established by Miron. He sees in “The Enchanted Tailor” an important first step in the anti-progressive, pessimistic trend in his works. ^{20 20} Miron, “Afterword,” 237-248.

In the monologue “A mentsh fun Buenos-Ayres” (“A Man from Buenos-Aires”; 1909) Sholem Aleichem gives voice to his most immoral and ruthless character, worse than Baraban and Dodi: that of a top operate in an international sex slavery crime syndicate. Although this story takes place in a train, and is part of the collection “Rail-Road Stories,” the space here functions in effect as a tavern on wheels. The naïve narrator in the story tells at first how he and the man from Buenos-Aires warmed up to each other:

Thus, with brandy, beers, and cigars, consumed in the railroad-station buffets along the way (the pair makes two more buffet-stops; the passengers even receive a booklet with the mapping of the station-buffets), the man from Buenos-Aires created the spatial atmosphere of a familiar taproom that puts his interlocutor at ease. This setup of generosity, of plying his listener with liquor and treats prepares the narrator to hear the man’s side of the story. It is one of several methods used by the wealthier man from abroad in his attempts to win over and legitimize his abusive and non-normative line of work in the eyes of the narrator.

In another famous monologue set in an urban modern space entitled “Yoysef” (“Joseph”; 1905), Sholem Aleichem again stages the modern conflict in a lively public eating place. In this instance, it is a small Jewish restaurant (“a idishe restoratsye”; perhaps parallel to a “Jewish tavern”), in a big Eastern-European city. The owner is a beautiful Jewish woman, a widow. Her daughter works alongside her as a waitress in the restaurant which functions as an underground meeting place for political radicals referred to as the “yenkelekh.” Here, a nameless, self-perceived bourgeois gentleman tells the story of his unrequited love to the attractive young waitress and of his fascination with the radical social atmosphere of the restaurant. The text doesn’t explicitly state that alcohol is served at the restaurant, but it also doesn’t state the contrary, and the restaurant serves food that one often consumes with wine or other forms of alcohol.

The story’s subheading “Story of a ‘Gentleman’ ” refers to the speaker’s nickname amongst the radicals; a name that underlines his strangeness amongst them. The speaker’s attraction to the radicals, and in particular to their charismatic leader Joseph, can be explained in homo-erotic terms, or by the possibility that the speaker is in fact a government agent, or a combination of the two. ^{22 22} See Dan Miron, Mipeh la’ozen: Sihot umah shavot ‘al omanut hamonolog shel Shalom ‘Alekhem (Ramat Gan, Israel: Afik, 2012), 179-220. The speaker gives the following description of the restaurant, including some hints at why he frequents it:

The speaker wants to create the impression that he is one of Heinrich Heine’s modern acculturated Jewish protagonists, whose one element they hold on to from their Jewishness is the cuisine of their heritage for its divine tastes, with a special fondness for cholent. But his fluent Yiddish, to name one example, suggests his Jewish identity is still stronger than he’d like to admit. This restaurant provides him with everything he needs as a single man in the big city: a hot meal, a connection to his roots, and a double, or possibly triple, sexual fantasy – he can feast his eyes on an attractive mother-and-daughter pair while feasting on tasty and familiar foods. The fact that the speaker, who brags about how well he does in business, chooses to frequent such a low-brow establishment says a lot about him and his motives. But more interesting for our purposes is the way Sholem Aleichem’s narrator speaks about an underground hot spot for Jewish socialists, spiked with dangerous and sexy elements, an attractive place where activists would meet and plan “konspireyshens” to overthrow the regime.

When the authorities get their hands on Joseph (whether because of the narrator’s snitching or otherwise), the radicals stay away from their favorite meeting place. Joseph’s arrest also affects the mother and daughter a great deal, because of the daughter’s infatuation with Joseph, and because of their political kinship. By the time Joseph is hanged, the underground restaurant had already closed down and vanished into thin air, and the mother, daughter, and the activists all fled the scene.

From the perspective of a bourgeois narrator, Sholem Aleichem provided an enduring portrayal of a popular revolutionary meeting place. It also contrasts starkly with the bourgeois gentlemen’s club where the narrator sometimes visits to have a drink and play cards. This portrayal is also unique compared to those found in Peretz’s work. Peretz was close to radical political circles in real life, but in his writing, he tended towards a moralistic condemnation of a tavern, as previously noted.

Conclusion

Analyzing the role of the tavern in Sholem Aleichem’s works we see how he was able to utilize this public drinking institution in various ways. Whether it was the country inn in a stylized pre-modern landscape; a railroad station-buffets that served cigars, liquor and beer; or an urban meeting ground for political radicals – common to all these dynamic spatial representations was the ways he used them in his narratives as a perfect setting for performing “Jewspeak.” He took Perl’s comedic tavern a step further, and liberated it of any didactic message or moral lesson regarding taverns and their customers. In his work, Jews were a natural part of the tavern, capable of vocally dominating it, both as owner and as clientele. They were not reduced to mere others who run taverns as they were in Polish and Russian literature. His taverns were not created to serve any ideology, and were not condemned as a Hasidic institution, a goyish one, or as a metaphor for capitalism. He was thus able to extract from this space the raw potential that it encapsulates: an exciting, revolutionary, enchanting and intriguing space, the ideal setting for defying and blurring convenient boundaries; a place where the chaos and insanity of modernity speaks itself to the fullest.