Read Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America for Free Online

disloyal, usurers, cosmopolites, plotters. Since they have no way to win this age-old battle for unconditional acceptance, a vast collective neurosis settles in. Sigmund Freud detects it in himself and others; hethinks it may be embedded in the genes. “Though we may admit for the memory-traces in our archaic inheritance we have so far no stronger proof than those memories evoked by analytical work,” he writes in
Moses and Monotheism,
“yet this proof seems convincing enough to postulate such a state of affairs.” It is an odd endorsement of Carl Jung's theories, which Freud so often opposes. Jung's monograph on analytical psychology posits a “collective unconscious” that constitutes “the residue of the life of the ancestors.” Whether the doctors are correct or not remains debatable to this day. But there is no arguing the psychology of apprehension among the world's Jewry, perhaps inherited, perhaps acquired in early childhood. If it is a source of unhappiness, it is also responsible for their social cohesion and their urge to make a place for themselves, however prohibitive the cost.
    THE THIRD INGREDIENT is humor. Just as the word “laughter” is buried in the word “slaughter,” so the tragedies of Jewish history hide a subversive wit. We know that even in Auschwitz jokes made the rounds; common sense tells us that a people, no matter how oppressed, will find moments of humor in the long day's journey. Many times the Bible instructs the Hebrews to take harps, trumpets, cymbals, and lyres, and make “a joyful noise unto the Lord in all the earth.” Surely that noise must have been accompanied by merriment. In the postbiblical era, there are many descriptions of Jewish celebrations accompanied by hilarity. And in the Middle Ages, a new Jewish occupation is born: the
badkhn,
Hebrew for jester. A sixteenth-century poem speaks of a merchant who “danced so merrily/with the beautiful maidens/that he became thirsty/he forgot all his cares/to the jesters he nodded/that they stop not too soon.” Regulations regarding the Jews of Hesse in 1690 prohibit “the custom in vogue to date of riding to meet the bridegroom—except for waiters and jesters.” The method of compensation has not varied from that time to this: a Jewish wedding song of the eighteenth century pleads, “Give also gifts today to the clowns and to the musicians.”
    The roots of modern comedy lie in the Jewish past. “The merrymaker did not occupy a prominent social position,” notes historian Ezekiel Lifschutz. “He was feared on account of the rhymes which he freely utilized to his own purposes and frequently caused embarrassment.People exploited his friendship for their personal advantage, they were amused by his apt parables, paraphrases and merry songs and then proceeded to censure him as a sinner.”
    Comic stories, spread orally through the centuries, eventually catch Freud's attention. In a letter to his colleague William Fleiss in 1897, he writes, “Let me confess that I have recently made a collection of deeply significant Jewish jokes,” psychical productions that he finds analogous to dreams. Some of the most meaningful stories, he goes on, are those concerned with Jews hiding under layers of pretension: “The doctor, asked to look after the Baroness at her confinement, pronounces that the moment has not come, and suggests to the Baron that in the meantime they should have a game of cards in the next room. After a while a cry of pain from the Baroness strikes the ears of the two men: ‘
Ah, mondieu, queje suffre!
’ Her husband springs up, but the doctor signs for him to sit down: ‘It's nothing. Let's get on with the game!' A little later there are again sounds from the pregnant woman: ‘
Mein Gott, mein Gott was fur Schmerzen!
’ ‘Aren't you going in, Professor?' asks the Baron. ‘No, no, it's not time yet.’ At last there comes from next door an unmistakable cry of ‘
Oy vay!
’ The doctor throws down his cards