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

and exclaims, ‘Now it's time.’”
    Such tales are usually told by Jews in mixed company, and they tend to make gentiles uncomfortable. But that is their point—to discomfit the outsider. Somerset Maugham describes a relevant incident in “The Alien Corn.” A wealthy Jew, Fred Robenstein, mimics the accent and ghetto mannerisms of a pushcart peddler until his listeners are weak with laughter. But the listener cannot join in the amusement: “I was not quite sure of a sense of humor that made such cruel fun of his own race.”
    Freud's disciple Theodor Reik explains that kind of uneasy comedy in a paper entitled
Jewish Wit.
In desperate times, “the Jew sharpens, so to speak, the dagger which he takes out of his enemy's hand, stabs himself, then returns it gallantly to the anti-Semite with the silent reproach: ‘Now see whether you can do as well.’” In less threatening situations, the humor acts “to bring relaxation in the ardor of battle with the seen and with the invisible enemy; to attract as well as repel him; and to conceal one's self. Jewish wit hides as much as it discloses. Like the seraph in the Temple of the Lord, it covers its face with two of its wings.”
    THE FOURTH INGREDIENT is Judaism's other language, Yiddish. The primary tongue of the Jews is Hebrew, the language of the Bible and of prayer, and therefore sanctified. Yiddish is the common speech of the ever mobile people. It begins as a kind of slang, stirring Old High German with backchat from the Western European ghettos. As the Jews are forced to the Middle Countries, then north and east, they pick up phrases from the Romance languages and Slavic tongues. Although Yiddish is written in phonetic Hebrew, it is pronounced with greater expression and a more musical cadence. In time the irony, spirit, and rhythms of this polyglot vernacular begin to shape Jewish culture.
    Condensed folktales spring up. Not quite jokes, not quite anecdotes, they find a home in the wry, ironic attitude and rapid pulse of Yiddish:
Two Jews decide to assassinate the czar. They bring sharp instruments and conceal themselves behind trees in a park where the Russian leader takes his daily stroll. Hours pass and the czar fails to appear. At sundown one of them worries: “I don't know what's wrong. I hope nothing happened to him.”
One Jew sighs to another, “It would be best never to have been born.” His friend agrees: “True, but how many are that lucky? Maybe one in a hundred thousand.”
Two Jews are sentenced to be executed by a firing squad. The captain offers Sol and Mendel blindfolds. Sol accepts. Mendel spits in the officer's face: “Keep your lousy blindfold!” Sol demurs: “Mendel, don't make trouble!”
As a magnificent funeral procession passes by the
shtetl
gates an old man weeps. “You're a relative?” asks an astonished friend. “No.” “Then how come you're crying?” “That's why.”
    In time a literature rises from the chatter-poems, romantic stories, moral fables. By the middle of the nineteenth century Yiddish has developed from a kind of enriched patois, claimed one poet, into “the language which will ever bear witness to the violence and murder inflicted on us, bears the marks of our expulsion from land to land, the language which absorbed the wails of the fathers, the laments of thegenerations, the poison and bitterness of history, the language whose precious jewels are undried, uncongealed Jewish tears.”
    Not everyone agrees with this assessment—including some very prominent Jews. In his lavish
omnium gatherum, The Joys of Yiddish,
Leo Rosten notes that from the start purists derided Yiddish for its “bastard” origins, its “vulgar” idioms, its “hybrid” vocabulary. “Germans called it a ‘barbarous argot'; worse still, Hebraicists called it uncivilized cant.”
    An intense battle gets under way. On one side are the pedants who want Hebrew to be the one and only Jewish language—and their unwitting allies, the