Uncategorized – Page 15 – From Under the Fig Tree

The right name

joselitAugust 14, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

I’ve been called many things in my day: Jocelyn, Jennifer, Jen, Joselit Weissman and on occasion (and hopefully in jest) even Gender Weissman Joselit, a name designed to highlight my stalwart embrace of feminism in matters large and small. Little wonder, then, that I sympathize with the fate that has recently befallen the celebrated man of Yiddish letters, Sholem Aleichem.

Thanks to Joseph Dorman’s affecting and insightful new film, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, its eponymous subject is experiencing something of a new lease on life. At the very least, his name has probably appeared in print more times in the past month than in the previous 90-odd years since his demise in 1916.

It’s a reflection of our unfamiliarity with the literary protocols and linguistic conventions of an earlier era that we stumble when it comes to the man’s name.

The first time the creator of such enduring characters as Menachem Mendel and Tevye the Dairyman is referred to in an article, he is properly identified as Sholem Aleichem. So far, so good.

It’s the second reference that wreaks havoc. Nine times out of 10, he appears as “Aleichem,” as if Sholem were his first name and Aleichem his surname when, in fact, Sholem Aleichem is not, and has never been, the actual name of a person but rather a familiar Jewish greeting, the equivalent of “hello.” Sholem Aleichem was a pen name – and a rather warm and witty one, at that: an in-joke of the highest, and most intimate, order.

Those in the know do not take kindly to fiddling with his literary signature. As Sophie Stein, the granddaughter of Joseph Stein, the playwright of Fiddler on the Roof, learned the hard way, one messes with Sholem Aleichem’s name at one’s peril.

In a recent article in The Paris Review, which was prompted by Dorman’s film, Stein wrote about what Sholem Aleichem meant to her and her family. Whatever keen insights she may (or may not) have brought to bear mattered not a whit compared to the hue and cry that accompanied her repeated use of “Aleichem,” when referring to what she thought was the writer’s last name. Stein committed the ultimate onomastic faux pas.

The barrage of criticism prompted Ms. Stein to change her tune – and her references – and in later online versions of her text she called the writer by his full and rightful pen name.

That was the proper, and respectful, thing to do. Now, if only the New York Times would follow suit.

Update: Mea culpa

Much to my chagrin, I’ve just learned that I, too, committed an onomastic faux pas when writing last week about Ms. Stein’s piece in The Paris Review.

Instead of calling the author by her proper name, which is Sadie, I called her Sophie. Oh, the irony!

My deepest apologies.

Dancing with the stars

joselitAugust 7, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

A few days ago, I was in the process of retrieving my book bag from the trunk of a colleague’s car when the hood of the trunk came down suddenly and swiftly on my head, leaving me momentarily stunned. Like the characters in countless cartoons, I saw stars.

The stars, in turn, gave way to a dull ache and to a nagging anxiety about the lingering consequences of my encounter.

Barack Obama 50th birthday — Flickr/VA Democrats.

I tell you all this, because I actually thought I was seeing things when, in reading about President Obama’s 50th birthday bash, I came across the following sentence from the Chicago Sun Times: “The night was balmy, and when dinner was done, a DJ spun dance tunes—‘like at a Bar Mitzvah,’ said one guest.”

But, no, I didn’t misread or misapprehend or misinterpret. There it was in black and white: the bar mitzvah, that millennial religious rite of passage, has been firmly associated in the American public imagination with a dance party.

Is it a measure of how far the Jews have come in contemporary America that one of their most distinctive, and age-old, rituals now stands in for a modern, and widely shared, form of partying? Should we wring our hands or use them to applaud?

All I know is that my head hurts.

The more, the merrier

joselitJuly 31, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

M.A.s are the new B.A.s, the New York Times declared just the other day in its latest survey of goings-on within the world of higher education. The road to marketability is paved with lots of new master’s programs, it noted, singling out Rutgers’ recent decision to establish an M.A. in Jewish Studies as a case in point.

diplomas — Diplomas. Flickr/Sergio Rivas.

The tone of the piece, though, was something else again. It was hard to figure out where the Times stood, especially when it came to graduate programs in Jewish or Judaic studies.

On the one hand, it devoted a significant amount of coverage to the Rutgers initiative, which would suggest that it approved.

But then, sentences such as “Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement” suggest otherwise, raising the possibility that the newspaper’s stance was far more critical than welcoming.

No matter. Any venture which contributes to a deepening of knowledge, the sharpening of critical ways of thinking and the creation of a community of individuals for whom ideas are of paramount importance can only be applauded. And if, along the way, said venture successfully enhances the marketability of its participants, so much the better.

Call me starry-eyed and naïve, but I can’t help thinking that, whatever form they take – traditional or newfangled – M.A. programs in Jewish studies end up being good for the Jews.

On the rails

joselitJuly 25, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

The sight of Jewish men, clad in full ritual garb, davening, or praying, in public is not new to me or, for that matter, to anyone who has flown to Israel via El Al. But in my all years of shuttling back and forth between New York and D.C., I’ve never, ever, seen anyone daven on Amtrak.

Until today, that is. I looked up from my laptop and there he was -- on the 8:10 to Washington. His tefillin bag plopped on the seat beside him, a male passenger on the right side of 40 was holding on to his siddur (prayerbook) with one hand and to his ticket with the other, trying all the while to stand upright and still as the train swayed to and fro.

The prayerful passenger also seemed to be coordinating his devotions with those of the conductor, timing the first with the second so that he wouldn’t be interrupted.

As I (surreptitiously) looked on, I couldn’t help wonder what Sholem Aleichem would have made of the scene. The author, among other things, of the droll and amusing Railroad Stories, which situated East European Jewry’s encounters with modernity aboard a series of train trips, he would have relished the seeming incongruity of it all.

Sholom Aleichem is currently the subject of a warmhearted and incisive documentary, Sholom Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness. Be sure to see the film, even if it entails getting on a train.

Field trip

joselitJuly 20, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Traipsing around the Lower East Side on a beastly hot summer day, I had lots of company. The streets were filled with tourists, shoppers and the cool cats who now call that downtown neighborhood their home. Most visitors, I suspect, were in search of the fabled hipster haven that the Lower East Side has become of late. As for me, I was in search of history.

Lower East Side tenement fire escapes — Fire escapes on the Lower East Side near the Tenement Museum. Flickr/manyhighways.

It’s hard to find. The Lower East Side, that “great ghetto” of the late 19th and early 20th century, is now a living and breathing palimpsest of past and present. Sleek glass condominiums nestle, cheek by jowl, with the area’s characteristic brick tenements, while Katz’s Delicatessen, whose stock in trade is a hot pastrami sandwich, is just yards away from il laboratio del gelato, a bright, clean, laboratory-like space that purveys all manner of gelati, from pink pepper tarragon to thai chili chocolate.

Yes, the streets are still filled with signs that dangle in the wind from a metal chain. That’s not something you see too much of uptown. But they’re no longer hand-lettered or written in Yiddish and Hebrew. Instead, crisp, stylish graphics in English beckon passersby.

The multi-layers that constitute the Lower East Side put me in mind of an equally layered short story, “A Cycle of Manhattan,” that was first published in 1919, when that one square mile of downtown real estate was bursting at its seams with Jewish immigrants. Written by Thyra Samter Winslow, one of the bright young things of the interwar years, whom no one reads any more (but should), the story chronicles the deracination of an immigrant family.

Starting out in a New York tenement neighborhood as the Rosenheimers, they steadily make their way out of the ghetto. By the time they reach Riverside Drive, they have jettisoned their past and acquired a new name – Ross – in the process. Their son, an artist, rejects the bourgeois comforts and conceits of his parents. In search of authenticity and truth, he ends up living in a downtown tenement. But not in any old downtown tenement. In a wonderful denouement, this one turns out to be the very same tenement which his parents and grandparents had inhabited when they first arrived in America.

The life cycle of that fictional family, and doubtless that of their real life counterparts, parallels the life cycle of the city. And still does.

Cornerstone

joselitJuly 12, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

In New York, change is the coin of the realm. Nothing remains intact or in one place for very long. Businesses come and go, neighborhoods rise and fall, synagogues and churches shutter their doors and move away.

But not Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (or “KJ,” as it’s commonly called), a stalwart and true urban presence on East 85th Street since 1902.

A raging fire claimed the life of its dignified limestone and brick building last night, leaving me, along with thousands of New Yorkers, with an acute sense of loss.

While I’ve attended services on occasion, my relationship to KJ happens to be professional rather than personal. Years ago, I wrote a book about modern Orthodox Jewry in which the history of the congregation figures prominently. One of the book’s chapters, in fact, contains a description of the building’s cornerstone-laying ceremony, which took place 109 years ago.

Spirits ran high that day, the sources tell us in what now makes for painful reading. There was a band and bunting and the usual complement of official dignitaries. A “vast concourse of Jewish citizens” also turned out to participate in the proceedings. Everyone on hand agreed that Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun was the “most modern and beautiful orthodox synagogue in New York.”

May it rise again.

Summer in the city

joselitJuly 6, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Now that the 4th of July has come and gone, summer in all its glory bears down upon us. By rights, I should be on a beach somewhere, chasing the waves. Instead, I’m at the library, chasing footnotes.

My neck is buried in that infernal contraption known as a microfilm reader, my eyes ache from squinting at the fine print of a 19th century newspaper, my fingers tirelessly tap, tap, tap away compiling information -- and I’m in my element, happy as a clam.

Academics liked to joke that there were three truly great things about our profession: June, July and August. These days, thanks to the accelerated pace of life, June and August are pretty much given over to winding down and gearing up, respectively, leaving July our one shot at sustained research and writing.

I, for one, am hoping to make the most of it, so that when it comes time to account for how I spent my summer vacation, I’ll have what to show: no tan, but enough sentences to fill a sandbox.

In the round 1

joselitJune 26, 2011November 16, 20171 Comment

As an historian, my stock in trade is change. Chronicling and analyzing how one thing gives way to another is what I do for a living, day in and day out. But taking the measure of Clio’s slings and arrows is one thing; actually experiencing them is quite another. When the forces of change affect me personally, dispassion goes out the window.

What prompts this confession is the news that a beloved New York City neighborhood institution, H & H Bagels, called it a day and closed its doors. As long as I can remember, the store hugged the corner at 80th Street and Broadway, the smell of onions and yeast wafting through the air.

Bagel cognoscenti might debate the merits of H & H’s offerings -- some palates fond them far too doughy, others just right -- but for me, the modest little storefront stood for something larger than a rounded piece of dough heaped with “everything.”

It represented the multiple ways in which a certain kind of Jewishness -- a decidedly vernacular, easy-going and undemanding form of Jewishness, at that -- found a place for itself within the urban landscape and within the deeper reaches of American culture.

Along with appetizing stores and kosher (or kosher-style) delicatessens and other Jewish food purveyors that once peppered the city street, the bagel shop brought about a sea change in what Americans ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bagels became common fare. Expanding the American diet, the bagel also helped to expand, deepen and round out America’s relationship to its Jewish citizens.

I’ll miss my occasional bagel from H & H. But what I’ll miss even more is the history nestled within its little circular frame.

By George

joselitJune 19, 2011November 16, 2017Leave a comment

Multiple ties bind this blog and the university that hosts it to George Washington. We proudly take our name and many of our cues from him.

George Washington, Public Garden, Boston, Mass. Flickr/Eric Hatch

Under the circumstances, then, fans of the first president of the United States would do well to consult the June 24 issue of The Forward, which features both an editorial and a front-page article about the fate of the famous 1790 letter assuring the Jews of Newport of religious liberty.

As it turns out, this foundational document, a staple of American Jewry’s political and civic identity, currently reposes in a Maryland storage facility, where it’s kept under wraps. “What a loss!” The Forward declares, coming down hard in favor of publicly displaying the text.

At a time when simulacra have taken the place of the real thing, and historical literacy is increasingly an artifact of the past, taking the measure of an 18th century text with our own eyes is an experience to be cherished.