Beyond Fiddler on the Roof: Lessons in Pre-War Jewish Life
My Jewish History Education Began at Sinai, Resumed at the Holocaust, and culminated in 1948: I Hope to Change That For Others
by Dylan Skolnick, Manovill University Fellow
When Beth Cohen, Director of Education, asked me to create a lesson on pre-Holocaust Jewish identity and life, I had one primary goal in mind: to communicate, truly, the general sense of Ashkenazic or Yiddish culture, to show its heft and its richness. My audience was a collected group of highschoolers from around the Bay who were participating in the Manovill Seminar, an 8-week Holocaust and Genocide education program. I assigned a story by Sholem Aleichem, the most famous of Yiddish writers, called “The Town of Little People.” It is a satirical survey of a “shtetl,” a Yiddish word which means “little town.” Every stereotype is present and over-exaggerated. Thus, it is a remarkably efficient way to convey the breadth of Yiddish culture. The image it presents is an inaccurate one, a mythologized one, but when we read the story with this qualifying lens (and accompanying accurate historical information I provided to the students) we become able to glean from it some of the real characteristics common to shtetl life. These are traits most American Jews are already familiar with, via Fiddler on the Roof (itself based on an Aleichem story) or other representations of pre-war Jewish life in media, so I won’t go into them here. Instead, I encourage you to read the story yourself—it is short and widely available for free online.
This is one level of Aleichem’s story but I also led the students to think more critically. For what reason was this written? Who was the intended audience? We find out that Aleichem was publishing in Yiddish newspapers distributed widely in centers of urban Jewish life; places like Odessa, Warsaw, and Łódź in which, by 1900, around 1/10th of all worldwide Jews lived. They are also places like New York where, in 1916, Aleichem died and received the largest funeral in New York history, up to that point. In this way, Aleichem’s story tells us about both of the two forms of pre-war Jewish life: the “groisshtotish” or “large-cityish” way of life and the “kleinshtetldik” or “small-townish” way of life. We rounded out the lesson by listening to a Yiddish song sung in Warsaw cabarets, in order to touch a bit more on the nature of “groisshtotish” life.
Why Teach Pre-Holocaust Jewish Life?
For my students, as once for me, this was new information. I had not received education, either in public school or religious school, about the period which composes the majority of Ashkenazi Jewish history: life in Eastern Europe. My Jewish history education began at Sinai, resumed at the Holocaust, and culminated in 1948. Ever since my first exposure with Yiddish culture, I knew that filling this gap would become my goal. It is this subject, specifically Yiddish literature, which I hope to teach and research about for the rest of my life.
And it was the opportunity to teach and learn more about this history which originally compelled me to apply to become a Manovill University Fellow. For me, Yiddish culture and history is a crucial part of the Holocaust story, and thus connected with the Holocaust Center’s mission. The Jews of Europe are not a people whose sole contribution to history is the story of their destruction. The same goes, of course, for Native Americans and Armenians and any other victimized peoples. When we neglect to teach about a people outside of their sufferings, that group becomes like a mirror, reflecting only their oppressor’s violence. It becomes much easier, I think, to imagine those oppressed people going like “lambs to the slaughter.” For, if the lambs had no culture, no families, no traditions, and no history, what do they lose by laying their necks down for the butcher?
The process of creating and working through the material for this lesson helped me to understand more the importance of Yiddish education. I hope that I imparted this sense to the students. Already, though, my lesson has had an impact on my life. I was able to use some of what I discovered in my research process. I submitted an essay to the Jewish Studies department at my university, University of California, Berkeley, for a contest named the Goor Prize. My essay, entitled “And Where a Spurt of Our Blood Falls Will Sprout: A Jewish Theory of Identity Creation as Founded in the Lack,” uses psychoanalytic theory to understand how Jewish people—and all people—construct their identities. Within the essay, I analyzed the Yiddish film Tevye (1939), the first film adaptation of the same story which Fiddler was based on. I am proud to say that I won this contest. By furthering my understanding of Yiddish culture and history, allowing me to grow my teaching abilities, and helping me win this contest, the Manovill University Fellowship has immensely improved the skills I’ll need to achieve my goal of teaching Yiddish literature (but first, I’ll need to graduate from college!)
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¹ Joshua Rothenberg, “Demythologizing the Shtetl” in Midstream (March 1981): 25-31: “By 1897, more than half the Jewish population of the Tsarist empire lived not in shtetlekh but in larger towns. And half a million Jews, almost one-tenth of the total Jewish population of over five million, lived in only three cities — Warsaw, Odessa and Lodz.”
² Ezra Glinter, “The Fate Sholem Aleichem Brought on Himself” in Forward (June 2016): “Sholem Aleichem’s funeral was the largest New York City had ever seen. On May 15, 1916, more than 150,000 mourners accompanied the writer’s coffin from his home in the Bronx to the Ohab Tzedek synagogue in Harlem, down Fifth Avenue to the Lower East Side, and finally to the Mt. Nebo cemetery in Cyprus Hills, Queens.”