Marginal lives

Arriving in Paris this spring for a research stay, I searched for a place to eat in my new neighbourhood. Among endless doner joints with names such as “Berliner kebab” and “Munich”, I spotted, one afternoon, an unexpected institution: the Paris Yiddish Center. I slipped in just before it closed for the evening. A young woman gave me a tour of the café, the bookstore and what she said was the largest collection of Yiddish books in western Europe. And she assured me that there was usually cake.

For several years now, I have nurtured the fantasy that I could combine my knowledge of German, my basic acquaintance with the Hebrew alphabet and my general East Europeanness, and, after a quick shake, pour out a martini of passable Yiddish. It’s never that simple, but it doesn’t keep me from buying facing-page editions of poetry and easy prose and imagining that I will work my way through them on quiet evenings. At the Paris Yiddish Center, I gave in to reason and also bought a translated book that I could read quickly: a collection of three monologues by the Yiddish Mark Twain, Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), on whose stories Fiddler on the Roof was based. At moments, these lively speeches reminded me of the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Confessions of sorts, each monologue has its own style, with repeated phrases giving the flavour of real speech, and internal inconsistencies suggesting that the narrator has something to hide.

I was taken in particular by a story called “The Three Widows”. A wealthy old bachelor is friends with a couple, Pinye and Paya. When Pinye dies, Paya is left widowed and with an infant to care for. The bachelor falls in love with Paya and speaks of baby Rosa almost as if she were his own, calling her “our only comfort!” Yet something blocks him from declaring his love to the mother. “I lay awake night after night, thinking how to tell her”, he confesses. “I would get up in the morning resolved, it seemed, to go and tell her straight… But when you go there the words don’t come.”

Instead the bachelor throws himself into raising the little girl. He arranges for Rosa’s teachers, buys her dance and piano lessons, sees to it that she gets to school on time. He manages Paya’s financial concerns as well, fighting off the various people who swoop in to take advantage of her. In time he transfers his affections to Rosa, but is horrified when she finds her own beau: Shapiro, the bookkeeper at the distillery. The old bachelor’s heart is broken, but he helps with the wedding and begins to like Shapiro despite himself.

The story is called “The Three Widows”, though. Shapiro poisons himself when his business partners leave him with a bankrupted company. His young wife, Rosa, is pregnant, and the pattern eventually repeats itself with her daughter, Feigele. Feigele falls in love with a chemistry student named Misha Gruzevich, but we know at this point that he will not last long past the wedding. Three days later, he is locked up. Some bombs have been discovered, as well as a stash of letters, and these have been connected to him. It’s not clear if Misha is a revolutionary or is simply being framed; but he is executed anyway.

Why am I so taken with “The Three Widows”? The narrator begins his tale by dismissing “psychology”, which he compares, oddly, to parsley – it tastes nice, it smells good, but you wouldn’t want to eat it on its own. His story, he seems to suggest, is the real dish. Yet the psychodrama that he lives out with his three widows seems ripe for analysis. The women fascinate him, have him to dinner, accept him despite his tempers. He resents them for not fulfilling his desires; longings he does not dare to speak. At the same time, in his solicitude, he keeps all of them dependent on him, like lifelong children. He seems to be a curse that afflicts the generations, shortening their happiness. “Three widows – three lives”, counts the bachelor, reflecting on the women’s loss; “not full lives, but half-lives, or rather snatches, fragments of lives.”

In my experience, the people most scornful of psychology often turn out to be textbook cases. The curious family unit of “The Three Widows” is like that: a group of people holding on to one another out of comfort, even though they know their habit keeps them from truly living.

But what I find most telling about the story is what happens on its margins: the other men do live fully, and die tragically young. Some, like Misha, even seem to carry out double lives. Nor is he the only politically active student to meet a sad end in Aleichem’s works. In “Joseph”, the title figure is involved in Bundist politics. He wears long hair and the black Gorky shirt that was de rigueur at the time, gives brilliant speeches and is executed. Sholem Aleichem’s insight was that most people care more about their own comforts and neuroses than about a government’s brutalization of the young. “Hanging men these days is just like cutting chickens’ throats for dinner”, observes the bachelor. “And what do you do meanwhile? You rock yourself in your chair and smoke an aromatic Havana, or drink a cup of tasty coffee with fresh rolls and butter.”

Irina Dumitrescu teaches medieval literature in a small town in Germany

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