It's Simple, Tevya

• In Event: The Social Landscape of Yiddish Literature

Abstract

I recently examined the Tables of Contents of three enormous anthologies of World Literature, the Norton, the Longman, and the Bedford. These volumes contain thousands of pages of world literature covering every century and every continent. But what is missing in all three? They contain not a single example of Yiddish literature.
This situation is both lamentable and fascinating. Is Yiddish literature so unimportant, or are there other causes for this absence? I propose the latter. And surely one explanation is that, for reasons both good and bad, Yiddish literature has, like so many Yiddish speakers, existed in a ghetto. My current project is to try to create an opening in those ghetto walls by demonstrating that Yiddish literature is indeed part of world literature.
For the Association of Jewish Studies, I would like to present one small part of that work, in this case a comparative study of two figures, one from Yiddish literature and one from African-American literature, specifically Sholem Aleichem's Tevya and Langston Hughes's Simple. Both inhabit stories that were written over long spans--Tevya from 1894 until 1914 and Simple from 1950 until 1965--and both became spokesmen for a large segment of their people. Both also illustrate the changing conditions under which their people lived, whether in Eastern Europe or New York. Both the differences and the similarities between these authors and their creations are significant and worth examining.
My argument is not, however, that aside from language and customs, the creations of Sholem Aleichem and Langston Hughes are brothers--or even cousins. It is that both, stemming as they do from minority cultures, deserve entry into the category of world literature. They are no more parochial than the MAHABHARATHA or WAR AND PEACE. They, and especially Tevya (the Tevya of the stories, not the Tevya of FIDDLER) are simply overlooked. If students and scholars can read Homer and Dante, distant as those authors are from us, they can also read Sholem Aleichem.

author

• Theodore L. Steinberg, SUNY Fredonia