Thursday. December 16, 1982 — THE BULLETIN — 9
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This first translation of Sholom Aleichem's Marienbad by Aliza Shevrin, comes at a propitious time. The broad, sustained acceptance given to English translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish stories and novels, combined with the increasing absorption of Yiddish into spoken English, as Leo Rosten has recently documented in Hooray For Yiddish, A Book About English, insures that a receptive audience.
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larger than ever before, will welcome this gem from the great Yiddish master storyteller whose tales about Teyve and his daughters are well known to us but whose other works are not.
In terms of its relationship to the Teyve stories, Afarienbad Tzises some new questions and answers some old ones. Chief among the new questions posed are these: Why is it only now that this novel, written in 1911, is being "discovered;" and how has it managed to escape consideration in the extensive critical commentary that surrounds Sholom AIeichem*s massive literaiy output? More importantly, what is its
MARIENBAD By Sholom Aleichem Translated by AUza Shevrin G.P. Putnam*s Sons, 222 Pages
message and its relevance to our uiiderstandin£ of his representation of Jewish farnily dynamics, the central concern of all his writing?
To answer these questions we must look to Sholom Aleiehem*s life and to the new book itself. Born Sholom Rabinovitch, in 1859 in the Ukraine, he was reared in a traditional shtetl where, unlike most of his neighbors, he had the advantage of a public school education. Though he was devoted to Hebrew and Yiddish, he learned Russian thoroughly and read widely in its literature. He became an intellectual. Making a good marriage, he lived comfortably. He was therefore as much at home with assimilated middle-class urban Jews as with their poverty-stricken brethren in the shtetl. While he wrote about both classes of Jews, it was the popularity of the shtetl stories, focused, on the enormously attractive Teyve, that garnered the lion's share of attention.
In our own time. Fiddler on the /?oo/has reasserted and maintained Teyve's primacy. That may well explain the absence of critical commetary on Sholom Aleichem's tales of middle-class Jews. The disappearance of shtetl life in Eastern Europe accompanied by the rise of a powerful Jewish middle-class, particularly in twentieth-century America, largely deriving from Eastern European origindf, however, explains the rediscovery of this "ncw*^ old work.
Perhaps we have not noticed sufficiently that even Teyve was ^racted, once he rose to be a dairy-Inan, to^ middle-class values. He could never escape hispoverty as this role was assigned to him by G-d, but what he really wanted in life, as Sol Gittleman has made clear in From Shtetl to Suburbia, was yichus and kovod, respect and honor. The progress, or, if you prefer, flight, of his daughters from tradition to modenity is more marked. The unlucky Shprintze and the materialistic Beilke who shouts **Dont compare me to Hodel! Hodel lived in her time and I live in mine!** are the
soap-opera sisters to Beltzi Kur-lander, the beautiful, young, rich empty-headed heroine of Marienbad who charms us into liking her in spite of her spoiled Jewish princess caprice and hysteria.
Beltzi, along with several other Jewish wives from Warsaw's fashionable Nalevkis street, is in Marienbad to take the cure. The novel, told iti letters, notes, and telegrams flying back and forth between the once famous Jewish spa and Warsaw, becomes a soap-opera, fast-paced and lively, wherein the heroine and her friends indulge themselves in idleness, malicious gossip, and flirtations with equally opportunistic married men, not their husbands. Their indulgence puts all the marriages in jeopardy, though the trauma of the damaging entanglements is greatly ameliorated by Sholom Aleichem's rich humor and keen understanding of human folly.
From this story we get an insight into the , meaning of Sholom Aleichem's overall message in general and the contemporary relevance of this work in particular. The message is that in the twentieth century the responsibility for Jewish survival would necessarily be transferred from the doomed shtetl societies to the increasingly powerful; urban Jewish middle-class^. Marienbad in this respect is a natural extension of the direction in which Sholom Aleichem moved through-
(Continued on Page 10) See: SOAP
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