No Joke (21 page)

Marc Chagall emerged from a similar amalgam of Russian Jewishness, bringing a brightening burst of color to his birthplace, Vitebsk. In the marvelous way that art conducts its own conversation across time and space, Chagall's piebald fiddler was later adopted as the iconic image of
Fiddler on the Roof
—as noted earlier, a musical inspired by Sholem Aleichem, whose works had been adapted by the Moscow Art Theater with sets designed by Chagall. Very much in Sholem Aleichem's spirit, Chagall's story was all about beating the odds, beginning with the traditional Jewish boy who becomes a modern artist and proceeds merrily to turn the world upside down. In Chagall's art, levitating bridegrooms have their heads turned around as in the Yiddish expression
zi hot im fardreyt dem kop
, though Chagall knew that the Yiddish phrase meant not “she turned his head” but rather “she drove him crazy.” In Chagall's cemeteries, as in Sholem Aleichem's, you can hear the intimate exchanges among those who lie beneath gravestones that tilt like inclining ears. And Chagall was only one of several Russian Jewish artists who developed a genre of visual wit in book design, illustration, and art.
¹³

That was all at the beginning. A second, darker phase of Jewish humor developed once Stalin replaced Lenin, and started enforcing collectivization and compliance:

After Stalin's takeover of Soviet leadership, the Politburo receives a repentant telegram from Trotsky. Kalinin [of
Russian peasant stock] reads it aloud. “I made mistakes and you didn't. You were right and I was wrong.” Members are about to applaud when up jumps Kaganovich [one of Stalin's chief supporters in the struggle against Trotsky]: “You've misread the telegram. It reads:
I
made mistakes and you
didn't
?
You
were right and I was
wrong
?”
¹⁴

Yiddish has several comic versions of such “corrected” telegrams, which lacking punctuation, depend for their interpretation on the intonation of the reader. These jokes draw attention to the mechanism that substitutes an unexpected (ironic) construal for the obvious (declarative) one. That Kaganovich and Trotsky are both Jews hints at the cultural intimacy that sets them apart from Soviet Gentiles, despite their fealty to the Communist International; Kaganovich's vindictiveness in exposing his fellow Jew; and the fear of implication that may have prompted his preemptive malice against his coreligionist. The motif of misreading underscores the importance of deciphering the politburo's official utterances.

Russians also joked about features of czarism that persisted in Soviet guise. In that vein, Jews mocked the persistence of aggression aimed specifically at them.

What is “friendship among Soviet nationalities?”

Armenians join with Russians, Russians with Ukrainians, and Ukrainians with Uzbeks to beat up the Jews.

Or more subtly: “Haim is walking down the street when someone calls him a Jew bastard. He mutters: ‘Ay, if only there were meat in the shops, it would be like czarist times.' ”
The faux nostalgia embeds this joke about the persistence of anti-Semitism in the gibe that czarism was better than its replacement.

As for what may be considered
anti
-Jewish humor, Jews themselves served up most, if not all, of it for their own bitter amusement, and it was probably most appreciated by them. This may have been particularly the case with Jewish commissars who were sufficiently self-conscious and nervous about their overrepresentation in high party positions to spoof their own telltale accents and prominence, and with intellectuals who indulged in irony as a habit of mind.

The boundaries between laughing at and laughing with became increasingly permeable in Soviet humor, just as happened in the United States but under contrasting circumstances. The Communist system controlled the movement of Soviet subjects, invaded private life, and mistrusted the instincts of the populace. As prohibitions forced open dissent into subversive channels, Jewish-style political humor became something of a national pastime:

What is a Soviet optimist?

Someone without all the facts.
¹⁵

Jokes about Abram, Chaimovitch, or Rabinovitch became widespread. Acquired habits of quiescence, a familiar foil of Jewish comedy, became rampant in a punitive regime:

Passing KGB headquarters, Abram sighs.

“Abram,” whispers his wife, “how many times have I told you not to make political pronouncements in public.”

The wily generic Jew trying to outsmart the authorities was now a model for every Soviet citizen:

As soon as Abram arrives in Moscow, he cables his wife at home in Berdichev:
DON'T REVEAL LOCATION OF BURIED BOX IN YARD
. Several hours later his frantic wife calls to tell him that KGB agents are digging up their backyard. “Don't worry, my dear,” Abram calms her. “I only wanted to make spring planting easier for you.”

At the ostentatious funeral of a high Communist official that is reputed to have cost the state about 100,000 rubles, a Jew says indignantly, “What about the policy of economizing? For that price, I could bury the whole Central Committee.”
¹⁶

Studies of the Russian anekdot during this period highlight its resistance to the “existential totalism to which state ideology aspired.”
¹⁷
Jewish humor had specialized in this kind of resistance under earlier punitive systems, and with the greatly increased social interaction between Jews and other Russians, Jewish jokes naturally leached into the public domain, even as some Slavic humor was absorbed in Jewish humor.

We are told that Stalin himself enjoyed jokes, like the one about a delegation from his native Georgia that conducts an interview with him and then takes its leave. Stalin starts looking for his pipe and can't find it. He calls in Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police, and instructs him to go after the delegation and uncover the thief. Beria rushes off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds
his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria—“Look, I've found my pipe.” “It's too late,” Beria says, “half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning.”

A third phase of Soviet Jewish humor was ushered in by Israel's defeat of the Soviet-backed Arabs in 1967. Jews who had traditionally cast themselves as comic foils now emerged as the improbable “victors” in a society increasingly frustrated by its authorities' incompetence and repression.

The instructor in the Russian War College was discussing how the Soviet Union might win a war against China. Perplexed, a student asked how their military could stack up against China's inexhaustible manpower. “It is possible for the smaller army to win,” the instructor said, citing the example of the recent Six-Day War: “Israel can field a maximum of two or three million against the Arabs' hundred million and yet it won that war.”

“Yes,” the student objected, “but where can we find three million Jews?”
¹⁸

The Russians telling this joke (or the Jews imagining their fellow Russians telling this joke) were mocking themselves in the way that Jews had traditionally made fun of their own weaknesses, suggesting that for the first time, Jews may have gained a
political
advantage over their Gentile compatriots. The irony of this newfound Jewish advantage quickened once the movement for emigration to Israel gave the Jews a destination of freedom, and Russians hoping to be included in the exodus began to advertise for Jewish grandmothers: “A group of resourceful
Georgians forge Soviet internal passports intending to apply for exit visas to Israel. They are discovered. As punishment, they have to keep their Jewish nationality.”
¹⁹

Kulbak and Babel

The contortions of doublespeak that were required for everyday survival in the Soviet Union produced some comic masterworks by writers willing to risk (or unable to avoid risking) their lives. The contortions may have been played out to their fullest in the work and career of the Yiddish poet and writer Kulbak, whose comic novel
Zelmenyaners
I introduced briefly in
chapter 2
.

Kulbak's talent benefited and suffered from some of the choices that he made in the tumultuous 1920s. Educated in both a Russian Jewish school and yeshiva, Kulbak, a bookish young man attracted to nature, took full advantage of the revolutionary moment to experiment with various literary genres as well as styles of poetry and prose, the most successful of which played off the tensions between his lyric sensibility and skeptical intelligence. He was among the many eastern European writers and artists who spent time in Berlin in the postwar years 1918–21, soaking up its expatriate atmosphere and trying his hand at Yiddish expressionism. He then moved back to his native region, where he taught literature in the Jewish Teachers' Seminary, winning the love of Vilna's Jewish youths and all the while publishing works that ran the gamut from radical modernism to modern balladry. When
Kulbak decided to cross from Polish Vilna to Soviet Minsk in 1928, perhaps to join some of his family, he may also have hoped to gain publishing opportunities in the only place where Yiddish writers and scholars received government support. Had he not moved to the Soviet Union, he could not have written
Zelmenyaners
, the masterwork that sealed his doom.

Zelmenyaners
divides its affections and barbs between the twin phenomena of declining Jewishness and the hardening rule of Stalin's Soviet state. The family of Reb Zelmele (diminutive of Zalman) hails, as did Kulbak himelf, from the agricultural heartland of Belarus, where over time its members had developed their own smell—“a faint odor of musty hay mixed with something else.”
²⁰
Now they have become city folk, inhabiting a courtyard called the
REBZEHOYF
(Zelemele's
hoyf
, or yard, an imitation of Soviet speak that formed acronyms for everything). The novel's faux-anthropological description of the clan conjures up a biologically distinctive people and its adaptation to the new Soviet regimen—an adaptation that is more like a struggle against the force of historical inevitability.

As against Sholem Aleichem's famous cycle of Tevye stories, which is organized around daughters, Kulbak's revolves around Zelmele's grown sons, four “uncles” who work at tailoring, watchmaking, carpentry, and tanning, and their children, who serve in the militia, study engineering, marry Gentiles, and join the Communist Party. There is but one holdout in the younger generation: Tsalel, diminutive of Bezalel. The biblical figure Bezalel was the artist-builder of the tabernacle
in the desert; Tsalel, in contrast, is a self-parody of the Soviet Yiddish writer, “too educated to do anything but read, the kind of modern young pedant who's always asking you to repeat what you've said so that he can write it down in a notebook … and [who] had the habit of occasionally committing suicide—which is, however, another story.”
²¹

Kulbak's plot turns on conflicts over tradition and innovation in the two generations. While the dictates of the state guarantee the dreary outcome of every such conflict, the storyteller lingers on the vagaries of compliance—as, for example, with the advent of electricity:

Uncle Itshe stepped outside, glanced around to see if anyone was looking, and headed for the quiet space between Uncle Yuda's and the stable. Once it had been pitch-black. Now it was bright as day, making Itshe realize that a sanitary convenience had been lost forever. Angrily he turned back toward the yard, disgruntled by the new-fangled world.
²²

The narrator records as funny what the older generation experiences as tragic, and twits them for thinking that it is.

But the young also come in for their share of mockery. It-she's son Bereh, a Paul Bunyan type, refuses to have his son circumcised and names him Marat for the most radical of the French revolutionaries. By adding a Yiddish diminutive to his name, Bereh's mother turns the presumptive Bolshevik into little
Maratl
. The suppressed Jewish element breaks through as well in Bereh's report to his army superiors on how he got separated from his unit:

That same night I left for Krinitsa. From Krinitsa it was a day's walk to Buchach. From Buchach I walked to Nozerovo. From Nozerovo I walked to Diatly. From Diatly I walked to Hayduchok. From Hayduchok I walked to a village named Drozdovo. From Drozdovo I walked to Bistrich. From Bistrich I walked to Ivye. From Ivye I walked to Sokolka. In Sokolka I went to see my mother's uncle, who lives on the main street and deals in horses.
²³

Echoing chapter 33 of the Book of Numbers, which tracks the Israelites as they set out from Rameses and camp at Sukkoth, set out from Sukkoth and camp at Etham, and so forth, Bereh's deposition mocks at once the forty-five mind-numbing verses of the Bible, and the degree to which the new Soviet Jew faithfully echoes his native religion even as he serves its secularized and dictatorial replacement.