I want to go to Yiddish culture, because the whole issue of how mother knows that she can resist, while being passive, while accepting the blows, which is a theme, is also central to Yiddish culture, to Jewish culture, as a culture of resistance in general. So, a culture that teaches people about being different from the usual stuff of European culture. And Peter elaborated how the Jews were, and continue to be, different, last time. And that difference turns out to be very important as the world becomes modern. There are a whole bunch of passages from the that I want you to look at in particular, as well as to read the whole book! And they are part of what I sent around as an announcement to eCommons. And I also sent a copy of this story by Shalom Aleichem, but I want to talk a little bit about Yiddish culture, the culture of Eastern European and Jews. Part of their difference is that they spoke a different language. A language called Yiddish. A fusion language. That's a technical term for the linguists among us. A fusion language that, on the armature of some German dialect, and the use of much Hebrew, becomes a language that the Jews spoke. We have a text from the 12th century in Yiddish. So it's a language that's got a long history, and there are even classes in it here. Hebrew, the language in which God created the universe, according to the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. Hebrew is an intellectual language. That is, it was used for intellectual discussions. Think of it as how physicists talk. But it lacked certain things when you got to Europe, it was fine in the Middle East. But even there is became part of another linguistic fusion language, Aramaic. Which some of you have heard about from movies. Aramaic, which is known as the little sister of Hebrew. You go back and forth. And almost all languages that I know of are next to other languages they share, so there are no languages or words in isolation. Yiddish was known as the mamaloshen, a word that is made up of the Hebrew word lashon, tongue, language, and the word mama, which you've probably already guessed. So Yiddish, is the mother tongue. It's the language that Jews use to talk to each other about all the everyday life experiences. When, in the middle of the 19th century, Jews said they had to start writing Hebrew again as part of their nationalism. The first Hebrew novel had a problem, because like novels everywhere, it was about love, but Hebrew doesn't have much in the way of love talk. So, that first novel, by Abraham Mapu, had to turn to the language of the Song of Songs, which is elegant, elevated poetry. And when I was a kid, I thought I would be a failure in talking to women. So I talked to my sisters all the time, but other women, because I couldn't use that fancy language or, my experience was the movies, and there, when the young man wants to talk to the young woman and impress her, he sings! Forget it. >> [LAUGH] >> Right? But Yiddish was the language in which Jews made love. In which they had families, in which they lived everyday life. And Sholem Aleichem, in the middle of the 19th century, as Jews become welcomed more and more, and have access, is part of a group of people who are writing modern literature. And as writers of modern literature, they are breaking with Jewish tradition, because everything has changed. And before that, when Jews wanted to talk about serious subjects, they wrote in Hebrew. And they wrote commentaries on the great texts, commentaries. And when they had fantasies to bring, they did the backstory on Jacob and Esau, Jacob wrestling with the angel, all kinds of things. Very brief in Hebrew. But here is Sholem Aleichem writing literature because there are now newspapers, and the newspapers bring news of new situations, the new experiences of life. And there are newspapers in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem, like many of us, said well, the big thing is to write in Russian like Tolstoy. So he tries writing in Russian, but he doesn't have many readers. He tries writing in Hebrew, doesn't have many readers. But when he writes in the mamaloshen, suddenly everybody wants to read him. And he becomes one of the great writers to a community. I sent you one story because it's a very special moment, but it's like so many of his stories, tries to deal with what it means to be a traditional society changing into a modern society. So if you want to know about women's lives in the 19th century, Jewish women's lives, you should read Sholem Aleichem. Because women's lives are changing. They're both traditional and modern at the same time. I know, you're young and you believe you should only be one thing. But as you'll get older, you'll know that you'll have to play many roles or maybe you've already learned that. Women, especially, got to this point as industrialization happened, urbanization, all of those experiences. So, here is a story in which Sholem Aleichem is telling us that women's roles change. But how can he tell us a story, using past tense, that gets us to experience it in the present? And again, many young writers only write in the present because that's present and that's our experience of films and so on. Sholem Aleichem has a different understanding. He's telling us that Jews are responding to the new modern world and the old traditional world they live in and they talk to each other. So Sholem Aleichem's stories give us a series of experiences in which two Jews are talking. Not did talk, not talked, past tense, but they're in the process of talking, they're talking about each other And that's the trick of the narrator in this story. Because the narrator doesn't narrate, the narrator does the listening. Now, to listen is an interesting idea and deserves lots of serious discussion. I can only give you a sense of how important listening is by telling you that Isaiah Berlin, a wonderful modern philosopher, told his audience, when he won the Jerusalem Prize, that you need to belong somewhere in order to be able to communicate. That listening and speaking depend upon belonging, and that that's the condition of being understood. So the narrator of Sholem Aleichem's tale, On Account of a Hat, and the speaker, by their listening to each other, are telling us they belong together. And they're telling us that the frame of reference works for both of them. So this is literary analysis, and I hope you'll think about this for all the stories in your lives and all the stories you are inventing. I didn't finish the homework because the dog ate the, whatever. The stories that you're constantly inventing. Sholem Aleichem's narrator meets someone who's a merchant, as he puts it, in snips of paper. Snips of paper. He sells cigarette papers. If you want to know about those, I think there are several smoke shops here in town, you can all get snips of paper. And the narrator tells us that while he tells us this story, he's smoking constantly. And what is he doing? He's saying to Sholem Aleichem, I want to tell you about something extraordinary. Why is it extraordinary? Somewhere I have that. Oh, here. The story.
