Sholem Aleichem: Mythologist of the Mundane
What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How-Do- You-Do than to place folklore and folk-speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
1988
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 1988, Volume: 13, Issue: 1/2, Pages: 27-46 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | What could be more obvious for a writer who called himself How-Do- You-Do than to place folklore and folk-speech at the center of his work? After all, it was his childhood friend Shmulik who had inducted him into the world of storytelling; ever since then, the celebrated author could have mined the treasures of Jewish myth and legend as his natural legacy. But Shmulik′s formative role in From the Fair was as much a fiction as the name Sholem Aleichem itself, which masked the true beginnings of a typical Russian-Jewish maskil named Rabinovitsh. Everything in the program of the Haskalah, as in Sholem Rabinovitsh's early career, militated against the discovery of folklore: the overwhelming antipathy of the Jewish Enlightenment to fantasy, superstition, and folk custom;2 Rabinovitsh's concern for fostering a highbrow literary culture in Yiddish based on the realistic portrayal of poverty, on social satire and stylistic discipline;3 and, perhaps most importantly, the young writer's adulation for the arch-maskil Abramovitsh- Mendele, who embodied this new critical standard.4 When, along with other of his contemporaries, Sholem Aleichem finally overcame these formidable obstacles and negotiated his way back to the folk, readers were so taken by his reinvention of Jewish folklore that they mistook it for the real thing. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009400002282 |