The Tsimbalist
  • Blog
  • Contact

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue … All Right, He's Sixty-Two (Updated)

2/14/2014

0 Comments

 
Yesterday, Rabbi Joe Black, to whom I have the honor of being related, posted a really cute video which reminds us of something worth noting:


I doubt whether this timely reminder stopped many Jews who saw it from participating in various Valentine’s Day rituals. Those forces of convention and commercialism are awfully hard to resist. 

But his video did make me think: Hey, maybe I should take this opportunity to talk a little bit about love and courtship back in shtetl days--and specifically to ask, was there any love involved in courtship? 
That is, exactly how antithetical is Valentine’s Day to Eastern European Jewish tradition?

As usual, the test case for shtetl image vs. shtetl reality is Fiddler On The Roof. That's particularly so in this instance: the question of how young people manage to pass from single to married, and what that means for society, is a running theme in Fiddler ... just as it is in Sholem Aleikhem's Tevye stories, the basis for the musical … and just as it is in the works of Jane Austen ... which I only mention because some people have actually put about the delightful theory that Aleikhem based his stories on Austen's novels, or have at least noted the similarities between the two. 


Somebody even did this: 


Jane Austen aside … and to make a long musical short: In Fiddler On The Roof, the power of "tradition" keeps getting weaker as the power of new-fangled, Western-style love (Valentine's-Day-style love) grows stronger. If tradition finally makes a stand in refusing to accommodate intermarriage ... still, you have to say that, overall, the West has won.

So: Is the picture of tradition that Fiddler paints accurate?

Here's what Hayyim Schauss says, in The Lifetime Of A Jew: "Falling in love was considered an extraordinary and abnormal phenomenon, a sort of mental disease occurring once in a great while among the very wealthy or the very poor, the only groups who dared to flout the conventions of social decency."

Well, well, well. Score one for Fiddler On The Roof: Marriage really didn't have much to do with love.

Rather, it was in part a business arrangement, and in part a way of perpetuating a culture that prized, above all else, learning. The most sought-after grooms were scholars. The better the scholar, the bigger the dowry.  Not only that: dowry arrangements included provisions for the support of the newlyweds, room, board, and more, sometimes for years, in order to enable the scholarly young bridegroom to continue to do nothing but study (and perhaps also make little scholars.)

Picture

Do you remember the ethnographic survey I mentioned last time, the one carried out from 1912-1914 by S. Ansky? If you're in any doubt about the massive importance of the dowry in Eastern European Jewish life, check out these questions the survey asks:

"Do feuds often break out on account of dowries?"

"Do you know of any cases in which the groom did not go through with the marriage until the entire dowry was delivered to him?"

"What living expenses are generally included in this?" 
"Are clothes included?"

"What kind of guarantee do people give for this? Is a Jewish contract enough, or do people require a legal promissory note or notarized document?"


 Not exactly the stuff of Valentine's Day dreams. 

Something else that left little chance for romance: in many cases, bride and groom came from different towns, and were barely acquainted before the wedding. This is where matchmakers came into the picture. 

But here, those points we awarded to Fiddler On The Roof are going have to come off the board. If I'm not mistaken, in most people’s minds the archetypal matchmaker is Yente (as played by Molly Picon, who was last seen pretending to be both a man and a violinist in Yidl Mitn Fidl.) 

But the truth is, most matchmakers were men. What sort of men? According to Hayyim Schauss: "Matchmaking required a special aptitude. A professional shadchon had to have an air of importance and dignity in order to arouse confidence. He usually wore good clothes and carried a cane. He led up to the subject very cautiously and made every proposal in a tortuous and indirect manner. He was skilled in hiding and distorting facts, especially when the bride and groom were from two different localities."

This skill was made fun of in one of Sigmund Freud’s favorite Jewish jokes: "The young man was most disagreeably surprised when the proposed bride was introduced to him, and drew aside the shadkhen—the marriage broker—to whisper his objections: 'Why have you brought me here?' he asked reproachfully. 'She's ugly and old, she squints, and has bad teeth …' 'You needn't lower your voice,' interrupted the broker, 'she's deaf as well.'      (Quoted in Ruth Wisse's No Joke)

Picture
Picture

There was one respect in which shtetl romances did resemble today’s. After the engagement, bride and groom sent each other love notes. As Schauss relates, "They also wrote letters to one another. These letters were distinctive in character, consisting of high-sounding, stereotyped phrases. In most cases, the betrothed couple did not write their own letters, but delegated the task to a man in the town who had a beautiful handwriting and the ability to use pompous language. He used the same phraseology and the identical expressions in most of the letters which he wrote ..."

The Cyranos of the shtetl … or maybe just the Hallmarks.


***

Update: I meant to include a fun tidbit illustrating the very false impressions these letter-writers could sometimes create, just the way that Cyrano did. 


A story by nineteenth-century writer A. S. Friedberg includes two such characters "who penned letters in very elegant German in the names of a bride and a groom. Each betrothed was convinced that the other was fluent in German, while the truth was that both the groom and bride-to-be were entirely ignorant of that language."

(Described by David Assaf in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yehezkel Kotik.)
0 Comments

The Schmaltz Diet: Zaftig Up In 8 Weeks Or Your Money Back (Part 1)

1/24/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
My novel’s heroine has a problem. She’s too thin. 

Not too thin for me, mind you--I like her just the way she is. She’s not abnormally thin. It’s just that, in the shtetl, they liked a little meat on a lady’s bones. Read for yourself:


"A woman, according to the shtetl inhabitants, should be zaftig and full-figured."
     --Menachem Brayer, The Jewish Woman In Rabbinic Literature: A Psychohistorical Perspective

" ... the Yiddish word "Zaftig" was a complementary [sic] reference to a juicy, plumb, strong, vibrant, solid woman." 
     --Karen L. Smith. "Some Notes on Jewish Women and Eating Disorders"

Picture
"Hannah, Volodya’s wife, robust, summer-fresh, calm as a bright village morning in July, knew how to hold on to her husband with her body and with food."
     --Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, in a typically vivid characterization from The Yeshiva.

As if anybody needed proof of how things have changed since then, here's novelist Jennifer Weiner, in Good in Bed:

 "She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft. As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat."

So when did things change? Perhaps, around the same time people stopped eating so much schmaltz:

"… to a certain generation of assimilation-minded, America-embracing Jews, schmaltz was shunned as a totem of their parents’ and grandparents’ unforgivingly ethnic poverty cuisine. At a low point in Jewish delicatessen culture, many cooks yielded to customer pressure, subbing flavor-deficient vegetable oil into their chopped liver and kishke." --Leah Koenig, writing in Tablet.


 ... and around the same time violinists stopped playing so schmaltzily: 


So if de-schmaltzification is a result of assimilation and Americanization … is the same true for the lost appeal of zaftigkeit? Sarah Schulman thinks so, as she discusses classic Yiddish film Yidl Mitn Fidl in the online magazine  Jump Cut: 

"The detail I found most interesting in Yidl Mitn Fidl was the surprising information about Jewish aesthetic standards. We are told that the bride is ‘the most beautiful girl in the village.’ She is large-boned, plump, with big features and kinky hair. This is a pre-Americanization image of Jewish beauty. Today, an assimilated Jewish woman who looks like this would think of herself as unattractive.”




(Note that Molly Picon, holding the violin, is playing a woman pretending to be a man; the most beautiful girl in the village is the one on the left.)

Okay. If all that's the case … why didn’t I make my heroine a little more zaftig?

Well … writing a novel that takes place in another time and place requires a little flexibility. Sometimes you go for what seems historically accurate. Sometimes you favor what is historically plausible. And sometimes, you just have to do what feels right.


I guess this is a case of doing what feels right. What can I say, I'm a thoroughly American Jew. 

I'm just sorry my heroine has to suffer for it.
***
By the way ... did you know that schmaltz is making a comeback? 
Picture
0 Comments

    Author

    Sasha Margolis is author of The Tsimbalist (the novel and the blog) and violinist, singer, and storyteller for the band Big Galut(e)
    He can be found on twitter as @SashaMargolis

    Archives

    March 2016
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

    Categories

    All
    Ansky
    Bennett Muraskin
    Big Galut(e)
    ChaeRan Freeze
    Chaim Grade
    Dan Miron
    Dara Horn
    Fiddler On The Roof
    Hayyim Schauss
    Jeffrey Shandler
    Jennifer Weiner
    Joe-black
    Julian-kytasty
    Molly Picon
    Mordecai Gebirtig
    Moshe Beregovski
    Moshe Leiser
    Nathaniel Deutsch
    Original Fiction
    Rachel Elior
    Sacher-Masoch
    Schmaltz
    Sholem Aleikhem
    The Tsimbalist
    Toscha Seidel
    Yaffa Eliach

    RSS Feed

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

Proudly powered by Weebly