History of the Symphony - Class 7 - Pathetic Symphonies - 45%

We're going to start this class with the anti-Beethoven's 5th, and end it with the anti-Beethoven's 9th.

But first, a symphony with a very original ending.  (Monteux/London)

That's the end of Dvorak's 7th Symphony, which many people - not me, feel is better than even his New World Symphony. It's unquestionably magnificent though, even if, for me at least, it's a little too energetic and dance-like to have to the full weight of tragedy.

Dvorak wrote nine symphonies, only five of which are ever truly played in the concert hall, and only three of which are masterpieces. Dvorak was, by any standard, one of the very greatest composer,s and he never gets enough credit, but his greatest music, and his most 'natural' music, is his chamber music. Just to give an example of how inestimably beautiful his chamber music is, let's just the beginning of the third movement of his Dumky Trio, which begins with a few bars of music that are as perfect as the beginning of The Magic Flute or Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream. I so wish we had time to listen to the whole thing because it's just so beautiful.

Dvorak was the true successor to Schubert, a genius whose musical talent was so natural that having anything as complicated as an orchestra in front of him would only get in the way. His last three symphonies are masterpieces, but it took him six other tries to get there. The Fifth and Sixth are wonderful, but the Fifth has some pretty severe flaws, and the Sixth? Well, let's just compare it to a certain other piece of music written three years before by Brahms, Dvorak's closest musical friend.

First, let's play the beginning of the uncharacteristically festive finale to Brahms's Second Symphony.  (Solti/Chicago) And now the beginning to the finale of Dvorak 6.  (Davis/London)

And now, let's go to the end of both of them. First, this time, Dvorak (Davis/London). Now the ending to the Brahms (Solti/Chicago).

Originality works in the exact opposite way we generally think it does. Unless you've imbibed and assimilated everything which came before you, you have no idea if you're being original or not. It's much better that a piece of music sound derivative than that it sounds insipid. Dvorak puts a new spin on old material, which, in many ways, was exactly what both Dvorak and Brahms did throughout their careers. In order to write something completely original like the ending of the 7th, he first needed to put new spins on old endings. And let's face it, Brahms's finale wasn't all that much more original than Dvorak's. Consider consider a piece you all probably know very well that Brahms may have gotten that last little bit of material for his finale. 

So let's now, the Third Symphony, not of Dvorak or of Brahms, but of Schumann (Barenboim/Berlin St.). Just take my word for it, those final two measures have very little to do with the rest of the Symphony. So now listen to what Brahms, who of course knew Schumann's music better than anyone, save Clara Schumann, does with these two measures. It's perhaps the only truly derivative part of Brahms's Third Symphony.

Brahms Three is, in my opinion, both best of the four, and clearly also the least popular of the four because it's the least symphonic - it's a Brahms Symphony, so it's still played all the time, but performances of Brahms 3 are just a little bit rarer - and when it's performed, it's often on the first half of the program and there's a longer, flashier work on the second half.

Brahms 3 is a kind of Beethoven Symphony in reverse. Beethoven puts the minor key struggle in the beginning, and the triumphant movement at the end. In Brahms 3, the order is reversed. Beethoven Symphonies get gradually more optimistic, this symphony gets gradually more pessimistic.

Let's hear that opening Eroica-like fanfare again. "Free but happy."  (Walter/Columbia) The Symphony is in F-Major, and yet, the second note, 'Aber' or 'but'. It's not an A, but an Ab, which is a minor key note in F. The chronically anxious and melancholic Brahms always has a 'but.'  Minor key emotions are always threatening Brahms's confidence, and Brahms needs to find ways to overcome his fears.

So let's listen for a minute or two to how he transitions, over and over again, almost imperceptibly, to completely different sections, different moods, different material. By this point, Brahms is fifty, a completely mature master, and you can no longer tell where one section begins and another section ends.   It's completely seemless.  (Furtwangler/Berlin) Schoenberg, who loved Brahms's music as dearly as any composer ever has another, and whose music is very similar to Brahms in many ways, said that Brahms was not a musical conservative but a misunderstood progressive, and he particularly loved this process of Brahms in which the older master is constantly and imperceptibly transitioning his musical material, called this process 'Developing Variation.'

So now, you've heard both a gentle waltz, and the turbulent waltz juxtaposed with each other, yet done in seamless transition. Now hear how he combines the two a few minutes later. 

So now, let's hear what happens when Brahms relaxes the tension in a way Beethoven never would in a mystical section that perhaps wouldn't be completely out of place in Wagner. 

And now the ultimate heroic statement of the Eroica-like theme, plus the waltz in a completely new, heroic character!

But what happens then? He, once again, ratchets down the tension completely. It's the exact opposite of what Beethoven would do. 

A quiet ending to an heroic movement! Beethoven's untamed hair would have stood straight up.

The second movement, the least thought about of the four, is extraordinary in all kinds of ways. We're going to skip the beautiful church chorale that starts it. Let's go straight to the lulling second theme in the middle of this incredibly strange movement.  And to lull us still further, Brahms gives us the most unbelievably pieceful but strange, harmonically spare, almost stagnant, interpolation of the first two notes. As though to almost deliberately put us to sleep. This sounds like it could be from Morton Feldman or even Webern. And now, let's leapfrog into the inferno of the final movement and hear this incredibly peaceful theme transformed into something that sounds like war itself.  (Beecham/NBC) Not to mention, it's the same four note motif as... guess who?... Beethoven's Fifth!

Everybody's heard the third movement, even if you think you don't. It's a beautiful melody, it's also perhaps the weakest movement because compared to the rest, it doesn't have quite as much formal connection to the rest of the work. It's like a palate cleanser.  (Sinatra) OK, this is kind of an abomination, it takes Brahms's amazing melody and puts it into a completely different meter.

So let's hear that famous and gorgeous theme in the original.  But now, let's go back to those amazing transitions of Brahms. Let's hear how he transitions back to a restatement of that theme.  Listen to the Beethoven 5 rhythm? It's completely disguised, but it's everwhere in there! But it's not just Beethoven's 5th. There's another Schumann reference in there - Schumann's 4th Symphony. 

Now let's hear the anxious second subject of the third movement. 

What is that possibly setting up in the finale that we've already heard? (Walter/Columbia)

So now, let's finally get to the last movement. Which in a Beethoven symphony would be the opening.   Within thirty seconds, you'll hear that motif from the second movement, in a completely different cast.

We'll skip more Beethoven 5 declarations, and I think you've already gotten the turbulence of this movement. And instead, let's hear one of the more magnificent passages in Wagner's Ring (Boulez/Bayreuth). This is the Forest Murmurs in Act II of Siegfried - which has to be easily the most underrated Wagner opera and the most neglected of the Ring Cycle, though it's frankly much more engaging than Das Rheingold. Now let's go straight to that magnificent, peaceful, anti-Beethoven ending of Brahms 3 and hear how, through Wagner, Brahms subverts Beethoven.  (Furtwangler/Berlin)

Only someone who completely idolized Beethoven could have written something in such opposition to Beethoven's model. Wagner wrote something completely different from Beethoven, in many ways he transcended Beethoven. But the third symphony is is, in so many ways, the anti-Beethoven's 5th. Beethoven wanted victory, Brahms wanted peace. By opposing Beethoven's revolutionary edge, he preserved everything which Beethoven fought for. He may have lacked Beethoven's will to greatness, but he had his own kind of blood and iron. He had a caution that insisted on getting everything exactly right, and the same iron will Beethoven had, which allowed him to work through his caution. He didn't recapture the spirit of Beethoven's revolutionary zeal, and in 1883, I doubt anyone could. Wagner's revolution was very, very different from Beethoven's. Beethoven's revolution was, ultimately, an affirmation of the self, Wagner's was, in ways we won't get into, a renunciation of the self. Beethoven showed the way out of the struggle. Brahms showed the way to preserve a world without struggle. He showed how we can all achieve something great through weaving an endless array of ideas into a diverse and inclusive whole that incorporates everything at all times.

But not every temperament is Brahms, and clearly not everybody is satisfied with merely endless  ingenuity and integration. And don't think Brahms didn't know that.

So now, let's go to the Fourth, which Brahms wrote the next year, at the age of 51, and in many ways is a companion piece to the Third just as the First and Second belong together. I would say the Third is the best of Brahms's 4. It's the most characteristic of Brahms's music. It's the closest to the more peaceful world of his four instrumental concertos, which in my opinion are even better than his symphonies, and also of his chamber music. Brahms did drama extremely well, but what he did even better was a luminous lyricism that exists in this ambiguous state between melody and form. The developing variation in which his music is always evolving in the most luminous way. And there's no better example of this than the Fourth.

Listen to what we call a melody in the opening of the Fourth Symphony. It's so basic that it's barely a melody. 

It's just a chain of thirds - in varying octaves: B-G-E-C-A-F#-D#-B. And then, the chain of thirds goes up again: E-G-B-D-F-A-C. Rhythmically it's so foursquare that we have to call it something between a dance and a trudge. 

There's no way of knowing exactly what if anything Brahms meant by this except music, but it's a perfect musical metaphor for daily life. Going back and forth on the same ground, the same predictable routine. A routine that almost makes you want to fall asleep and dream.  

So now let's go back to Beethoven. Remember how I said, a bunch of weeks ago that Beethoven's Eighth Symphony could be considered the real First Symphony of Mendelssohn and Brahms? Well, I showed you what I meant by Mendelssohn when we talked about him, but now let's see what we mean when we say that it's Brahms. Let's listen to some of that amazing long coda of Beethoven's 8th. 

It's almost impossible to hear the details of those two giant F-Major crashes, the way that Beethoven gets that effect is by instructing each basic section of the orchestra to play five different rhythms. The horns and trumpets play whole notes, violas cellos and basses play quarter notes, the winds play quarter-note triplets, the timpani plays eighth notes, the violins play sixteenth note triplets. It sounds like a jumble, but like so many things that sound like chaos in classical music, particularly in the 20th century, it's actually extreme order. 

So now, let's hear that full dreamy passage in Brahms 4th and the buildup within what feels like a dream sequence that might have more rhythms in it than anything between Beethoven's 8th and the Rite of Spring. (Kleiber/Bayerisches St.)

So many musicians complain, rightly so, that Brahms is much much harder to play than he looks. That passage doesn't sound all that revolutionary, but the flutes and oboes and horns and trumpets have one rhythm, the cellos and basses and bassoons have another, the violins still another, the violas still another, and the timpani still another. Just like in Beethoven 8, five simultaneous rhythms, in the middle of a melodic line. It should sound like the most natural thing in the world, but coordinating it's a real nightmare. There was a book by Gunther Schuller, a legend of both classical music and jazz, in which he went through a couple dozen recordings of the piece and found that only one recording by an undistinguished Hungarian orchestra got the rhythms exactly right. 

All these little subtle compositional tricks are both the glory of Brahms and also why a lot of people hate his music. By now, the Fourth is probably most people's choice for Brahms's best symphony, but it was the only one of Brahms's symphonies that wasn't an instant success. Some people think that it doesn't evoke mindless routine, but that it was mindless routine. This is what Hugo Wolf, a contemporary of Mahler and a great writer of lieder, had to say about it:

"He (Brahms) never could rise above the mediocre. But such nothingness, hollowness, such mousy obsequiousness as the e-minor Symphony has never yet been revealed so alarmingly in any of Brahms's works. The art of composing without ideas has decidedly found in Brahms one of its worthiest representatives. Like God Almighty, Brahms understands the trick of making something out of nothing. Enough of this hideous game!"

Wolf was an incredibly expressive composer, and he responded to music that was immediately expressive. But while Brahms seems like absolute music, there are nevertheless clues that these supposedly 'hideous games' have real meanings. So what might Brahms have really been expressing behind it all? Let's now go to one of Brahms's final works, the third of his Four Serious Songs - O Death How Bitter Are You.   (Fischer-Dieskau/Moore). So now let's go forward to the last movement of Brahms 4 (Szell Cleveland)

The melodies and harmonies of O Tod, O Tod come from the beginning of the first movement, the harmonies of wie bitter come from the beginning of the last movement.

And just in case that seems a bit too coincidental, listen to this moment when falling asleep becomes much much creepier, perhaps like a much deeper sleep.  (Jochum/Berlin) It's like a musical memento mori.

So the symphonies we're talking about today are Pathetic Symphonies. Before the 20th century, 'Pathetic' had the precise opposite meaning from what it means today. Not a state deserving of contempt, but deserving of compassion, an ignoble state. These symphonies aren't heroic, perhaps some of them would like to be, but there is no real sense of triumph. It's not hard to imagine what the first audiences thought when they heard Brahms 4, a creeping realization gradually dawning on them that there would not be a happy piece of music (Celibidache/Berlin). A symphony needs lots of work, and Brahms would often find a cabin in the woods for the summer to write his symphonies. After he wrote his Fourth, he wrote to a friend of his about it and he said:

It tastes of the climate here... In general my pieces are unfortunately more agreeable than I am, and one finds less in them to correct?! But in these parts the cherries do not become sweet and edible -- so if the thing doesn't taste good to you, don't bother yourself about it.

After that deadly seriousness, you need something that will be a bit more balmy, and the second movement is not only gorgeous and moving, but there is something about it that feels much older. The whole symphony is in E-minor, but while this movement begins in E, it begins not quite in a key so much as in an old Church mode, never mind which, and then it seems to procede in E-major in the rhythm of an old Spanish Baroque dance, the Sarabande with strings imitating a guitar, and quiet winds that sound like the softest possible pedals of a pipe organ. (Kleiber/Vienna)

Fifteen minutes in, the cherries finally sweeten for a minute or two, in the leadup to that gorgeous second subject and we finally have a balm for all that suffering in the first movement, almost like a lullaby, but nevertheless, one that's interrupted a rhythmic figure that becomes more threatening with every appearance.    (Kleiber/Vienna)

But of course, this being a 'pathetic' symphony, the soothing nature of it can't last for too long. It was only a matter of time before things got extremely turbulent again.  (Furtwangler/Berlin) And yet, Brahms allows for us to have some consolation for our suffering. Another one of Brahms's most moving moments in music, in which, after the turbulence, we emerge with what I can only describe as a Lutheran chorale that ends the music with a peace that completely eludes this music elsewhere.

The raucous third movement is there as a counterweight, again, a palatte cleanser, that is meant like a fake handoff in football. 

History of the Symphony - Class 7 - Pathetic Symphonies - A Bit More

We're going to start this class with the anti-Beethoven's 5th, and end it with the anti-Beethoven's 9th.

But first, a symphony with a very original ending.  (Monteux/London)

That's the end of Dvorak's 7th Symphony, which many people - not me, feel is better than even his New World Symphony. It's unquestionably magnificent though, even if, for me at least, it's a little too energetic and dance-like to have to the full weight of tragedy.

Dvorak wrote nine symphonies, only five of which are ever truly played in the concert hall, and only three of which are masterpieces. Dvorak was, by any standard, one of the very greatest composer,s and he never gets enough credit, but his greatest music, and his most 'natural' music, is his chamber music. Just to give an example of how inestimably beautiful his chamber music is, let's just the beginning of the third movement of his Dumky Trio, which begins with a few bars of music that are as perfect as the beginning of The Magic Flute or Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream. I so wish we had time to listen to the whole thing because it's just so beautiful.

Dvorak was the true successor to Schubert, a genius whose musical talent was so natural that having anything as complicated as an orchestra in front of him would only get in the way. His last three symphonies are masterpieces, but it took him six other tries to get there. The Fifth and Sixth are wonderful, but the Fifth has some pretty severe flaws, and the Sixth? Well, let's just compare it to a certain other piece of music written three years before by Brahms, Dvorak's closest musical friend.

First, let's play the beginning of the uncharacteristically festive finale to Brahms's Second Symphony.  (Solti/Chicago) And now the beginning to the finale of Dvorak 6.  (Davis/London)

And now, let's go to the end of both of them. First, this time, Dvorak (Davis/London). Now the ending to the Brahms (Solti/Chicago).

Originality works in the exact opposite way we generally think it does. Unless you've imbibed and assimilated everything which came before you, you have no idea if you're being original or not. It's much better that a piece of music sound derivative than that it sounds insipid. Dvorak puts a new spin on old material, which, in many ways, was exactly what both Dvorak and Brahms did throughout their careers. In order to write something completely original like the ending of the 7th, he first needed to put new spins on old endings. And let's face it, Brahms's finale wasn't all that much more original than Dvorak's. Consider consider a piece you all probably know very well that Brahms may have gotten that last little bit of material for his finale. 

So let's now, the Third Symphony, not of Dvorak or of Brahms, but of Schumann (Barenboim/Berlin St.). Just take my word for it, those final two measures have very little to do with the rest of the Symphony. So now listen to what Brahms, who of course knew Schumann's music better than anyone, save Clara Schumann, does with these two measures. It's perhaps the only truly derivative part of Brahms's Third Symphony.

Brahms Three is, in my opinion, both best of the four, and clearly also the least popular of the four because it's the least symphonic - it's a Brahms Symphony, so it's still played all the time, but performances of Brahms 3 are just a little bit rarer - and when it's performed, it's often on the first half of the program and there's a longer, flashier work on the second half.

Brahms 3 is a kind of Beethoven Symphony in reverse. Beethoven puts the minor key struggle in the beginning, and the triumphant movement at the end. In Brahms 3, the order is reversed. Beethoven Symphonies get gradually more optimistic, this symphony gets gradually more pessimistic.

Let's hear that opening Eroica-like fanfare again. "Free but happy."  (Walter/Columbia) The Symphony is in F-Major, and yet, the second note, 'Aber' or 'but'. It's not an A, but an Ab, which is a minor key note in F. The chronically anxious and melancholic Brahms always has a 'but.'  Minor key emotions are always threatening Brahms's confidence, and Brahms needs to find ways to overcome his fears.

So let's listen for a minute or two to how he transitions, over and over again, almost imperceptibly, to completely different sections, different moods, different material. By this point, Brahms is fifty, a completely mature master, and you can no longer tell where one section begins and another section ends.   It's completely seemless.  (Furtwangler/Berlin) Schoenberg, who loved Brahms's music as dearly as any composer ever has another, and whose music is very similar to Brahms in many ways, said that Brahms was not a musical conservative but a misunderstood progressive, and he particularly loved this process of Brahms in which the older master is constantly and imperceptibly transitioning his musical material, called this process 'Developing Variation.'

So now, you've heard both a gentle waltz, and the turbulent waltz juxtaposed with each other, yet done in seamless transition. Now hear how he combines the two a few minutes later. 

So now, let's hear what happens when Brahms relaxes the tension in a way Beethoven never would in a mystical section that perhaps wouldn't be completely out of place in Wagner. 

And now the ultimate heroic statement of the Eroica-like theme, plus the waltz in a completely new, heroic character!

But what happens then? He, once again, ratchets down the tension completely. It's the exact opposite of what Beethoven would do. 

A quiet ending to an heroic movement! Beethoven's untamed hair would have stood straight up.

The second movement, the least thought about of the four, is extraordinary in all kinds of ways. We're going to skip the beautiful church chorale that starts it. Let's go straight to the lulling second theme in the middle of this incredibly strange movement.  And to lull us still further, Brahms gives us the most unbelievably pieceful but strange, harmonically spare, almost stagnant, interpolation of the first two notes. As though to almost deliberately put us to sleep. This sounds like it could be from Morton Feldman or even Webern. And now, let's leapfrog into the inferno of the final movement and hear this incredibly peaceful theme transformed into something that sounds like war itself.  (Beecham/NBC) Not to mention, it's the same four note motif as... guess who?... Beethoven's Fifth!

Everybody's heard the third movement, even if you think you don't. It's a beautiful melody, it's also perhaps the weakest movement because compared to the rest, it doesn't have quite as much formal connection to the rest of the work. It's like a palate cleanser.  (Sinatra) OK, this is kind of an abomination, it takes Brahms's amazing melody and puts it into a completely different meter.

So let's hear that famous and gorgeous theme in the original.  But now, let's go back to those amazing transitions of Brahms. Let's hear how he transitions back to a restatement of that theme.  Listen to the Beethoven 5 rhythm? It's completely disguised, but it's everwhere inthere!

Now let's hear the anxious second subject of the third movement. 

What is that possibly setting up in the finale that we've already heard? (Walter/Columbia)

So now, let's finally get to the last movement. Which in a Beethoven symphony would be the opening.   Within thirty seconds, you'll hear that motif from the second movement, in a completely different cast.

We'll skip more Beethoven 5 declarations, and I think you've already gotten the turbulence of this movement. And instead, let's hear one of the more magnificent passages in Wagner's Ring (Boulez/Bayreuth). This is the Forest Murmurs in Act II of Siegfried - which has to be easily the most underrated Wagner opera and the most neglected of the Ring Cycle, though it's frankly much more engaging than Das Rheingold. Now let's go straight to that magnificent, peaceful, anti-Beethoven ending of Brahms 3 and hear how, through Wagner, Brahms subverts Beethoven.  (Furtwangler/Berlin)

Only someone who completely idolized Beethoven could have written something in such opposition to Beethoven's model. Wagner wrote something completely different from Beethoven, in many ways he transcended Beethoven. But the third symphony is is, in so many ways, the anti-Beethoven's 5th. Beethoven wanted victory, Brahms wanted peace. By opposing Beethoven's revolutionary edge, he preserved everything which Beethoven fought for. He may have lacked Beethoven's will to greatness, but he had his own kind of blood and iron. He had a caution that insisted on getting everything exactly right, and the same iron will Beethoven had, which allowed him to work through his caution. He didn't recapture the spirit of Beethoven's revolutionary zeal, and in 1883, I doubt anyone could. Wagner's revolution was very, very different from Beethoven's. Beethoven's revolution was, ultimately, an affirmation of the self, Wagner's was, in ways we won't get into, a renunciation of the self. Beethoven showed the way out of the struggle. Brahms showed the way to preserve a world without struggle. He showed how we can all achieve something great through weaving an endless array of ideas into a diverse and inclusive whole that incorporates everything at all times.

But not every temperament is Brahms, and clearly not everybody is satisfied with merely endless  ingenuity and integration. And don't think Brahms didn't know that.

So now, let's go to the Fourth, which Brahms wrote the next year, at the age of 51, and in many ways is a companion piece to the Third just as the First and Second belong together. I would say the Third is the best of Brahms's 4. It's the most characteristic of Brahms's music. It's the closest to the more peaceful world of his four instrumental concertos, which in my opinion are even better than his symphonies, and also of his chamber music. Brahms did drama extremely well, but what he did even better was a luminous lyricism that exists in this ambiguous state between melody and form. The developing variation in which his music is always evolving in the most luminous way. And there's no better example of this than the Fourth.

Listen to what we call the melody of the Fourth. It's so basic it's barely even a melody. 

History of the Symphony - Class 7 - Pathetic Symphonies - Beginning

We're going to start this class with the anti-Beethoven's 5th, and end it with the anti-Beethoven's 9th.

But first, a symphony with a very original ending.  (Monteux/London)

That's the end of Dvorak's 7th Symphony, which many people - not me, feel is better than even his New World Symphony. It's unquestionably magnificent though, even if, for me at least, it's a little too energetic and dance-like to have to the full weight of tragedy.

Dvorak wrote nine symphonies, only five of which are ever truly played in the concert hall, and only three of which are masterpieces. Dvorak was, by any standard, one of the very greatest composer,s and he never gets enough credit, but his greatest music, and his most 'natural' music, is his chamber music. Just to give an example of how inestimably beautiful his chamber music is, let's just the beginning of the third movement of his Dumky Trio, which begins with a few bars of music that are as perfect as the beginning of The Magic Flute or Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream. I so wish we had time to listen to the whole thing because it's just so beautiful.

Dvorak was the true successor to Schubert, a genius whose musical talent was so natural that having anything as complicated as an orchestra in front of him would only get in the way. His last three symphonies are masterpieces, but it took him six other tries to get there. The Fifth and Sixth are wonderful, but the Fifth has some pretty severe flaws, and the Sixth? Well, let's just compare it to a certain other piece of music written three years before by Brahms, Dvorak's closest musical friend.

First, let's play the beginning of the uncharacteristically festive finale to Brahms's Second Symphony.  (Solti/Chicago) And now the beginning to the finale of Dvorak 6.  (Davis/London)

And now, let's go to the end of both of them. First, this time, Dvorak (Davis/London). Now the ending to the Brahms (Solti/Chicago).

Originality works in the exact opposite way we generally think it does. Unless you've imbibed and assimilated everything which came before you, you have no idea if you're being original or not. It's much better that a piece of music sound derivative than that it sounds insipid. Dvorak puts a new spin on old material, which, in many ways, was exactly what both Dvorak and Brahms did throughout their careers. In order to write something completely original like the ending of the 7th, he first needed to put new spins on old endings. And let's face it, Brahms's finale wasn't all that much more original than Dvorak's. Consider consider a piece you all probably know very well that Brahms may have gotten that last little bit of material for his finale. 

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So now, we begin with the Third Symphony. The best of the four, and the least popular because it's the least symphonic. It's kind of a Beethoven Symphony in reverse. The most triumphant movement is in the front, the minor key struggle movement is in the back. Beethoven Symphonies get gradually more optimistic, this symphony gets gradually more pessimistic.

Let's hear that opening Eroica-like fanfare again. Free but happy.  (Walter/Columbia) But let's listen to how he transitions, over and over again, almost imperceptibly, to completely different sections, different moods, different material. By this point, Brahms is fifty, a completely mature master, and you can no longer tell where one section begins and another section ends.   It's completely seemless.  (Furtwangler/Berlin) Schoenberg, who loved Brahms's music as dearly as any composer ever has another, and whose music is very similar to Brahms in many ways, said that Brahms was in fact a progressive, and he referred to this process where Brahms is constantly and imperceptibly transitioning his musical material, called this process 'Developing Variation.'

So now, you've heard both a gentle waltz, and the turbulent waltz juxtaposed with each other, yet done in seamless transition. Now hear how he combines the two. 

So now, let's hear what happens when Brahms relaxes the tension in a way Beethoven never would in a mystical section that perhaps wouldn't be completely out of place in Bruckner. 

And now the ultimate heroic statement of the Eroica-like theme, plus the waltz in a completely new, heroic character!

But what happens then? He, once again, ratchets down the tension completely. It's the exact opposite of what Beethoven would do. 

A quiet ending to an heroic movement! Beethoven's untamed hair would have stood straight up.

The second movement, the least thought about of the four, is extraordinary in all kinds of ways. We're going to skip the beautiful church chorale that starts it. Let's go straight to the second theme in the middle of this incredibly strange movement.  And to lull us still further, Brahms gives us the most unbelievably pieceful but strange, harmonically spare, almost stagnant, interpolation of the first two notes. As though to almost deliberately put us to sleep. This sounds like it could be from Morton Feldman or even Webern. And now, let's leapfrog into the inferno of the final movement and hear this incredibly peaceful theme transformed into something that sounds like war itself.  (Beecham/NBC) Not to mention, it's the same four note motif as... guess who?... Beethoven's Fifth!

Everybody's heard the third movement, even if you think you don't. It's a beautiful melody, it's also perhaps the weakest movement because compared to the rest, it doesn't have quite as much formal connection to the rest of the work. It's like a palate cleanser. Let's hear that famous and gorgeous theme.  But now, let's go back to those amazing transitions of Brahms. Let's hear how he transitions back to a restatement of that theme.  Do you hear the Beethoven 5 in there? It's there!

Now let's hear the anxious second subject of the third movement. 

What is that possibly setting up? (Walter/Columbia)

So now, let's finally get to the last movement. Which in a Beethoven symphony would be the opening.   Almost immediately, you'll hear that motif from the second movement, in a completely different cast.

We'll skip more Beethoven 5 declarations, and I think you've already gotten the turbulence of this movement, and go straight to that magnificent, peaceful, anti-Beethoven end. 

Only someone who completely idolized Beethoven could have written something in such opposition to Beethoven's model. This is, in so many ways, the anti-Beethoven's 5th. Beethoven wanted victory, Brahms wanted peace. By opposing Beethoven's revolutionary edge, he preserved everything which Beethoven fought for. He may have lacked Beethoven's will to greatness, but he had his own kind of blood and iron. He had a caution that insisted on getting everything exactly right, and the same iron will Beethoven had, which allowed him to work through his caution. He did not recapture the spirit of Beethoven's revolutionary zeal, and in 1883, I doubt anyone could. Beethoven showed the way out of the struggle. Brahms showed the way to preserve a world without struggle. He showed how we can all achieve something great through weaving an endless array of ideas into a diverse and inclusive whole that incorporates everything at all times.

But not every temperament is Brahms, and clearly not everybody is satisfied with merely endless  ingenuity and integration. And don't think Brahms didn't know that. Next week, we'll start with his Fourth Symphony, and we'll go through a number of other symphonies so we can end with the Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, the anti-Beethoven's Ninth.

Modern Jewish Literature - Class 2 - Yiddish Literature

So I'm just going to warn you now. Things are about to get very real, and I'm taking a big risk by framing our discussion in this way. Some of you may not come back after today. So very quickly, brace yourselves. I was completely blocked on how to approach this class until Friday night when I realized that the block was due to the fact that this class is probably near the source of every neurosis I've ever had in my life. So if you find this too uncomfortable, I apologize but I was up against a deadline, and Dr. Freud was screaming at me. And because of that I have little choice but to take you with me on a journey as I work through my guilt and anger about being yelled at by my family about how I'm the reason the Yiddish language is dying when I was four years old!

I had some inkling that my parents were speaking some strange language to each other of which I knew a bit when I was a very small child, and there were certainly resemblances between many words. But I'm pretty sure it was not until my first day of school that I realized, OH MY GOD THE REST OF THE WORLD SPEAKS ENGLISH!

So at some point after school started, I learned English well enough to come home one day and refuse to talk to them in Yiddish, for which I got the first of many, many, many lectures about how I'm not doing my part to rescue Jewish culture from dying permanently. Which of course, in a four-year-old's brain, means 'You killed Judaism!!! You killed it and it's dead and it's never coming back and we don't love you anymore. Well, I'm teaching a Jewish literature class, so who's the champion of Yiddishkeit now????

So all of this and everything I'm about to say is obviously ironic in the extreme, but it does bring us to a deeply uncomfortable truth of life among Yiddish speakers, and perhaps generally of Jewish life. For the vast majority of our history, Jews have been utterly powerless against our life-circumstances. We lived in authoritarian countries where you had to defer and grovel to the outside world to survive, or at very least avoid imprisonment, or conscription, or assault. We knew that whenever we showed how much we resented our circumstances to the outside world, the consequences might have been disastrous and permanent. So whatever frustrations we had, the only outlet we had to take them out on was each other.

This might strike some of the more American souls in here as extremely harsh, maybe even a little antisemitc. But those of us who lived it can tell you, in a traditional Yiddish-speaking family it was pretty much expected that scenes would be made. 

What is the one thing that everybody knows Yiddish does better than anything else? (insults)

Name some simple Yiddish words that are insults:

Now let's think of some compound multi-word Yiddish insults:

Let's read some of that list of Yiddish insults. You knew it was coming. A class on Yiddish without a list of insults is not a class on Yiddish. 

“Abi gezunt dos leben ken men zikh ale mol nemen.” – Stay healthy, because you can kill yourself later.

“Vahksin zuls du vi a tsibeleh, mitten kup in drerd!” – May you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground!

“Lign in drerd un bakn beygl!” – May you go to hell where you bake bagels you can’t eat!

“Ale tseyn zoln bay im aroysfaln, not eyner zol im blaybn oyf tsonveytung.” – May all your teeth fall out, except one that will make you suffer.

 “Zolst hobn tsen haizer, yeder hoiz zol hobn tsen tsimern, in yeder tsimer zoln zain tsen betn un zolst zij kaiklen fun ein bet in der tsweiter mit cadojes!” – I wish you to have ten houses, each house with ten rooms, each room with ten beds and you should roll from one bed to the other with cholera! 

 “Gey strashe di gens” – Go threaten the geese

"Zey zol kakn mit blit un mit ayer." - They should shit blood and pus.

"Got zol gebn, zey zol hobn altsding vos zyn harts glist, nor zey zol zayn geleymt oyf ale ayvers un nit kenen rirn mit der tsung." - God should bestow them everything they desire, but they should be quadriplegics unable to use their tongues. 

So once we've taken in the glories that are the Yiddish language. Ask yourself: What's the point of having insults like these?

Say any of these insults in English, and they lose all meaning. The specificity of them is unique to the language and the customs of the culture that birthed them. They're not just something Hershel the tailor said once and everybody remembered it. That may have happened once in 1450, but if these insults are remembered to this day, it's because they became common parlance. They are almost like a formalized declaration of intent. "I say this because I mean to insult you." Jews in the ghetto could not challenge each other to duels, it's doubtful they often allowed themselves fisticuffs, because gentiles might see them fight and get ideas, so they needed an elaborate formal system of expressing anger with hat sounds completely ridiculous in a modern context. When most of us Americans get angry, the first thing that happens is that we're at a loss for words. But that's not an option for Jews in the shtetl, words are their only weapon. And to give any outlet to their anger, they needed an extremely specific system of insults. I remember hearing about the time a friend of my Bubbie and Zaydie was called a schtik fleysch mit eygen, and what a scandal that was. In so many words, that meant that she was stupid. But a schtik fleysch mit eygen means 'a peace of meat with eyes.' It's a formalized insult you can't take back, the shtetl equivalent to slapping another person with a glove and saying I challenge you to a duel. But since it's so much less effective than a duel, it happens much more often, and it's seen as something sort of unavoidable in day to day interaction.

In many American Jewish families, this way of yelling continues to this day. For some families, yelling means I love you at the same time as you're killing me at the same time as it means you're killing me because I love you. Now many non-Jewish people, perhaps even many Jewish people,  inevitably recoil from public admissions that a person has grudges against his family. A conservative who might be a little repressed might say how can you possibly talk this way about your family in public??? A progressive who might be a little overly empathetic might ask, how could you possibly endure circumstances like that???

But both of them are seeing the world in a very linear, non-Jewish, maybe even goyisher, rubric. They are seeing the world from a place where everything is either one thing or the other. Everything, in such a view, is either tragic, or comic, or romantic, or satirical. But the origin of those world views is Greek, not Jewish, and while it's shaped the Western worldview for two-and-a-half thousand years, it's barely two-hundred years old in Judaism. 

The most uniquely Jewish form of expression is irony. Irony, not comedy. The Tanakh is, so far as we know, the literary origin of irony. It literally means to say one thing and mean the opposite. 

Let's quickly look at three verses from the Tanakh that are clearly ironic:

2 Malachim/Kings 18:27'It came about at noon, that Elijah mocked them and said, "Call out with a loud voice, for he is a god; either he is occupied or gone aside, or is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened."' 

(in response to Iyov/Job 11:20: 'But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall not escape, and their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost.')Iyov/Job 12:2'No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you.' 

Yechezkel/Ezekiel 28:3-5'Behold, you are wiser than Daniel; There is no scret that is a match for you. By your wisdom and understanding you have acquired riches for yourselfand have acquired gold and silver for your treasuries. By your great wisdom, by your trade you have increased your riches and your heart is lifted up because of your riches.'

Irony is a way of expressing things in a multiplicity. It's the most practical means of expression: it's a holistic viewpoint takes in both tragedy and comedy, it can be filled with both contempt and compassion. It expresses a long view of the universe that says we can't possibly his everything there is to know about anything. So when a person, let alone a Jew, says that your upbringing could be weird at times, it's both a way of complaining about it and also of celebrating it. It's a way of saying the obvious truth about every family in the world, which is that family life is messy. Everybody's family is crazy, and everybody has reasons they sometimes want to murder the people they love, but thought and action are very different things, and in Judaism, the way you deal with these thoughts is by unapologetically owning up to them. Maybe only a Jew could have come up with psychotherapy because would anybody else have wanted to talk about their baggage? But the Jewish way is to find a practical way to accommodate the reality rather than letting it fester, because repressing and denying problems is how problems grow.

So, let's take a Talmudic disquisition to this and ask a series of ironic questions and try to find answers:

Why do I want to murder my family?

Let's consult the Mishna:

What makes me want to murder these people? Rabbi Akiva says it's because they are so rigid about how they interpret Jewish responsibility and assimilation and Israel and antisemitism. Rabbi Eliezer says it's because it took them thirty years to realize that dating non-Jews might be alright even if every potential spouse would be pestered until the end of their lives to convert. Rabbi Yehoshua HaNasi says it's because they still haven't realized that just because I'm a liberal I'm not necessarily an accessory to evil any more than they are.

Let's find the next Mishnaic question: 

How can I avoid murdering these people? Rabbi Meir says it's by not bringing politics and religion up. Shimon Bar-Yochai says it's by finding other, more agreeable topics of conversation. Yokhanan Ben-Zakkai says it's by leaving the room when it seems like these inevitable discussions are getting heated.

So then you go to similar questions in the Gemara: 

How can I reduce the situations that make me want to murder them? Abbahu says I should politely ask them before it gets heated not to bring up these topics. Rav Ashi says I should make them see the common ground between us before they come up.

 Once I'm in those situations that make me want to murder them, how do I get myself out of them? Rav Jonah says there's a polite way in which I can leave the room without their taking offense. Rav Nachman says there's a way to steer the conversation with a pasted on smile to something unrelated that they'll find interesting enough to talk about. Rav Papa says I can make a joke out of the whole thing that deflates the situation

So then go to the questions which the Zugot ask:

How can I make myself remember, when I want to murder them, that there are times when I don't want to murder them and am really quite fond of them? 

Rabbi Shammai would say it's by these kinds of arguments that bond us together and grow into a shared experience that makes life more meaningful. Rabbi Hillel would say that it's these arguments that makes you appreciate the other person for precisely who they are, and in those moments after the yelling calms down, make you grow love them even more for having understood them better. 

The Talmud involves grappling with all sorts of things: obvious things we all don't necessarily need stated, pedantic things we'd all rather tune out, dark things we'd all rather avoid, but by taking all of that commentary in, you realize the vastness of lived Jewish experience, and you come to realize that the problems of your life are just a very small part of the totality that defines your life, your family, your community, and your world.

So let's look at three of the most famous instances of irony in Yiddish Literature. The first is from a writer who isn't one of my favorites. I. L. Peretz. Peretz was perhaps a greater man than a writer. He's the second famous Yiddish writer, but in many ways he's the reason that Yiddish Literature and Yiddish culture became a phenomenon. It's not that his stories are anything but good, sometimes great, but in many ways, they're more didactic than artistic. He wants to provoke the reader into action, and he did that brilliantly. So let's be yet another Yiddish Literature class that looks at Bontshe the Silent. Take five or six minutes to read this highlight reel of the story that I put together:

Here on earth the death of Bontshe Shvayg made no impression. Try asking who Bontshe was, how he lived, what he died of... and no one can give you an answer. For all you know, he might have starved to death. 

The death of a tram horse would have caused more excitement...

Bontshe lived and died in silence. Like a shadow he passed through this world....

...He lived like a grain of gray sand at the edge of the sea, beside millions of other grains No one noticed when the wind whirled him off and carried him to the far shore.

While Bontshe lived, his feet left no tracks in the mud: when he died, the wind blew away the wooden sign marking his grave... Do you think that three days after Bontshe was dead anyone knew where he lay?

...Nothing remained of him at all. Nt a trace. Alone he lived and alone he died.

Were not humanity so noisy, someone might have heard Bontshe's bones as they cracked beneath their burden... Bontshe, a fellow member of the human race, had in his lifetime two lifeless eyes, a pair of sinkholes for cheeks, and, even when no weight bent his back, a head bowed to the ground as if searching for his own grave....

 ...Think of how many others are waiting to share his plot of earth with him and well may you wonder how long he will rest there in peace. 

He was born in silence. He lived in silence. He died in silence. And he was buried in silence greater yet. 

But that's not how it was in the other world. There Bontshe's death was an occasion. 

A blast of the Messiah's horn sounded in all seven heavens:... A joyous din broke out in paradise "Bontshe Shvayg--it doesn't happen every day!"

...God Himself soon knew that Bontshe Shvayg was on his way. 

...And what was that flash?

It was a gold crown set with gleaming jewels All for Bontshe!

"What, before the Heavenly Tribunal has even handed down its verdict?" marveled the saints, not without envy.

"Ah!" answered the angels. "Everyone knows that's only a formality. The prosecution doesn't have a leg to stand on. The whole business will be over in five minutes. You're not dealing with just anyone, you know!"

...when Bontshe heard that a gold crown and chair awaited him in paradise and that the heavenly prosecutor had no case to present, he behaved exactly as he would have in this world--that is, he was too frightened to speak. His heart skipped a beat. He was sure it must either be a dream or a mistake.

...He was afraid that if he uttered a sound or moved a limb he would be recognized at once and whisked away by the devil. 

He was trembling so hard that he did not hear the cherubs sing his praises or see them dance around him.

 "The name of Bontshe Shvayg, Bontshe the Silent," the counsel was saying "fit him like a tailored suit."... "not once in his whole life," the counsel for the defense went on, "did he complain to God or to man. Not once did he feel a drop of anger or cast an accusing glance at heaven."

"At the age of eight days, his circumcision was botched by a bungler--...---who couldn't even staunch the blood."... "He bore it all in silence." continued the counsel for the defense. "Even when, at the age of thirteen, his mother died and her place was taken by a stepmother with the heart of a snake--"... "She scrimped on his food. She fed him moldy bread and gristle while she herself drank coffee with cream in it--"... "She didn't spare him her fingernails, though. His black-and-blue marks showed through the holes in the ld rags she dressed him in. She made him chop wood for her on the coldest days of winter, standing barefoot in the yard. He was too young... He wrenched his arms and froze his feet more times than you can count. But he kept silent, even before his own father--"

"His father? A drunk!" laughed the prosecutor, sending a chill down Bontshe's spine. 

"--he never complained"... "He hadn't a soul to turn to. No friends, no schoolmates, no school . . . not one whole item of clothing . . . not a free second of time--"... "He even kept silent when his father, in a drunken fit, took him by the neck one snowy winter night and threw him out of the house. He picked himself out of the snow without a peep and followed his feet where they took him. At no time did he ever say a word. Even when half-dead from hunger, he never begged except with his eyes."... "He worked the meanest jobs and said nothing. And don't think it was easy to find them."

"Drenched in his own sweat, doubled over beneath more than a man can carry, his stomach gnawed by hunger, he kept silent!... Spattered with the mud of city streets, spat on by unknown strangers, driven from the sidewalk to stagger in the gutter with his load beside carriages, wagons, and tram cars, looking death in the eye every minute, he kept silent!... He never reckoned how many tons he had to carry for each ruble... Never once did he stop to ask himself why fate was kinder to others. He kept silent!... He said nothing when cheated, nothing when paid with bad money... He even kept silent in the hospital, the one place where a man can scream... He kept silent as he lay dying. He kept silent when he died. Not one word against God. Not one word against man.

"The defense rests!"

"Gentlemen!" The voice of the prosecutor was sharp and piercing. At once, however, it broke off. 

"Gentlemen . . ." it resumed, although more softly, only to break off again. 

When it spoke a third time, it was almost tender. "Gentlemen," it said. "He kept silent. I will do the same. 

...Then, from the bench, another voice spoke tenderly, tremulously, too. "Bontshe, Bontshe, my child," it said in harplike tones. "My own dearest Bontshe!"

..."My child"; "my Bontshe"--not once since the death of his mother had he been spoken to like that.

"My child," continued the judge, "you have suffered all in silence. There is not an unbroken bone in your body, not a corner of your soul that has not bled. And you have kept silent. 

"There, in the world below, no one appreciated you. You yourself never knew that had you cried out but once, you could have brought down the walls of Jericho. You never knew what powers lay within you.

"There, in the World of Deceit, your silence went unrewarded. Here, in the World of Truth, it will be given its full due. 

"The Heavenly Tribunal can pass no judgement on you. It is not for us to determine your portion of paradise. Take what you want! It is yours, all yours!

..."Truly?" asked Bontshe, a bit surer of himself

 "Truly! Truly! Truly!" clamored the heavenly host. 

"Well, then," smiled Bontshe. "what I'd like most of all is a warm roll with fresh butter every morning."

The judges and angels hung their heads in shame. The prosecutor laughed.  

So, what's the ending mean?

This is a stunning work in all kinds of ways, but it's clear to me that this is as much a very powerful piece of agitprop as it is a work of literature. Look at that line from this judge with a very musical voice, and let's also bear in mind that there are all sorts of images presented in the Psalms - the Biblical book written specifically to be sung - of God as a Judge. So this judge very well may be God himself, and He says, "You yourself never knew that had you cried out but once, you could have brought down the walls of Jericho. You never knew what powers lay within you."

And now that he has a bit of inkling of the power that lay within him, what does he do? He wants a warm roll with butter every morning. It's possible, let's not forget, that the end result of this is that Bontshe is condemned to hell. But it's clearly not a literal story, so let's not read its meanings too literally.

Let's think, instead, about the trial itself, and everything which is being put on trial along with Bontshe. After you read this, think to yourself. Who is actually on trial here? Is it Bontshe? Or is it Heaven? Is it Jews because of their timidity in the face of suffering? Or is it God and the Angels who would let the Bontshes of the world suffer as he did? Or is it us, for letting the Bontshes we see every day keep suffering? Or is it us for allowing ourselves to keep suffering?


There's obviously a searing rage that shoots through this story, but alongside that contempt is enormous compassion. It's clearly a story that tells those readers who suffer that the angels hear your suffering and want to reward you for it. It's a story that if you demand your rights and due in life, you will be surprised by how much of it you will get.

The irony in this story cuts very deep because Bontshe deserves so much more than he got, and he would have gotten it had he done the very things the rest of us do that perhaps make us not deserve as much as Bontshe.

Now, let's go to a Sholem Aleichem story. Sholem Aleichem is probably the most beloved Yiddish writer, and he is absolutely great. This is far from his most famous story, but it's, almost without a doubt, my favorite, for reasons that will become clear very quickly. It's called 'A Yom Kippur Scandal.' Let's take roughly seven minutes to read this, if you know the punchline, DO NOT GIVE IT AWAY!

...suddenly screams were heard. 'Help! Help! Help!' We looked around: the stranger was stretched out on the floor in a dead faint. We poured water on him, revived him, but he fainted again. What was the trouble? Plenty. This Litvak tells us that he had brought with him to Kasrilevka eighteen hundred rubles. To leave that much at the inn--think of it, eighteen hundred rubles--he had been afraid. Whom could he trust with such a sum of money in a strange town? And yet, to keep it in his pocket on Yom Kippur was not exactly proper either. So at last this plan had occurred to him: he had taken the money to the synagogue and slipped it into the praying stand. Only a Litvak could do a think like that! . . . Now do you see why he had not stepped away from the praying stand for a single minute? And yet during one of the many prayers when we all turn our face to the wall, someone must have stolen the money . . .

"Well, the poor man wept, tore his hair, wrung his hands. What would he do with the money gone? It was not his own money, he said. He was only a clerk. The money was his employer's. He himself was a poor man, with a houseful of children. There was nothing for him to do now but go out and drown himself, or hang himself right here in front of everybody. 

"'Shammes, lock the door!' ordered our Rabbi. We have our own Rabbi in Kasrilevka, Re Yozifel, a true man of God, a holy man. Not too sharp witted, perhaps, but a good man, a man with no bitterness in him. Sometimes he gets ideas that you would not hit upon if you had eighteen heads on your shoulders . . . When the door was locked, Reb Yozifel turned to the congregation, his face pale as death and his hands trembling, his eyes burning with a strange fire.

"He said, 'Listen to me, my friends, this is an ugly thing, a thing unheard of since the world was created--that here in Kasrilevka there should be a sinner, a renegade to his people, who would have the audacity to take from a stranger, a poor man with a family, a fortune like this. And on what day? On the holiest day of the year, on Yom Kippur, and perhaps at the last, most solemn moment, just before the shofar was blown! Such a thing has never happened anywhere. I cannot believe it is possible. It simply cannot be.... Therefore, my friends, let us search each other now, go through each other's garments, shake out our pockets--all of us from the oldest householder to the shammes, not leaving anyone out. Start with me. Search my pockets first.'

"Thus spoke Reb Yozifel, and he was the first to unbind his gabardine and turn his pockets inside out. And following his example all the men loosened their girdles and showed the linings of their pockets, too. They searched each other, they felt and shook one another, until they came to Lazer Yossel, who turned all colors and began to argue that, in the first place, the stranger was a swindler; that his story was the pure fabrication of a Litvak. No one had stolen any money from him. Couldn't they see that it was all a falsehood and a lie? 

"The congregation began to clamor and shout. What did he mean by this? All the important men had allowed themselves to be searched, so why should Lazer Yossel escape? There are no privileged characters here. 'Search him! Search him!' the crowd roared.

"But wait . . . I forgot to tell you who this Lazer Yossel was.... The rich man of our time had dug him up somewhere for his daughter, boasted that he had found a rare nugget, a fitting match for a daughter like his. He knew a thousand pages of Talmud by heart, and all of the Bible. He was a master of Hebrew, arithmetic, bookkeeping, algebra, penmanship--in short, everything you could think of. When he arrived in Kasrilevka--this jewel of a young man--everyone came to gaze at him. What sort of bargain had the rich man picked out? Well, to look at him you could tell nothing.... Our leading citizens began to work on him; tried him out on a page of Gamorah, a chapter from the Scriptures, a bit of Rambam, this and the other. He was perfect in everything, the dog! Whenever you went after him, he was at home. Reb Yozifel himself said that he could have been a rabbi in any Jewish congregation. As for world affairs, there is nothing to talk about. We have an authority on such things in our town, Zaidel Reb Shaye's, but he could not hold a candle to Lazer Yossel.... Naturally the whole town envied the rich man his find, but some of them felt he was a little too good to be true. He was too clever (and too much of anything is bad!). For a man of his station he was too free and easy, a hail-fellow-well-met, too familiar with all the young folk--boys, girls, and maybe even loose women. There were rumors . . . At the same time he went around alone too much, deep in thought. At the synagogue he came in last, put on his tallis, and with his skullcap on askew, thumbed aimlessly through his prayerbook without ever following the services. No one saw him doing anything exactly wrong, and yet people murmured that he was not a God-fearing man. Apparently a man cannot be perfect . . .

"And so, when his turn came to be searched and he refused to let them do it, that was all the proof most of the men needed that he was the one who had taken the money. He begged them to let him swear any oath they wished, begged them to chop him, roast him, cut him up--do anything but shake his pockets out. At this point even our Rabbi, Reb Yozifel, although he was a man we had never seen angry, lost his temper and started to shout.

"'You!' he cried. 'You thus and thus! Do you know what you deserve? You see what all these men have endured. They were able to forget the disgrace and allowed themselves to be searched; but you want to be the only exception! God in heaven! Either confess and hand over the money, or let us see for ourselves what is in your pockets. You are trifling now with the entire Jewish community. Do you know what they can do to you?'

 "To make a slong story short, the men took hold of this young upstart, threw him down on the floor with force, and began to search him all over, shake out every one of his pockets. And finally they shook out . . . Well, guess what! A couple of well-gnawed chicken bones and a few dozen plum pits still moist from chewing. You can imagine what an impression this made--to discover food in the pockets of our prodigy on this holiest of fast days. Can you imagine the look on the young man's face, and on his father-in-law's? And on that of our poor Rabbi?

"Poor Reb Yozifel! He turned away in shame. He could look no one in the face. On Yom Kippur, and in his synagogue . . . As for the rest of us, hungry as we were, we could not stop talking about it all the way home. We rolled with laughter in the streets. Only Reb Yozifel walked home alone, his head bowed, full of grief, unable to look anyone in the eyes, as though the bones had been shaken out of his own pockets."
The story was apparently over. Unconcerned, the man with the round eyes of an ox turned back to the window and resumed smoking.
"Well," we all asked in one voice, "and what about the money?"
"What money?" asked the man innocently, watching the smoke he had exhaled.
"What do you mean--what money? The eighteen hundred rubles!"
"Oh," he drawled. "The eighteen hundred. They were gone."
"Gone?"
"Gone forever."

This has got to be one of the funniest stories ever written, and the ending is brutal. After a punchline that good, everybody in the story forgets about the money, everybody forgets about the person whose life is ruined along with his family's, and so do the readers. The fact that the ending's so bleak only makes it funnier. And then, boom! The irony hits you. The ultimate scandal of this story is that we find it funny. It's right before the Shofar is blown at the last minute of Yom Kippur. The holiest minute of the holiest day of the year, and a man's life is completely and heartlessly ruined. A horrible crime against God, a horrible crime against our fellow man, and for the fact that we forgot about this crime against both man and God means that we are horrible people - and that makes it even funnier. 

So now, let's go to another very famous story that no Yiddish literature class can seem to avoid. Bontshe's son, Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer. This is, probably, the most famous short story in Yiddish literature, and maybe the best.  We're going to come back to Gimpel later, but let's just read these three paragraphs: 

I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, glump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in. They said, "Gimpel, you know the rabbi's wife has been brought to childbed?" So I skipped school. Well, it turned out to be a lie. How was I supposed to know? She hadn't had a big belly. But I never looked at her belly. Was that really so foolish? The gang laughed and hee-hawed, stomped and danced and chanted a good-night prayer. And instead of the raisins they give when a woman's lying in, they stuffed my hand full of goat turds. I was no weakling. If I slapped someone he'd see all the way to Cracow. But I'm really not a slugger by nature. I think to myself: Let it pass. So they take advantage of me. .......

When the pranksters and the leg-pullers found that I was easy to fool, every one of them tried his luck with me. "Gimpel, the czar is coming to Frampol; Gimpel, the moon fell down in Turbeen; Gimpel, little Hodel Furpiece found a treasure behind the bathhouse." And I like a golem believed everyone. In the first place, everything is possible, as it is written in The Wisdom of the Fathers, I've forgotten just how. Second, I had to believe when the whole town came down on me! If I ever dared to say, "Ah, you're kidding!" there was trouble. People got angry. "What do you mean! You want to call everyone a liar?" What was I to do? I believed them, and I hope at least that did them some good....

To tell the truth, I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened, but all the same, as folks were talking, I threw on my wool vest and went out. Maybe something had happened. What did I stand to lose by looking? Well, what a cat music went up! And then I took a vow to believe nothing more. But that was no go either. They confused me so that I didn't know the big end from the small. 

So in the interests of time, I'm going to summarize the rest of the story. Gimpel the Fool believes in the goodness of other people. His benevolence’s reward is nothing but humiliation and oppression from everyone he's ever met. Because Gimpel chooses to believe that people would never be so malicious as to lie, everyone he ever meets tries to fool him. The people of the town trick him into marriage with a woman who named Elka who had already been married twice and who may be a prostitute; and in addition to a steady stream of lovers, Elka has a more permanent paramour whom she introduces as her ‘brother.’ She insists that the ‘brother’ not only live with them but also that Gimpel hire him as an apprentice in his bakery. Both Elka and her ‘brother’ are physically abusive to Gimpel, and though Gimpel and Elka probably never have had sex, she has six children and assures Gimpel that they’re all his. Gimpel chooses to believe her. The town later decides that Gimpel has to divorce Elka for the very reason they insisted he marry her. But Gimpel still chooses to believe his wife, and he refuses to divorce her. Gimpel and Elka live this way for another twenty years before Elka dies. On her deathbed, she makes a shocking confession: (gasp!) the children are not his. We're going to come back at the end of the class to the end of this story.

Gimpel doesn't care at all about how other people treat him, only about how he treats them. He's a man who lives his life in the service of an ethical code, and the world rewards his efforts with unsurpassable cruelty; and this is cruelty devised and enacted by his fellow Jews - the very same people who should unceasingly praise his ethical conduct. Gimpel may live among his co-religionists, but he is a Jew among Jews; he's hounded for living by an ethical code that sets him apart from his neighbors. He becomes so tyrannized by those around him that he has to leave his home and live a life of perpetual exile.

So why might other Jews treat Gimpel so hatefully?

I will give my personal theory. A bullied person is in the hardest possible circumstance, because once you've dehumanized a victim, the most important part of rehumanizing them is to realize that you yourself are the one who became less than human. There's a famous passage in The Brothers Karamazov, maybe the most famous, which begins with Fyodor Karamazov, the family father, deciding to make a scandalous scene in a holy place, because he thinks of someone he dislikes and says to himself 'I once played a trick on this person, and I've hated him ever since.' It's the same idea as the old adage that whites could never forgive blacks for slavery. The contempt and the revulsion which Europeans felt for Jews was as much because of how they made Jews suffer as it was for how they perceived any Jewish actions. Jews are perceived as revolting because they are weak, and because they have to accept how we treat them, and therefore we must continue to treat them that way. If we show them mercy, their weakness might infect us. They might gain strength, and they in fact might take revenge, because god knows we've done things to them worth avenging; so, if anything, let's treat them still worse. So when you look at it from this point of view, not only is Yiddish literature shot through with irony, not only is Yiddishkeit, not only is perhaps Judaism itself, but even the primary reason for antisemitism is irony! And Isaac Bashevis Singer takes it an irony still further. Gimpel is treated with incredible cruelty by the very people who have been treated that cruelly themselves. 

At this point, I wanted to take a half-hour to take you through one the greatest novels I've ever read. The Brothers Ashkenazi by Singer's older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. It's one of the most intense novels ever written. And I tried to make an extreme miniature version of it. But there is no way to reduce this to a half-hour of reading, and so many passages from it in isolation would seem exploitative and pointlessly brutal when in fact, the brutality is, sadly, incredibly realistic - about war, about exploitation, about the pointlessness and inevitability of gut hatreds, and especially about what Freud would call "The narcissism of small differences." 

The Brothers Ashkenazi is not just a novel, it is a giant machine. It expands, it contracts, it whirls itself into events beyond the control of any character, and when it comes to rest, millions of lives have ended. In this novel, a world is built and destroyed. We see the Industrial Revolution happen, we see The Gilded Age, we see Communist uprisings, we see World War I, we see the Russian Revolution, we the antisemitism of the Right AND the antisemitism of the Left, and in all that, we ultimately see the humiliating prices which Jews pay for demanding anything more out of life than the humiliation that would be their lot anyway if they simply knew their place. And this was published in 1936; at the beginning of Hitler's rule, not the end! 

It is also a portrait of Jews of various regions who have, in a way, internalized the gut hatreds of the outside world against each other. Jews are, contra antisemites, made from the exact same human material as the people who hate them. They're slaves to the same prejudices that infect all people, and only separated from the rest of humanity only by just how powerless they are to act on their hatreds. 

So instead, let's read a piece of really shocking antisemitism, even more shocking because it was written by someone born Jewish. And, as so often happened in European history, the worst antisemites are ironically, Jews who converted to Christianity. We talked about Egon Friedell in the first class, and I told you that he's absolutely a thinker and intellectual historian worth reading, and that he's also a really, really bad thinker. So let's look at one of his very worst thoughts, and understand exactly what I mean by that he's both a terrible thinker and also that he's worth reading because he gives such a perceptive picture of his own age. This is a passage about the censure, the kherem, against Spinoza by the Jewish community of 17th Century Amsterdam:

...But hardly had the Jewish communities found their liberty in the "New Jerusalem," as they called it, before they began to develop with renewed energy that detestable intolerance which has always been characteristic of their religion, and which unhappily the Christian Church inherited in some degree. The spirit of Caiaphas, which determined the whole history of the people of Israel as long as they had national independence, frequently lost its potency in later times owing to external conditions, but it always came to life again when Jews attained to power. And so it was on this occasion. The case of Uriel de Costa, who, for his free religious views, was sent to his death by the venomous persecution of the Amsterdam Synagogue, is a tragic instance. Spinoza was then eight years old. Half a generation later he was engaged in a similar conflict himself. His philosophical interests and activities became known and attempts were made, first to convert him, then to bring him back to orthodoxy by threats. When both methods failed, bribery was tried: he was offered a salary of a thousand gulden if he would remain true to Judaism. Since he was not to be moved even by this, a member of the community felt that murder was indicated. But the attack failed. And now there was no course left to the Synagogue but to excommunicate him. Before the assembled congregation the solemn ban was pronounced, the concluding words being: "Curse him by day and curse him by night! Curse him sleeping and curse him waking! Curse his comings-in and curse his goings out! May the Lord never forgive him! He will burn with hardness and wrath against this man who is laden with all the curses that are written in the Book of the Law. He will blot out his name from under the heavens!" Thus did Jewry treat a man whose whole offense was that he led a more serious, peace-loving, and unworldly life than his fellow-Jews. But, as it had always been a good old Jewish tradition to stone the prophets, there is nothing extraordinary in this,... 

- Egon Friedell - A Cultural History of the Modern Age, Volume II 

First of all, wow! If you want to understand how the German speaking lands went along with Hitler, look at what Jewish converts whom Hitler would have killed anyway were saying about other Jews! As we talked about last time, the way that Jews were accepted in German speaking lands was to find ways to be more German than the Germans to show that they'd scrubbed clean all that dirty Jewishness from themselves. German Jews were, and were for a long time even in America, very keen on distinguishing themselves from those poor, obnoxious, backward Ostjuden from the Pale of Settlement.

And yet, Friedell didn't write the Kherem against Spinoza. Here is one of the ultimate ironies of Jewish history. In the most prosperous Jewish community of their century, Jews turned a fellow Jew who eventually gave more honor to the Jewish people than nearly any other person in the entire history of the religion, into a non person; simply because he exercised what should have been his freedom to worship or not worship in the way he saw fit in a country, The Netherlands, that was perhaps the most tolerant place of its time - not, in the least, because it was so tolerant to Jews. And yet Jews could not exercise the same tolerance even to the man people now think of as the greatest thinker of his time.

And that brings us to the second essential concept of Yiddish Literature. Which we'll talk about after the break. 

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So there are two essential concepts in Yiddish Literature. One is irony, the other is the flexibility of language. I wrote up and deleted another fake Talmudic disquisition about what I mean about the word 'murder.' But even in a class on Yiddish Literature, if you ironically talk about murdering your family enough, people are gonna start to think you mean it.  I think everybody's life experience makes you understand that any choice of words is incredibly important. And in the case of most languages, the importance was to make the meanings of words as clear as possible. In the case of Yiddish, the importance was to make the meanings as vague as possible. 

Some languages are relatively easy to translate because the meanings are fairly clear. But the problems of Yiddish translations are infinite. There is absolutely no way to get the infinite nuances of meaning from Yiddish into any other language. As great as lots of Yiddish Literature is, it's true that you have to take a certain fraction of its greatness on faith. You have to imagine the flavor for yourself and fill in your own meanings. You can smell what year the text you're reading was translated, because the only way you can even begin to translate a language where meanings were never properly codified is to use a certain amount of slang. 

And just as there's an incredibly elaborate system of specific expressions in Yiddish, there's also a second elaborate system of expressions meant to be vague as possible. Think of the word 'heymish' or 'heymisher.' I could tell you that it means home-like, but that does not in any sense describe the lived-in experience of having that word in your vocabulary, or the multiplicity of association it recalls for the people who use it, the exponentially multiple uses which the word passes through in everyday conversation, because what can home-like mean in a language of a people that have no home? It is both a deeply emotional word that recalls those places where the talker was loved and accepted, and also a code word that says that this is a place of safe lodging:

"I'm a Galicianer on the run from Romania and I'm looking a heymisher place to stay in Berdichev."
"Neyn. There isn't so much heymishkeit in Berdichev, try Molodechno."

And then you get into the basic problems any language encounters in regional dialects. My parents always marveled at how, when my Dad's parents, who were from Northeast Poland, said 'potatoes', they said 'Kartoffeln.' They used the German word. My Mom's grandparents were from the Belarus/Lithuania border, and when they said 'potatoes', they said 'Bulbes.' The Russian word. Every region of Yiddish had a world of difference to it, and in the confines of the shtetls and ghettos, it was constantly accumulating different words from region to region, and evolving at an accelerated rate from how the various dialects of German evolved between region and region. Another couple centuries and Galicianer Yiddish, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Litvak Yiddish from the Russian Empire, would probably be as different as Spanish and Italian.

No language should aspire to be in a situation like Yiddish, where the use of language has to be both extremely sloppy and extremely precise. We have to remember that Yiddish and pre-codified languages like it are the languages of oppressed people. And if we make English more like that, where we curtail some words because some people might be offended, and allow other words to be used whatever way we want, we may accidentally put greater oppression the people we're trying to liberate. 

Because Yiddish could not codify itself in any sense until the Jewish Enlightenment, which really only got going in the late 19th century, it can still evoke worlds of meaning in ways that are both fantastic and also a little dangerous.

Think of the word goy. After my first column in the Jewish Times, a couple at Beth Am whom I talked to nearly every week my first year at Beth Am wrote to the editor to condemn me for using it (they also complained that I said that Jews are bad at getting along with each other...). Goy is a word whose connotation is incredibly ambiguous. Lenny Bruce used 'goyish' the way I always use it, to connote a kind of ersatz good taste that any Jew's bullshit detector should be able to see through. It's true, the Torah sometimes uses goy in an incredibly pejorative way - heathens, idolators, and that's certainly how Rambam/Moses Maimonides, the preeminent Rabbi of the AD era, used it too. But the Torah also uses 'goy' to mean the Jews, Hashem promises Avraham a 'goy gadol' - a large nation, Whatever goy means now, 3000 years ago, it just seemed to be a value neutral term for 'nation' that was used sloppily. But when antisemitic writers wanted to show how hateful Jews are, they could point to all those pejorative uses in the Torah and then accuse Jews of hating 'goyim'. And then, in those places where 'goy' was used flatteringly, they could argue that linguistic sloppiness as evidence of our lack of moral integrity.

German is the precise opposite of this. The German language would find different and precise words, both simple and compound, to build out every possible conception of heymish brick-by-brick with its own word so that each meaning could never be mistaken for any other. The way the German language is structured seems to exist so that all concepts have a solid meaning, and can therefore never be misunderstood. We can certainly speculate how probable it is these two extreme concepts of language may have evolved parallel to each other in the way they interacted over the generations. 

But the point of Yiddishism, the study and cultivation of Yiddish as a language with its own identity and culture, was precisely to give Yiddish this definition it lacked when Jews were completely powerless; to make Jews a part of the company of nations and to show, even if they did not have territory of their own, at least they had a culture of which they could be proud. 

So that brings us to a second great Sholem Aleichem story: Dreyfus in Kasrilevka. For those who don't know, the Dreyfus Affair was a huge trial in France that captured the world's attention in the mid 1890's. A Jewish officer in the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, was charged with treason and giving state secrets to Germany. It became very clear very quickly that the case boiled down to 'This man is Jewish and therefore shifty,' and the trial indirectly created both the modern Zionist movement, and greatly influenced the Nazis in how they created antisemitic propaganda. 

This story is about how the Dreyfus Affair was followed in a small shtetl. Let's take three minutes.

I doubt if the Dreyfus case made such a stir anywhere as it did in Kasrilevka... So how did Kasrilevka learn about the Dreyfus case? From Zeidel.

Zeidel, Reb Shaye's son, was the onl person in town who subscribed to a newspaper and all the news of the world they learned from him...He told what he read in the paper, but they turned it around to suit themselves, because they understood better than he did. 

One day Zeidel came to the synagogue and told how in Paris a certain Jewish captain named Dreyfus had been imprisoned for turning over certain government papers to the enemy... Someone remarked in passing, "What won't a Jew do to make a living?" And another added spitefully "A Jew has no business climbing so high, interfering with kings and their affairs."

Later when Zeidel came to them and told them a fresh tale, that the whole thing was a plot, that the Jewish Captain Dreyfus was innocent and that it was an intrigue of certain officers who were themselves involved, then the town became interested int he case. At once Dreyfus became a Kasrilevkite. When two people came together, he was the third....

As the case went on, they got tired of waiting for Zeidel to appear in the synagogue with the news; they began to go to his house. Then they could not wait that long, and they began to go along with him to the postoffice for his paper. There they read, digested the news, discussed, shouted, gesticulated, all together and in their loudest voices. More than once the postmaster had to let them know in gentle terms that the postoffice was not the synagogue. "This is not your synagogue, you Jews...."

I doubt if Dreyfus' relatives in Paris awaited his return from the Island as anxiously as the Jews of Kasrilevka.... The day when the good news came that Dreyfus had arrived was celebrated like a holiday in Kasrilevka... "Have you heard?" "Thank the Lord." "Ah, I would have liked to have been there when he met his wife." "And I would have liked to see the children when they were told, "Your father has arrived.'"

And the women, when they heard the news, hid their faces in their aprons and pretended to blow their noses so no one could see that they were crying....

As the trial began, a great excitement took hold of the town. They tore not only the paper to pieces, but Zeidel himself. They choked on their food, they did not sleep nights....

When the last day of the trial came, the Kasrilevikites shook as with a fever. They wished they could fall asleep for twenty-four hours and not wake up till Dreyfus was declared a free man. 

But as if in spite, not a single one of them slept a wink that night. They rolled all night from side to side, waged war with the bedbugs, and waited for day to come. 

At the first sign of dawn they rushed to the postoffice. The outer gates were still closed. Little by little a crowd gathered outside and the street was filled with people. Men walked up and down, yawning, stretching, pulling their earlocks and praying under their breath. 

...They waited for Zeidel to come. And at last he came. 

When Zeidel opened the paper and read the news aloud, there arose such an outcry, such a clamor, such a roar that the heavens could ahve split open. Their outcry was not against the judges who gave the wrong verdict, not at the generals who swore falsely, not at the French who showed themselves up so badly. The outcry was against Zeidel.  

"It cannot be!" Kasrilevka shouted with one voice. "Such a verdict is impossible! Heaven and earth swore that the truth must prevail. What kind of lies are you telling us?"

"Fools!" shouted Zeidel, and thrust the paper into their faces. "Look! See what the paper says!"

"Paper! Paper!" shouted Kasrilevka. "And if you stood with one foot in heaven and the other on earth, would we believe you?"

"Such a thing must not be. It must never be! Never! Never!"

And--who was right?

That last line is perfect. My Yiddish is, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, terrible, but I'd venture there's about a 99.999999% chance that the original of that 'And' is 'Nu?' Yet another irony. Such a thing must not be, must never be, never, never. And yet it is.

Think of how prescient those final two lines would be fifty years after Dreyfus. A thousand years existence, finally an explosion of creativity and dedication to give Yiddish culture, to Jews, a respected place in their countries of origin, only for the children of every character in that story to meet a fate much worse than Dreyfus.

So let's end this by returning to the greatest of all Yiddish writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer. One of the few writers in any language who can measure up to Shakespeare or The Bible. He writes about the single most fundamental question of existence, why are we here? He writes often about simple medieval Jewish peasants, and on a shallow level, you might say that his stories might almost seem like Christian fables. But on a much deeper level, the perspective is extremely modern, because the stakes are not about salvation and damnation, but about being and nothingness. Does the world have meaning? Does anything we do matter?

There are readers of various temperaments who are put off by him, particularly Jewish readers. There are reasons to be put off. He allowed himself to be mass marketed in all kinds of ways. He was incredibly ungenerous in his assessment of other Yiddish writers, whom he said were corrupted by the twin sins of sentimentality and socialism. He was not political but he was very pessimistic about liberalism and got the Presidential Medal of Merit from Ronald Reagan. He was a married womanizer who hit on every young Jewish woman in he met well into his old age - and he was quite honest about that in his stories. 

He was, in so many senses, what a Yiddish writer was not supposed to be. Yiddish writers were mostly realists who wrote about recognizable people, but Yitzhak Bashevis wrote fables that almost seem biblical, some people would say that he was a magical realist fifteen years before magical realism existed. The Yiddish intelligensia was always a bastion of socialism, and Singer was utterly anti-Socialism. People were scandalized by the sex in his stories, though this was certainly before the emergence of Philip Roth, and they thought that his stories were meant to be deliberately offend reader's sense of common decency - which they certainly were and are - one of his novels has a scene in which a couple has sex on Yom Kippur. A lot of people, based on Singer's public readings, think of him as this amusing and sentimental old Zayde who imparted pieces of homespun wisdom. But read the stories, Singer is sadistic, not sentimental.

What Singer gives voice and body to is not the world of Yiddish readers, but the dangerous fluidity of its long existence before Yiddish became something definite. The medieval world where all Jews are still at the mercy of nature - physical, human, and daemonic - dybbuks and angels seem to have an everyday physical presence in people's lives. The devil personally tempts the unsuspecting, mourners are visited by the ghosts of the departed, and there are more things in the heaven and the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

At the end of Gimpel's story, we arrive at a complexity so great that even irony can't express it all. This is the complexity of the greatest passages of the Bible, in which Gimpel not only walks the earth, but becomes every Jew, in every time, everywhere. After every unthinkable event has become real, waiting for a day when all our foolishness and suffering has meaning, dreaming that the people we lived among who hated us in this world will love us in the next, and with many, many stories to tell.

Let's read this together:

I wandered over the land, and good people did not neglect me. After many years I became old and white; I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year. What difference can it make? Often I heard tales of which I said, "Now this is a thing that cannot happen." But before a year had elapsed I heard that it actually had come to pass somewhere.
Going from place to place, eating at strange tables, it often happens that I spin yarns improbable things that could never have happened about devils, magicians, windmills, and the like. The children run after me, calling, "Grandfather, tell us a story." Sometimes they ask for particular stories, and I try to please them. A fat young boy once said to me, "Grandfather, it's the same story you told us before." The little rogue, he was right.
So it is with dreams too. It is many years since I left Frampol, but as soon as I shut my eyes I am there again. And whom do you think I see? Elka. She is standing by the washtub, as at our first encounter, but her face is shining and her eyes are as radiant as the eyes of a saint, and she speaks outlandish words to me, strange things. When I wake I have forgotten it all. But while the dream lasts I am comforted. She answers all my queries, and what comes out is that all is right. I weep and implore, "Let me be with you." And she consoles me and tells me to be patient. The time is nearer than it is far. Sometimes she strokes and kisses me and weeps upon my face. When I awaken I feel her lips and taste the salt of her tears.
No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once re-moved from the true world. At the door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are hungry; the shrouds are prepared, I carry them in my beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.