Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

When we think of Yiddish literature most of us recall folktales, stories, novels or poems. We tend to forget the scholarly, religious and political non-fiction literature. This void is filled by the new (for the library) anthology titled Great Yiddish writers of the twentieth century. Its content was selected and translated by Joseph Leftwich in 1969 and we have a later edition from 1987. The thick volume’s 838 pages are filled with 136 essays by over 100 authors. Instead of attempting to cover this vast collection in vain let me just pick one extended quote from Abraham Koralnik‘s essay on Jewish humor (page 766)

Jews are a paradoxical people. One would think no other people on earth had suffered so tragically, yet Jews bubble with humor. Everybody knows about the Jewish joke, the Jewish bon mot, Jewish wit, the characteristic Jewish sally. The Russians have great satirists, like Gogol. But when a Russian wants to tell a funny story he brings out a Jewish or an Armenian joke. People laugh at the Armenian joke because it’s so silly. They laugh at the Jewish joke because it’s so intelligent. Both have one feature in common, the point of the story, its unexpected end. Take two typical jokes, an Armenian and a Jewish-both widely known. What, asks the Armenian, is green, hangs on the wall, and sings? The answer, he tells you, is a herring. Why green? Because he painted it green. Why does it hang on the wall? Because he hung it there. And how does it sing? Oh, he put that in only to make it more difficult. You laugh at the absurdity of it. The Jewish story is about a man who had no meat for the Sabbath. But he had a cock and a hen, and he didn’t know which to kill – if he killed the cock the hen would be angry. If he killed the hen the cock would be angry. Well, the Jew decides, what does it matter whether the cock or the hen are angry?