From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
17.2 (1997): 94-105.
Copyright © 1997, The Cervantes Society of America
The Jewish Don Quixote
n 1878, the renowned Jewish
writer Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh published a Yiddish
version1 of Don Quixote entitled The
Travels of Benjamin the Third.2 In the
novella, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are reconstituted as two small-town
Jewish fools, who are traveling through Poland on their way to Israel. The
novella mimics the structure, plot, and characters of Don Quixote.
However, The Travels of Benjamin the Third
pushes themes from Don Quixote to satiric extremes. For example, in
The Travels everyone is as mad as the Jewish Don Quixote, Benjamin,
and the relationship between him and Sancho Panza (Sendrel) is an homosexual
marriage. As will be shown, these deviations from Don Quixote were
generated by the radically different settings of the two works. In The
Travels, the landscape the two central characters travel through is
1 It is
difficult to accurately define the relationship between Don Quixote
and The Travels of Benjamin the Third. Literary critics have alternatively
labeled The Travels a “parody”, “satire” and
“rewriting” of Don Quixote. However, I believe Ruth Wisse
evokes the relationship most accurately when she writes that the novel Don
Quixote is a “frame device” to The Travels. Her term
is thus inclusive of both the satiric and parodic uses made of Don
Quixote in The Travels. See Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern
Hero (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1971), p.32.
2 For the English
rendition, see the wonderful new translation by Hillel Halkin in Tales
of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third,
eds. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), pp.
301-391.
[P. 95] For the
Yiddish original see “Masoes Binyomin hashlishi” in Ale verk
fun Mendele-Moykher Sforim, ed. N. Mayzl (Warsaw: Farlag Mendele, 1928),
Vol. 9.
94
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
95 |
|
not seventeenth-century Spain, but nineteenth-century anti-Semitic eastern
Europe, where there were considerable and real dangers to Jewish travelers.
While I have not uncovered any correspondence
which states outright why Abramovitsh chose Don Quixote as his literary
model, certain conclusions may be drawn as to its appeal:
1) Don Quixote presented a character
so captivated by literature that he had lost touch with the real, material
world.3 The shtetl Jews whom Abramovitsh wished
to parody, were also so enthralled by literature and story telling (for the
shtetl Jews, it was Biblical stories) that it crippled their ability to live
in the ‘real’ world.
2) Previous to the publication of The
Travels, Abramovitsh had employed the ‘posited author’ devise
found in Don Quixote. In fact, nearly all of Abramovitsh's writings
were mediated by the figure of Mendele (who, as a narrative tool, resembles
Cide Hamete Benengeli).4 Abramovitsh's desire
to mimic Don Quixote may have been influenced by Cervantes's use of
a narrative model Abramovitsh himself was adept at.
3) Don Quixote may have appealed to
Abramovitsh for its “hybrid elements”, as described by M. Bakhtin:
Don Quixote is the parodied hybridization of the “alien, miraculous
world” chronotope of chivalric romances, with the “high road winding
through one's native land” chronotope that is typical of the picaresque
novel (165).
Don Quixote presented Abramovitsh with a literary model for
counterpointing the “miraculous world” chronotope of (for shtetl
Jews) Biblical narratives, with the picaresque form (which was a genre that
appealed to Abramovitsh).5
3 For
a cogent analysis of Don Quixote's difficulty discerning fact from fiction
see Ulrich Wicks, “Metafiction in Don Quixote: What is the Author Up
To” in Approaches to Teaching Cervantes' Don Quixote, ed. Richard
Bjornson (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1984), pp.
69-76.
4 For the finest
analysis of Abramovitsh's use of Mendele as a narrative device, see Dan Miron,
A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in
the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), Chapters
4-7.
5 For Abramovitsh's
greatest picaresque novel see Dos kleyne mentshele in Gezamlte
verk fun Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Volume 3, eds. A. Gurshteyn,
[p. 96] M. Viner, and Y. Nusinov (Moscow: Farlag
Emes, 1935-1940). For the English version see The Parasite, trans.
Gerald Stillman (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1956).
|
| 96 |
LEAH GARRETT |
Cervantes |
|
4) Don Quixote could be used to show
the intrinsic differences between Jewish and non-Jewish forms of delusion.
Unlike Don Quixote whose madness was an individual idiosyncrasy and could
be outgrown, Benjamin's madness was historically generated and would not
change until the Jewish plight improved. Where Don Quixote could thus mature
and become more rooted in the real world, for Benjamin no improvement was
possible because the real world excluded Jews. His stasis, like that of Jewish
culture, was total, unchangeable and historically generated. Don Quixote
was thus an exemplary model to convey the historical roots of Jewish cultural
stagnation.
The similarities and differences between Don
Quixote and The Travels of Benjamin the Third give the novella
both its comic power and its satiric leverage. A comparison of the works
will bring to light how Abramovitsh used Don Quixote as a paradigm
to build a subtle yet powerful political critique of Jewish
oppression.6
* * *
Previous to the publication of The Travels
of Benjamin the Third, Abramovitsh was highly disparaging of many of
the parochial, unprogressive attitudes of Jewish shtetl life. In this way,
he matched the outlook of numerous Jewish intellectuals of the period. These
Jewish ‘enlighteners’ (called the Maskilim) believed that if the
Jews would become more modern in belief and action, their condition would
improve.7
6 Although
there has been much analysis of The Travels of Benjamin the Third,
little has focused specifically on its parallels with Don Quixote.
The most thorough comparison remains Shmuel Niger's analysis in Mendele
Moykher-Sforim: zayn lebn, zayne gezelshaftlekhe un literarishe oyftuungen
(Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1936), pp. 182-187. For other more limited comparisons
see Ruth Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago: U of Chicago
Press, 1971), pp. 31-34; Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh,
Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz (NY: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 83-84; Theodore
Steinberg, Mendele Mocher Seforim (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977),
pp. 87-89.
7 It was only
with the massive pogroms of the 1880s that many Jewish writers and intellectuals
began to focus on how anti-Semitism had caused Jewish isolation and poverty.
For an impassioned yet convincing analysis of how the pogroms affected Jewish
literary life, see Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1990), pp. 119-138.
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
97 |
|
The Travels of Benjamin the Third marks
a turning point in Abramovitsh's artistic development. Unlike his earlier
writings, which rarely considered the mitigating, external causes of Jewish
‘backwardness’, The Travels took heed of them. Thus while
The Travels certainly ridicules Jewish shtetl culture, the work suggests
that the primary cause of Jewish cultural stagnation is entrenched anti-Semitism.
When considering The Travels of Benjamin the Third, all of Abramovitsh's
mockery of traditional Jewish life must thus be balanced against his larger
critique of an anti-Semitic system which caused Jewish stasis.
Set in the late nineteenth century, when many
east European Jews still lived in small, poor shtetls with pre-modern conditions,
Benjamin (Don Quixote) and his sidekick Sendrel (Sancho Panza) are Jewish
country bumpkins who come from a shtetl that is “a God forsaken place,
far off the beaten track” (304). The culture of their shtetl is dominated
by story telling rather than action. For every moment of life in the shtetl
there thus exists a tale to give it grandiose significance. The primary narrative
used by the shtetl to construct an alternate, idealized reality is the Bible:
Once, it so happened, someone arrived in Tuneyadevka with a date. You should
have seen the town come running to look at it. A Bible was brought to prove
that the very same little fruit grew in the Holy Land. The harder the
Tuneyadevkans stared at it, the more clearly they saw before their eyes the
River Jordan, The Cave of the Patriarchs, the tomb of Mother Rachel, the
Wailing Wall (307).
Benjamin is the archetypal son of this environment of extreme isolation
compounded by constant fantasy weaving and a denial of the base reality.
Like Don Quixote, Benjamin is a passive man
seeking to activate his stagnant life by becoming an heroic character. In
Don Quixote, although chivalric stories are the catalyst for Don Quixote's
quest, he is the real author of his plot. Within the book, fellow characters
enact his chivalric imaginings by playing the parts of knights, damsels in
distress, etc. There thus exists in Don Quixote a bipolar reality
—the chivalric and the real— that most other characters in the
story are able to navigate. Only Don Quixote lacks the ability to enter and
exit the ‘mad’ realm at will.
In The Travels of Benjamin the Third,
the bipolar reality of Don Quixote is singular, with no stark division
between Benjamin's madness and the rest of the world's sanity. In fact
all the male Jewish
|
| 98 |
LEAH GARRETT |
Cervantes |
|
characters in Benjamin's world are deluded. Day after day they sit around
talking and weaving elaborate fantasies, while relegating all work to their
wives. Unlike Don Quixote, whose quest is generated by his unique inability
to differentiate fact from fiction, in Benjamin's culture, no men are able
to do this. The only difference between Benjamin and the other men is that
while all shtetl Jews believe the biblical narratives and communal fantasies,
only Benjamin and Sendrel desire to act them out. Inspired by stories they
hear from men in the shtetl, they decide to travel to Israel to find the
descendants of the mythical lost tribes.
The cause of the shtetl's constant negation
of reality is an anti-Semitic system that has effectively curtailed Jewish
action. The society is stagnating because it has had to build strict barriers
to the non-Jewish world in order to remain safe. The culture is dominated
by inflated rhetoric because real action is impossible.
Therefore, while in Don Quixote the
villains the knight errant must slay are generally of his own making, in
The Travels of Benjamin the Third the villains are real. Rather than
being dragons or knights, they are the non-Jews that inhabit the world just
beyond the shtetl. For Jews, an heroic encounter is thus not between good
and evil knights but Jew and non-Jew.
However, in both works there are two distinct
“aesthetic regions” where:
we have the encounter of two literary regions, of two different worlds
. . . It is not the density of the vegetation but the laws of style
that separate these inhabitants of two globes constructed differently, two
noncommunicating spheres (Martínez-Bonati).
Where in Don Quixote it is the fantastic and the real, in The Travels
of Benjamin the Third it is the Jewish and the anti-Semitic. The difference
between the two realms is manifested by their languages:
Sendrel rose, walked over to the peasant,
and said as politely as he could:
“Dobry dyen! Kozhi no tshelovitshe
kudi dorogi Eretz-Yisro'eyl?” “Shtsho?” asked the peasant,
eyeing him bewilderedly. “Yaki Yisro'eyl? Nye batshil ya
Yisro'eyl.”
“Nye, Nye,” interrupted Benjamin
impatiently from where he sat. “He thinks you're asking about a person
named Israel, not about the land” . . . The peasant spat,
told them both to go to the Devil, and drove away muttering:
“Eres-Srul, Eres-Srul!” (334)
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
99 |
|
The two languages, and their aesthetic systems,
can not and do not speak to one another. Yet, whereas for the peasant the
problems with communication are annoying and at times comedic, for the Jew,
they are dangerous and are a literal barrier to Jewish mobility. Thus, where
Don Quixote's abnormal chivalric speech is made fun of, and often even
lightheartedly encouraged, Benjamin's abnormal talk puts him in danger. To
exit the shtetl and enter the broader realm is to risk death because one's
speech is a foreign language in the surrounding milieu.
Unlike Don Quixote, whom few take seriously,
nearly everyone believes in Benjamin's delusions of grandeur. In fact, the
mere act of having set out on the road has made Benjamin a hero. He is even
suspected at times of being the Messiah:
First to come across the two was a pair of proper old ladies, Toltze and
Treine, whose well-known habit it was to don their best sabbath jackets and
kerchiefs every evening and sally forth from town to greet the Messiah. One
day as the sun went down, it fell to their happy lot to encounter our worthies,
freshly arrived from Teterevke, on the hither side of the tollgate and to
escort them into Glupsk. It did not take long for the old women to find out
everything about the two strangers entrusted by fate to their care. Toltze
and Treine exchanged wondering glances and poked each other smilingly in
the ribs. “Well, Toltze?” “Well, Treine?” they whispered,
yielding quickly to their premonitions that the travelers were no ordinary
mortals (360-361).
Where the culture considers Benjamin to be
a hero, Mendele, the story's co-author and narrator, constantly portrays
Benjamin as a fool. Nevertheless, like Cide Hamete Benengeli (the purported
author of the Arabic version of Don Quixote), Mendele takes on the
guise of a serious chronicler. However, unlike Cide Hamete Benengeli, who
is only occasionally sarcastic, throughout The Travels Mendele's
voice is highly ironic. A typical example is the following, where Mendele
juxtaposes Benjamin's seeming religiosity against his real selfishness:
. . . Benjamin was waiting by the windmill with a bundle under
his arm. In it were all the necessary items for his journey: his prayer-shawl,
his phylacteries, a prayer-book, a Psalter . . . In his pocket
were fifteen and a half farthings, taken from beneath his wife's pillow (326).
|
| 100 |
LEAH GARRETT |
Cervantes |
|
Mendele's most cutting satiric representation
is of the relationship between Benjamin and Sendrel. In Don Quixote,
Don Quixote's asexuality is counterpointed against Sancho's earthy lusts.
Although Don Quixote creates an imagined love quest for Dulcinea, in reality
he is unable to act within the realm of relationships. The world of sexuality
is totally foreign to him. While his relationship with Sancho Panza is intimate,
it is within the sanctioned, hierarchical structure of the master / servant
relationship.
In The Travels of Benjamin, there is
a radical departure from the central theme of an asexual, single Don Quixote:
Benjamin has left his wife to undertake a coupling with Sendrel. Their
relationship is a mock-marriage parodying the degenerate state of Jewish
marriage in the shtetl.
Benjamin and Sendrel's romance begins after
Benjamin has a frightening experience in the forest beyond the shtetl. In
what the literary critics Dan Miron and Anita Norich label “a scene
of seduction,” Benjamin entices Sendrel to join him on the journey (Miron
and Norich 61). The moment Sendrel agrees, Benjamin abandons his wife, stating
“Why should I care about my wife?” (324).
Their honeymoon begins when Sendrel arrives
at their rendezvous point transformed into a woman:
It was indeed Sendrel in a calico smock and a greasy kerchief clinging to
his cheeks. He had a gash beneath each eye, a stick in one hand, and a large
pack on his back —but to Benjamin he was as beautiful as a bride (328).
The narrative voice switches to Benjamin's.
He describes his feeling towards Sendrel by using erotic imagery:
“As a hart longing for a spring, or a thirsty man in the desert, when
water gushes from a rock,” he has said, “so I leaped for joy to
see my trusty companion!” (328)
In contrast to Don Quixote, who fears women,
Benjamin dislikes them and is in love with a man. Benjamin's misogyny pervades
the entire story. However, Mendele constantly points out the hypocrisy of
Benjamin's misogyny, by contrasting it with the reality that women are the
only ones in the Jewish realm getting anything done:
He didn't have a farthing to his name, having spent all his days in the study
house while his wife struggled to make a living from a little store she had
opened after her parents ceased supporting them as newlyweds, the entire
stock of which consisted of the socks that she knit, the down feathers that
she stayed up plucking
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
101 |
|
on winter nights, the chicken fat that she fried and rendered before Passover,
and the bit of produce that she haggled for with peasants on market days
and resold at a scant profit . . . . Should he
take her into his confidence and reveal his plan? . . . How much,
after all, could a Jewess from Tuneyadevka understand? She might be a brave
breadwinner, but she was still a woman, and there was less in the head of
the canniest female than in the little finger of the most doltish man (318-319).
Mendele thus satirizes a system in which the role of men and women is strictly
divided: women symbolizing reproductivity (earning a living, taking care
of the family, giving birth to children), and men denoting total
unreproductivity.
However, Benjamin's abandonment of his family
is not unique, but something all shtetl men partake of by shirking their
familial responsibilities to inhabit the empty realm of petty discourse:
All this is duly examined by a panel of distinguished citizens, which sometimes
sits late into the night, leaving wives and children waiting anxiously at
home while it selflessly examines the intricacies of each case without receiving
a farthing in recompense (305).
In the mock marriage of Benjamin and Sendrel, Benjamin seeks to renew this
division of male as spiritual, female as material:
. . . “the two of us are a pair made in heaven. We go
together like a body and its soul. You'll be in charge of the physical half
of our expedition, eating and drinking and all that, and I'll be in charge
of the mental half.” (333)
Benjamin is a symbol of all that is wrong with
male shtetl culture: a constant denial of reality; a shirking of material
responsibilities; the elevation of the spiritual in order to perpetuate a
system where women do all the work. Thus while his relationship with Sendrel
mimics the idealist / realist dichotomy of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
it also satirizes an entire cultural system. However, it is clear that it
is the anti-Semitic system that must be blamed for this: it has crippled
the shtetl's economic system and therein created this generation of Don Quixote
like luftmentsh (head in the clouds).
At the end of the story, Benjamin and Sendrel
are forced to take the place of some wealthy Jews who have been conscripted
into the Russian army. However, Benjamin lays responsibility for the internment
not on the Russian system that interned Jews for decades (as a conversion
tool), but the Jews who sold them out. Benjamin declares:
|
| 102 |
LEAH GARRETT |
Cervantes |
|
“No, it's the fault of the low-down, lying Jews!” (384).
The wealthy Jews' buying off of their internment
responsibilities, echoes Benjamin's desertion of his family. Yet Benjamin
is totally unaware of the parallel. Benjamin's easy blame of the Jews, and
his lack of consideration of the larger system that brought Jewish corruption,
is just as ill sighted as his belief in the holy nature of his journey.
In Benjamin's speech to the military tribunal,
Benjamin attempts to use the family he has abandoned as the reason why he
should not be forced into military service:
“We herby declare, the two of us, that we are, have been, and always
will be ignorant of all military matters; that we are, God be praised, married
men with other things on our minds than your affairs.” (389)
Some critics have misinterpreted this speech as the moment at which Benjamin
“vindicates” himself. For instance, Ruth Wisse writes:
faced with the alternative of real power, which means in these circumstances,
conformity to the status quo, militarism and anti-Semitism, Benjamin's
foolishness seems a blessing in disguise, a way of remaining innocent in
action as well as in thought (38).
Wisse's analysis ignores Mendele's negative
portrayal throughout the novella of Benjamin's desertion of his family. For
instance:
Frolicking birds took to the air with a song as if to say: “Come, let
us chant our matins for that fine-looking fellow by the mill! Why, 'tis Benjamin
—Benjamin of Tuneyadevka, the latter-day Alexander— the stalwart
soul who has set out from his native land, leaving behind his wife and children,
to follow God's path where it leads him!” (326-327).
At the end of the story, having gained their
release from military service, Benjamin and Sendrel march off to continue
on their journey (rather than returning to their deserted
families).8 The novella's ending and Benjamin's
speech to the tribunal show that Benjamin has not vindicated himself, nor
changed in the least. In the course of implicating the military system, Benjamin
negatively implicates himself as well (by seeking to use the wife he deserted
as an excuse to be released). However he is unaware of this. Nothing has
changed.
8 Although
the ending does not state where they are heading, the reader knows Benjamin
and Sendrel are continuing on their journey, since in the prologue Mendele
discusses the eventual successful completion of the expedition. See pp.
301-304.
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
103 |
|
Yet, however much Benjamin represents a negative
archetype of the male shtetl Jew, Mendele indicates the means of transcendence
with ironic clear-sightedness. For, in the end, it is Mendele, in the guise
and voice of a ‘man of the people’, who manages to subvert all
of Benjamin's fantastic claims. Moreover, it is Mendele who effectively conveys
that the Jewish proclivity for self-delusion is the result of an oppressive,
anti-Semitic system. It is this system that has forced Jewish traditional
life to stagnate and therein created the static figure of Benjamin.
By placing Don Quixote in a Jewish context,
Abramovitsh constructed a subtle yet powerful critique of Jewish shtetl life.
Where Jewish culture was like the fantasy weaving Don Quixote, Mendele was
like the hearty realist Sancho Panza, constantly pointing out the difference
between fact and fantasy. Moreover, the novella made it clear that there
were valid historical reasons for the cultural urge to escape the stagnating,
corrupted reality, in order to inhabit a fantasy world of endless heroic
possibilities.
| THE JEWISH
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY |
Abramovitsh, Sholem / Mendele Moykher-Sforim. “The Brief Travels of
Benjamin the Third” in Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke
the Lame and Benjamin the Third, pp. 301-391. Trans. Hillel Halkin. Eds.
Dan Miron and Ken Frieden. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. For the Yiddish
original see Ale verk fun Mendele-Moykher Sforim, Volume 9. Ed. N.
Mayzl. Warsaw: Farlag Mendele, 1928.
——. The Parasite. Trans. Gerald Stillman. New York: Thomas
Yoseloff, 1956. For the Yiddish original see Dos kleyne mentshele
in Gezamlte verk fun Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Volume Three. Eds. A
Gurshteyn, M. Viner, and Y. Nusinov. Moscow: Farlag Emes, 1935-1940.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael
Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981.
Frieden, Ken. Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and
Peretz. New York: SUNY Press, 1995.
Harshav, Benjamin. The Meaning of Yiddish. Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1990.
Martínez-Bonati, Felix. Don Quixote and the Poetics of the Novel.
Trans. Dian Fox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish
Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1996.
Miron, Dan and Anita Norich. “The Politics of Benjamin III: Intellectual
Significance and Its Formal Correlatives in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh's Masoes Benyomin
Hashlishi.” In The Field of Yiddish: Studies in Language, Folklore,
and Literature. Fourth Collection. Ed. Marvin I. Herzog, Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dan Miron, and Ruth Wisse. Philadelphia: Institute
for the Study of Human Issues, 1980. pp. 1-115.
104
|
| 17.2 (1997) |
The Jewish Don Quixote |
105 |
|
Niger, Shmuel. Mendele Moykher Sforim: zayn lebn, zayne gezelshaftlekhe
un literarishe oyftuungen. Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1936.
Steinberg, Theodore. Mendele Mocher Seforim. Boston: Twayne Publishers,
1977.
Wicks, Ulrich. “Metafiction in Don Quixote: What is the Author Up To.”
In Approaches to Teaching Cervantes' Don Quixote. Ed. Richard
Bjornson. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1984. pp.
69-76.
Wisse, Ruth. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971.
|
Prepared with
the help of Sue Dirrim |
|