{"id":37209,"date":"2026-04-29T14:41:04","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T18:41:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=37209"},"modified":"2026-04-29T14:41:04","modified_gmt":"2026-04-29T18:41:04","slug":"the-ukrainian-jewish-encounter-cultural-dimensions-part-4-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/the-ukrainian-jewish-encounter-cultural-dimensions-part-4-2\/","title":{"rendered":"\"The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\": Part 4.2"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter was founded in 2008 with the goal of building stronger relations between Ukrainians and Jews, two peoples who, for centuries, lived side by side on the territory of what is modern-day Ukraine. Since then, in keeping with its motto, \"Our stories are incomplete without each other,\" UJE has sponsored conferences, round-table discussions and research, as well as translations and publication of works the organization anticipates will promote a deeper understanding between the two peoples and an appreciation of their respective cultures.<\/p>\n

We offer for the first time the book\u00a0The Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter: Cultural Dimensions\u00a0<\/em>in an eBook format.<\/p>\n

The book is a collection of essays that examine the interaction between the Ukrainian and Jewish cultures from the seventeenth century onwards. Written by leading experts from Ukraine, Israel, and other countries, the book presents a broad perspective on parallels and cross-cultural influences in various domains \u2014 including the visual arts, folklore, music, literature, and language. Several essays also focus on mutual representation \u2014 for example, perceptions of the \"Other\" as expressed in literary works or art history.<\/p>\n

The richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of new information on these little-explored topics. The book appears as volume 25 in the series\u00a0Jews and Slavs,<\/em>\u00a0published by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1993. In several previous volumes, considerable attention is given to the defining role of the Old Testament in Ukrainian literature and art and to the depiction of Jewish life in Ukraine in the works of Nikolai Gogol, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, Vladimir Korolenko, and other writers.<\/p>\n

This collection of essays was co-edited by Wolf Moskovich, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Alti Rodal, Co-Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, who also wrote the introduction to the volume. It was published in 2016 by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

4.2<\/span><\/h1>\n

Click\u00a0here for a pdf\u00a0<\/a>of the entire book.<\/p>\n

Between the marketplace and enlightenment: Gogol and Rabinovich's Ukrainian memory space<\/h2>\n

Amelia Glaser (University of California, San Diego)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Who said that my homeland was Ukraine? Who gave it to me as a homeland? A homeland is whatever our soul seeks, what is dearer than all to it.\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba<\/em> [1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"We imitate other peoples in everything: they print newspapers \u2014 so do we; they have Christmas trees \u2014 so have we; they celebrate New Year's \u2014 so do we. Now, they publish guidebooks to their important cities (they have 'A Guide to St. Petersburg,' 'A Guide to Moscow,' 'A Guide to Berlin,' \"A Guide to Paris,' and so on) \u2014 why shouldn't we get out 'A Guide to Kasrilevke'?\"<\/em><\/p>\n

S. Rabinovich (Sholem Aleichem) [2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his early writing on Rabelais and Gogol, argues for the significance of comparing the two masters of popular humour, regardless of whether influence can be traced directly or indirectly: \"All that concerns us here are those features of Gogol's work which, independently of Rabelais, reveal his direct connection with forms of popular festivity on his native soil.\" [3]<\/a> The fair, Bakhtin reminds us, provides a stage on which the writer can restore to language \"its active stored-up memory in the full volume of its meaning.\" [4]<\/a> The Gogolian marketplace, which introduced Rabelaisan carnival humour to the Russian literary imagination, also depends upon a distinctly Ukrainian landscape to instill a collective spatial memory in the minds of his readers.<\/p>\n

Prompted by Bakhtin's comparison of Rabelais and Gogol, I will demonstrate an even stronger literary interaction between Gogol and one of his readers: the Yiddish humourist Solomon Rabinovich, better known by his literary persona Sholem Aleichem. [5]<\/a> In yet another rendition of Rabelaisan comedy, Rabinovich evokes the Ukrainian fair to inspire laughter in Yiddish at precisely the moment in which East European Jews were leaving the Russian Empire's Ukrainian borderlands en masse. In the case of Rabinovich's use of the popular fair, Gogol's influence was indisputably direct and the native soil was shared. As David Roskies has pointed out, \"Rabinovich kept a box marked 'Gogol' on his desk for work in progress, often quoted Gogol in private correspondence, and even wore his hair as Gogol did.\" [6]<\/a> What allows for this unlikely literary parentage, I will argue, is a poetics that allowed both writers to present (albeit with different objectives) a site of collective memory in the face of significant social change through the exaggerated materiality and laughter culture of a Ukrainian commercial landscape. [7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Gogol invites his readers to his hometown of Sorochintsy by throwing a fair. His 1829 \"Sorochintsy Fair\" [Sorochinskaia Yarmarka<\/em>] opens with an endless procession of props, characters, and costumes moving towards what will conglomerate into an immense marketplace.<\/p>\n

Since morning the endless procession [neskonchaemoiu verenitseiu] of ox-carts bearing salt and fish had been winding its way along the road. Great mounds of earthenware pots, packed in straw, plodded slowly along, as if sulking at being thus confined to the dark; only occasionally did a brightly decorated bowl or tureen thrust itself ostentatiously up above the tall wattle side of the cart and draw the admiration of the onlookers with its gorgeous patterns [privlekala umilennye vzgliady poklonnikov roskoshi]. [8]<\/a><\/p>\n

Products, animals, market stands, and a combination of Imperial Russia's ethnicities, recalled from Gogol's Ukrainian upbringing (conjured via familiar terrain in the minds of Gogol's readers, and would later attract other authors from Russia's western borderlands). [9]<\/a> \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" a crucible for Ukraine's hybrid peoples and products, presents Gogol's native Ukraine as a familiar home for his Russian readership, while leaving it open to penetration by outside commercial forces.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Rabinovich sets many of his stories in the fictional town of Kasrilevke, which he models on his childhood town of Voronkov. Rabinovich chooses to call the town by its own name in his 1913 autobiographical novel, From the Fair <\/em>[Funem Yarid<\/em>], a work that, like \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" renders the author's birthplace a memory space, beginning with a familiar image of a provincial fair. \"Why did I call my autobiography From the Fair<\/em>?\" Rabinovich asks his readers.<\/p>\n

A man, as he travels to the fair<\/em>, is full of hope, he himself does not yet know what bargains he'll manage to swing and what he'll manage to fix\u2026He flies there swift as an arrow, at full tilt, don't mess with him, he hasn't got the time! But when he travels from the fair<\/em>, he already knows the deals he's swung and what he's fixed up there, and now he doesn't fly so fast. He has time. [10]<\/a><\/p>\n

By setting his autobiography at a provincial fair \u2014 a space familiar to both the geography and literature (via Gogol) of the Russian Empire's western borderlands, Rabinovich provides a stage for the interactions taking place in the rapidly changing Jewish geography of the Pale of Settlement. [11]<\/a> The mass emigration of close to two million Jews from the Pale of Settlement to the United States between 1881 and 1914 meant that Rabinovich was not alone in leaving the metaphorical fair. By reading Gogol and Rabinovich through the shared memory space of the Ukrainian fair, we can perceive the literary continuity, across languages, of the Pale of Settlement, the territory that not only housed Polish and Ukrainian populations, but one that also confined Jews to the western reaches of the Tsarist Empire between 1791 and 1917. Gogol's Ukrainian stories illustrate the early years of the Pale, whereas Rabinovich was writing just before the Pale's official end.<\/p>\n

Nikolai Gogol and Solomon Rabinovich were both born in small towns in the territory that is now Ukraine \u2014 Gogol in Sorochintsy in 1809, and Rabinovich a half-century later and two hundred kilometres to the west in the shtetl <\/em>Voronkov. Nikolai Gogol grew up in a Russian-speaking family, was schooled in Nizhyn (Nezhin) and later moved to the imperial capital. Rabinovich attended, in addition to a Jewish kheyder <\/em>(primary school), a Russian school, the mark of a degree of assimilation in a Jewish family. [12]<\/a> While Rabinovich, who began writing in Russian and Hebrew, achieved fame writing for a Yiddish-speaking audience, he would serve, as Gogol did for the Petersburg elite, as an exporter of tales from the Jewish Pale of Settlement to a cosmopolitan readership through his publication in Warsaw and Petersburg journals, and his visits to the United States.<\/p>\n

The multiple ethnicities jostling in this territory kindled tension in both writers' comedy. Gogol peoples his Ukrainian stories with an amalgam of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, and Gypsies. In \"The Sorochintsy Fair\" his young heroine, lost among aisles of wares, marvels at the mix of ethnic types: \"A gypsy and peasant smacked hands violently after a bargain, crying out from pain; a drunken Jew slapped a woman on the backside; argumentative fishwives bandied abuse\u2026and crayfish\u2026a Russian strokes his long, goatish beard with one hand, while with his other\u2026\" [13]<\/a> The unlikely mixtures depicted in Gogol's early stories are laden with sexual overtones that are comic in their hybridity. A product of a Judeophobic era, Gogol was, to be sure, no great friend to the Jews, whom he often represents as the most morally ambiguous characters in a story. It is therefore particularly interesting that Rabinovich would have chosen Gogol's commercial Ukrainian landscape to be a memory space for his own readers, and many of Gogol's themes as a means of claiming a Jewish voice in the Tsarist Empire. Not only did Gogol create a memory space for Rabinovich, he presented, through his caricatured Jews, a foil against which Rabinovich would write.<\/p>\n

In 1829, before publishing his Dikanka <\/em>cycle, Gogol wrote \"Thoughts on Geography\" [Mysli o geografii<\/em>], in which he argued that children should be instilled with an instinctive understanding of geography, beginning with a feeling for the world map, gradually filling in natural resources, and finally, the individuals and objects found in that space. [14]<\/a> When Taras Bulba refers to the Ukrainian homeland as \"whatever the soul seeks,\" he offers another key to Gogol's geographical system, in which Ukraine represents, metaphorically, the soul of the imperial Russian landscape. Robert Maguire, among others, has observed that, for Gogol, \"'South' stood for movement, warmth, wholeness, and life, whereas 'north' betokened immobility, coldness, fragmentation, and death.\" [15]<\/a> Herderian trends in ethnography arguably played a role in Gogol's creation of a Ukrainian landscape for export, which appealed to his Russian readership's vague image of Ukrainian nature, ethnicities, and products. By creating a memory space out of this landscape he suggests an idealized geographic origin that he likens to the collective Slavic spirit without actively affirming Ukrainian linguistic or geographic independence.<\/p>\n

Gogol's early commercial landscape, with its products and peoples, is a laboratory for inspecting the effects of the Enlightenment, specifically in its Russian incarnation, on the human soul. [16]<\/a> As Robert Maguire has observed, Gogol's works reveal a deep skepticism about the effects of Western Enlightenment in Russia: \"Gogol goes beyond skepticism to outright mistrust of the Enlightenment and all its manifestations, particularly order, symmetry, and reason, with the corresponding loss of intuition, vitality, emotion, and religion.\" [17]<\/a> Gogol's most morally suspicious characters are the most challenged by the objects representing the West in general, and France, the cradle of the Enlightenment, in particular. Thus we find, in Dead Souls<\/em>, \"It must be added that at the same time [Chichikov] was thinking about a special brand of French soap which imparted an unusual whiteness to the skin and freshness to the cheeks.\" [18]<\/a> Similarly, immediately upon discovering a sum of money hidden in the demonic painting in \"The Portrait,\" Chartkov \"visited a French restaurant [zashel k restoranu-frantsuzu].\" [19]<\/a> The porous Russian market tries the resilience of the spirit, and Gogol's characters usually fail the test. [20]<\/a> From the folk-influenced Dikanka <\/em>stories to his Petersburg tales to the heroic epic, Taras Bulba<\/em>, Gogol's landscape of exchange undergoes a series of transformations, finally emerging as a metaphor for the quintessence of human deception in Gogol's narrative tour-de-force, Dead Souls<\/em>, in which a marketing scam fills all of Russia.<\/p>\n

\"The Sorochintsy Fair\" was a wild success, and seemed to arise out of thin air, or at least out of the market noise and miscellaneous objects that fill the commercial space: \"Oxen, bags, hay, gypsies, pots, peasant women, spice-cookies, hats\" [Voly, meshki, seno, tsygany, gorshki, baby, prianiki, shapki<\/em>]. [21]<\/a> The enumeration of objects, mixed with human market types, yields a humorous effect that Henri Bergson would, in his writings on laughter, attribute to the juxtaposition of matter and the soul. \"Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic.\" [22]<\/a> In Gogol's prose, objects, particularly those that can easily be purchased, always overtly distract the character from the more spiritually pressing task at hand. Yurii Mann has observed that throughout Gogol's oeuvre, objects assume independent actions: \"It is as though sideburns, mustaches, waists, women's sleeves, smiles, etc. were wandering along Nevsky Prospekt all by themselves.\" [23]<\/a> According to Mann, these soul-less objects [neodushevlennye predmety] literally step in to challenge the individual in his or her spiritual development: \"That which preoccupies the human being \u2014 and I am speaking of course about one's own development of a Christian sensibility [rech' idet o khristianskom samovospitanii] \u2014 takes place inside him and, of course, with his participation, but alongside that is the influence of another, stronger, divine power. Once again we see the natural and relentless procession of objects.\" [24]<\/a><\/p>\n

Rabinovich, like Gogol, uses images of provincial Ukraine to give his Jewish readers the illusion of a common shtetl <\/em>past. Best known in the United States for his \"Tevye\" character, who became a symbol of the Jewish departure from eastern Europe thanks to the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof<\/em>, Rabinovich might be seen as responsible for canonizing the Ukrainian shtetl <\/em>as the lost Jewish topos of the old world, partly by his own design, partly through the simplified afterlife of his stories. As David Roskies has observed, \"for American Jews, the whole of Eastern Europe had been turned into a single lieu de m\u00e9moire<\/em>, or memory-site, called a 'shtetl.'\" [25]<\/a> If Ukraine, for Gogol, represented the soul of Russia and the Ukrainian fair was a microcosm in which characters fought against the dangerous material influences of the outside world, for Rabinovich, the Ukrainian shtetl<\/em>, or market town, was a newly sanctified home for the collective memory of Russian Jews who were rapidly emigrating. [26]<\/a> However, it is important to bear in mind that, whereas Gogol, in his later works, includes Ukraine and Russia in a vision of a united Rus'<\/em>, Rabinovich takes for granted that the Jews should leave. It is in this spirit of honest (if funny) disillusionment that he wrote \"A Guide to Kasrilevke,\" a parodic Baedeker that includes seven sections, decreasing in desirability: \"Transportation,\" \"Hotels,\" \"Restaurants,\" \"Liquor,\" \"Theater,\" \"Fires,\" and \"Bandits.\" For Rabinovich trade is not inherently compromising as it is for Gogol; rather, the interactions that took place in the Ukrainian commercial landscape were increasingly physically threatening to the lives and welfare of Jews and Rabinovich subtly expresses this by depicting marketplace exchanges gone awry.<\/p>\n

Illusory material objects of desire present an important theme in Rabinovich's earliest works. In his first successful story, \"The penknife\" [Dos meserl], the young protagonist is compelled to steal a penknife that belongs to the family's lodger, a German Jew named Hertz Hertzenhertz who \"was bareheaded, beardless and without earlocks.\" Hertzenhertz comes straight from Germany, the heart of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, or Haskalah<\/em>, and is therefore an outsider to the Yiddish-speaking shtetl <\/em>community. \"How could I keep a straight face,\" relates the protagonist, \"when this Jewish goy <\/em>(or goyish <\/em>Jew) spoke to me in his fractured Yiddish \u2014 a queer dialect that was more German than Yiddish?\" [27]<\/a> As the French soap and restaurants of Gogol's stories are corrupt due to their link to the European Enlightenment, the coveted knife is tainted (yet particularly desirable), coming as it does from the origins of the Haskalah<\/em>. The protagonist who, at the age of ten, is learning to hate his cruel kheyder <\/em>teacher, and has already been labeled \"little apostate,\" a gruff term of mixed endearment and ridicule by his father, is linked to the strange German by more than his longing for the boarder's property.<\/p>\n

Once the object has been stolen, however, it takes on a Gogolian nose-like life of its own: the protagonist, witness to his kheyder<\/em>-teacher's brutal ridicule of a poor classmate who has stolen money from a charity-box, resolves to throw his own stolen object into the water.<\/p>\n

I grabbed the penknife and dashed to the well. I wasn't holding a knife, I imagined, but something hideous and despicable that I wanted to get rid of \u2014 and the quicker, the better. Still, I regretted losing the knife \u2014 it was so expensive. I stood for a minute lost in thought. I fancied I was holding a living thing, and my heart grieved. [28]<\/a><\/p>\n

The character's guilt brings him to the point of hallucination, and his eventual recovery and redemption only occur through the semi-lucid realization that the knife is at fault. The message Rabinovich imparts to his young readers appears transparent: one should not steal or lie. The deeper message, however, seems to be aimed at Rabinovich's adult readers, and involves the child's newfound ability to cut through surface-level assumptions about good and evil. Those who care about the child, including his parents and the German Maskil<\/em>, are at his bedside when he recovers; the kheyder <\/em>teacher, bent on teaching the pupils a moral lesson, is exposed (through the child's delusional ranting) for his cruelty. The \"German's\" little knife \"that could cut anything I wanted,\" [29]<\/a> however, can cut both ways: The tools of Enlightenment may enable a perspective that sees beyond traditional Jewish life, but the narrator is always at risk of being cut by them.<\/p>\n

Rabinovich's Ukrainian stories often begin with purchases made on credit, and many include animated lists of marketplace items that, like the wares at Gogol's Sorochintsy fair, lead the reader directly into the narrative. [30]<\/a> At the opening to one of his popular Menachem-Mendl <\/em>stories, which appeared between 1892 and 1913, we find:<\/p>\n

I take my walking stick and venture out onto Greek Street, as the place where Jews do business is called, and there are twenty thousand different things to deal in. If I want wheat, there's wheat. If I feel like wool, there's wool. If I'm in the mood for bran, there's bran. Flour, salt, feathers, raisins, jute, herring \u2014 name it and you have it in Odessa. [31]<\/a><\/p>\n

Whereas visitors to Gogol's Sorochintsy fair travel from the countryside to a temporary centre, Rabinovich's wide-eyed provincial characters find themselves in big cities and must navigate these scenes through the familiarity of products. Like Gogol's marketplace objects, these products distract Rabinovich's characters from their own best intentions. Menachem-Mendl travels the world inventing get-rich-quick schemes. His adventures begin when he is given, in place of a promised dowry, a small sum of cash, two promissory notes and an illegitimate \"draft\" on bad credit (to be redeemed in Odessa). These notes become the story's currency, initiating and continuing the narrative flow much in the way sleeves and collars piece together Gogol's tales.<\/p>\n

Menachem Mendl's wife Sheyne-Sheyndl, who remains at home in Kasrilevke alternately scolding her husband for his bad investments and sending him money when his ventures fail, is closest to the tactile Gogolian marketplace. Gogolian characters occasionally appear in her shtetl<\/em>. In one letter she writes that a government inspector has arrived in town to ascertain what has become of certain sums of money meant for charity, an echo of Gogol's government inspector [revizor<\/em>], whose anticipated arrival shakes a town to its core, unearthing the illegitimate finances of its provincial elite. Rabinovich thus assimilates two distinct manifestations of the Gogolian commercial landscape. Through Sheyne-Sheyndl, he returns to the Ukrainian memory-space of Sorochintsy, its small-town market and provincial relationships, and through Menachem-Mendl we see the broad wanderings, questionable currency and immaterial purchases of Chichikov in Dead Souls<\/em>. Like \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" the Menachem Mendl <\/em>stories reveal two distinct, but narratively interdependent, stories that compete on an open market for the reader's sympathy.<\/p>\n

Both Rabinovich and Gogol thus reveal a painful tension between the wide world, representing enlightenment (be it the European Enlightenment or the Jewish Haskalah<\/em>), and the provincial marketplace. Menachem Mendl, for all of his mistakes, urges the Yiddish reader to imagine a Jewish world that is not limited to the confines of Kasrilevke. This incitement to imagination looks something like the conversation, in Rabinovich's short story \"Seventy-Five Thousand,\" between Yankev-Yosl and his wife Ziporah, when the former has (erroneously) decided that he has won a jackpot of seventy-five thousand rubles:<\/p>\n

\"How much have we won?\" she says, gazing right into my eyes, as if saying: \"Aha! You're lying, but you're not gonna get away with it!\" \"Gimme a for instance \u2014 how much do you figure we've won?\"
\n\"I have no idea,\" she says. \"Maybe a few hundred rubles?\" \"Why not,\" I say, \"a few thousand rubles?\"
\n\"What do you mean by a few thousand?\" she says. \"Five? Six? Maybe as much as seven?\"
\n\"You can't,\" I say, \"imagine more?\" [32]<\/a><\/p>\n

Rabinovich, by juxtaposing Kasrilevke and the wide world, wanted his readers to imagine more, even if the ticket to get there proved to be one number off.<\/p>\n

Gogol's tales of misbegotten business ventures are, by contrast, more judgmental than they are optimistic. The folktale embedded within \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" tells of the terrifying reproduction of marketplace matter \u2014 in this case a devil's red coat. An errant demon who has pawned his red coat \"to a Jew who sold vodka at the Sorochintsy fair,\" returns to find that the coat, having been passed from merchant to merchant, has been chopped to pieces and distributed about the fair. [33]<\/a> Ever since, the devil returns to the fair each year in the form of a pig to gather his lost scraps of jacket. Gogol thus dramatizes the relationship between the human soul and the material that threatens it. The ubiquitous red cloth, which has taken on a devilish life of its own, would continue to reproduce itself in Gogol's later work, appearing in its final cranberry-hued incarnation on the back of Chichikov, whose own pig-like presence finds him wandering from market to market, collecting the lost souls of imperial Russia. For Gogol, this comic, devilish object subtly draws the reader's attention to more pressing ethical questions. As Bakhtin reminds us, Chichikov's purchasing of dead peasants gives the reader \"a more accurate view of the real images and processes of the serf economy (the buying and selling of human beings).\" [34]<\/a><\/p>\n

For Gogol, the dangers lurking at the depths of the Sorochintsy fair exist in part due to the presence of Jews, whose marketplace presence in nineteenth-century eastern Europe represents the dark side of capitalism. As George Grabowicz has pointed out, often in early nineteenth and twentieth-century Ukrainian and Russian literature \"Jews appear as Polish spies or agents, and even if they are simply go-betweens, with access to both sides, they are not to be trusted.\" [35]<\/a> The few references to Jewish characters in literature set in Ukraine before Gogol link Jews precisely to their marketplace presence. Ivan Kotliarevsky, in his 1794 Ukrainian parody of Virgil's Aeneid <\/em>describes the Ukrainian Aeneas's descent into Hell, which boasts a motley array of sinners all baking, including (but certainly not limited to) Jewish merchants: [36]<\/a><\/p>\n

Buly tam kupchiki provorni
\nShcho yizdyly po yarmarkam
\nI na arshinets' na idbornyi Pohanyi prodavaly kram.<\/p>\n

Tut vsiakii buly pronozy,
\nPerekupky i shmarovozy,
\nZhydy, miniaily, shinkari\u2026 [37]<\/a><\/p>\n

[There were cunning merchants
\nWho went to every fair
\nAnd on false yardsticks
\nSold goods.
\nThere were all kinds of crafty types,
\nPetty traders and snake-oil-salesmen,
\nJews, barterers, tavern-keepers \u2026]\n

Gogol makes Kotliarevsky's influence on his work transparent, using epigraphs from the Ukrainian mock Aeneid <\/em>(found objects in their own right) throughout \"The Sorochintsy Fair.\" [38]<\/a> The aristophanic laughter in the Dikanka <\/em>tales is indeed in keeping with what Mykola Zerov has called \"Kotliarevshchyna,\" a tendency among Ukrainian writers after Kotliarevsky to write classical literary themes in a village humoresque. [39]<\/a> Much as Rabinovich would later draw from Gogol's Ukrainian landscape in mapping a memory space for his Yiddish readers, Gogol was himself drawing upon a tradition of specifically Ukrainian humour, objects and market-goers.<\/p>\n

In \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" the implied kinship between pigs, devils, and Jews presents a moral lesson about the dangers of overzealous trade, in which the Jew is invariably the negative example. At precisely the moment when he begins \"to pray in the Jewish fashion\" [\"po-zhidovski molit'sia bogu\"], the Jew is haunted by \"pigs' snouts poking in at every window!\" [40]<\/a> Here is an image of Gogol's poetic justice, a system by which Jews are rewarded for their crimes with the least kosher of animals. No sooner has this folktale been conveyed within Gogol's story than the listeners are frightened by a pig, whose face appears at the window of the tavern, \"As if to ask, 'And what are you doing here, good people?' [A chto vy tut delaete, dobrye liudi],\" [41]<\/a> prompting them to connect the frightening legend with the unsacred space they inhabit. The subsequent mayhem follows an excerpt from Kotliarevsky's Aeneid<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u2026Pidzhav khvist, mov sobaka,
\nMov Kayin, zatrusivs' uves';
\nIz nosa potekla tabaka. [42]<\/a><\/p>\n

[\u2026Pulled his tail between his legs, like a dog,
\nLike Cain, starting to shake all over,
\nTobacco seeping from his nose.]\n

The citation separates Gogol's folk legend from his frame story, reminding the reader that his memory space depends on the past literature of Ukraine. The de-contextualized hero of Kotliarevsky's mock epic, present at Gogol's fair along with his tobacco, is a collective memory device. As Bakhtin reminds us, the epic, affirmed by its relationship to the past, is unbalanced by a comic, vernacular presence: \"Laughter destroyed epic distance; it began to investigate man freely and familiarly, to turn him inside out, expose the disparity between his surface and his center, between his potential and his reality.\" [43]<\/a> Gogol, by staging his Russian- language comedy on the Ukrainian periphery and by using Kotliarevsky's words (in their Ukrainian original) as an alternative literary history to the epic genres that were gaining popularity in Petersburg, offset the centrality of the imperial capital and its Western pretensions. [44]<\/a> Gogol's introduction of Jewish characters to his Ukrainian texts increases this sensation of a tale told from the margins of the Russian Empire.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian commercial landscape would later appear throughout Gogol's own epic novel, which he housed in Ukraine and based on one of several uprisings following Bohdan Khmelnytsky's anti-Polish campaign of 1648. Much of the violence in Taras Bulba <\/em>either occurs on market squares or makes direct reference to treason by means of commoditization. The despondent Cossacks in Taras Bulba <\/em>are drawn into battle by outrage against blasphemous religious combination. \"'Hang all the Jews!' rang out from the crowd, 'don't let their Jewesses sew skirts out of our priests' garments! [Pust' zhe ne sh'iut iz popovskikh riz iubok svoim zhidovkam!]\"[45]<\/a> The Jewish women who make skirts out of (Orthodox) priests' vestments are turning religious garb into commonplace material, an act that assumes a connection between the Jew in Ukrainian culture and commercial pragmatism. The Jews in Taras Bulba<\/em>, while despised, can negotiate magically between the hero and his goal. Having spared Yankel's life, Taras continues to encounter the Jew, the latter magically appearing to negotiate difficult situations, for the right price. \"Passing through the outskirts, Taras saw that his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Yankel had already managed to erect a stall with an awning for himself and was selling flints, handfuls of gunpowder in paper cones, and other military items \u2014 even bread rolls and dumplings.\" [46]<\/a> Whereas Taras, in his resemblance to Khmelnytsky, recalls Ukraine's history, Yankel evokes the eternal return that is indicative of the market, and that effectively negates history. [47]<\/a> It is Yankel who later informs Taras that his son Andrii has fallen in love with a Polish woman and deserted his Cossack band to join the enemy forces. And once again, Taras returns to the Jew to request his intervention so that he may see his son Ostap, who has been captured by the Poles, one last time. A professional intervener, Yankel is able to bring this about by speaking Yiddish to the Jews who live in the Polish town.<\/p>\n

Strikingly, although the emphasis on Ukrainian national pride wanes between the 1835 and 1842 redactions of the novel, the emphasis on the marketplace and on ethnic exchange increases. In the 1835 edition, for example, Taras tells Yankel, \"You're mistaken, cursed Judas! The baptized child could not have sold his faith. [Ne mozhno, chtoby kreshchenoe ditia prodalo veru] If he were a Turk or a dirty Jew [nechistyi zhid]\u2026No, he couldn't have done it! Oh, God, he couldn't!\" [48]<\/a> In this version, Taras's response is a Cossack's lament. As he does throughout both redactions of the novel, Gogol inserts Ukrainianisms, such as \"ne mozhno\" (rather than the Russian \"ne mozhet byt'\"), thus perpetually reminding the reader of the Ukrainian setting. In 1842, however, the conversation is much longer, and Gogol dwells on the double meaning of \"selling\" in the minds of the Cossack and the Jew. Here, Taras asks Yankel, \"How could he, in your opinion, have sold his native land and faith?\" [Tak eto vykhodit, on, po-tvoemu, prodal otchiznu i veru?] To this, Yankel responds, \"I'm not saying that he sold something, I only said that he went over to their side.\" [Ia zhe ne govoriu etogo, chtoby on prodal chto, ia skazal tol'ko, chto on pereshel k nim.] [49]<\/a> Thus, in the later version we see Gogol's increased attention to the moral imperative of resisting commercial exchange, as well as a heightened awareness of the interactions between ethnic groups coexisting in Ukraine. This awareness accompanied a more general shift, in Gogol's later work, toward portraying Ukrainian Cossacks as Russians' brethren within the Tsarist Empire. The marketplace, in this later period, is still a necessary metaphor for signaling a threat to the Slavic spirit from dangerous outside (in this case Jewish and Polish) forces, but the threat spans a far vaster territory and its consequences are of epic proportion.<\/p>\n

\"The Sorochintsy Fair\" and Taras Bulba<\/em>, eclipsed in recent editions by Dead Souls <\/em>and the Petersburg stories, were, precisely during Rabinovich's career, Gogol's most popular works. As Stephen Moeller-Sally has shown, between 1886 and 1892 \"The Sorochintsy Fair\" was second only, in editions published and copies sold, to Taras Bulba<\/em>, and remained among Gogol's three most popular works until 1903. [50]<\/a> We can assume that when Rabinovich evokes Gogol's popularity, these Ukrainian works are prominent within his own recent literary memory. If the devilish coat in \"The Sorochintsy Fair\" reflects Gogol's fear of the capitalist ventures, in which Jews are understood to be complicit, threatening the Slavic soul, for Rabinovich, the Ukrainian marketplace, an increasingly frequent site of violence against Jews in the early twentieth century, represented a more immediate, physical danger.<\/p>\n

It is, in part, these dangers that Rabinovich attempts to avert by urging his readers to leave the Ukrainian landscape. For a successful means of conveying this message, Rabinovich looked, in large part, to his older contemporary, Sholem Abramovich, whose likeness hung on the wall of Rabinovich's Kyiv study alongside that of Gogol. [51]<\/a> Abramovich had become popular in Yiddish under his own pseudonym, Mendele Moykher-Sforim (Mendele the Book Peddler). Abramovich, dubbed \"the grandfather of Yiddish Literature\" by his younger colleague Rabinovich, had created a road-weary book vendor\/narrator, whose marketplace gestalt is transparent in the introduction to one of his best-known stories, \"Fishke the Lame:\" \"My stock in trade: Rags and cast-offs\u2026Beggars are the stuff of my dreams; cadging bags the constant subject of my reveries.\" [52]<\/a> Mendele's reader is a customer, tempted by the best in junkyard comedy, with a little tragedy thrown in to boot. Unlike the worldly author Abramovich, whose horizon includes classical European literature, ideas of changing Jewish practices and thoughts of migration to a Jewish state, the narrator Mendele, for all his traveling, does not see far beyond the shtetl. <\/em>Both Rabinovich and Abramovich were thus borrowing what Boris Eichenbaum would later refer to as Gogol's skaz <\/em>technique by adopting a common market vendor's disguise as a means of selling the messages of the enlightened writer to a yet unenlightened readership. [53]<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1884, a year that saw the republication of Gogol's collected works, Rabinovich wrote, \"In Russian literature the names of Gogol and Turgenev will live forever, for the former was a satirist and the latter a humorist, and both were great poets. Our poor Yiddish literature, too, has its humorist (Abramovich) and its satirist (Linetski) \u2014 of course, on a smaller scale.\" [54]<\/a> Rabinovich's eagerness to equate Yiddish and Russian literatures reveals much about his goals as a Yiddish writer. Humour, a credible landscape, and a sense of the vernacular were at the heart of the Yiddish writer's synthesis of the Russian classics. [55]<\/a> The memory space that Rabinovich is accessing through his return to local markets and fairs is thus a synthesis of Abramovich, who, in the disguise of a marketplace vendor, urged for movement away from Ukraine; and on Gogol, whose familiar commercial landscape urges the reader to remember the space left behind.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Gogol's use of Jews to represent the margins, Rabinovich relegates Ukrainian and Russian characters to the stories' periphery. [56]<\/a> Whereas Gogol's heavily caricatured Jew is a marketplace expert, closely tied to pigs and other marketplace products and profiting against all odds from the devil's coat, Rabinovich's characters (like the author) are usually failures at trade. Menachem-Mendl deals in stocks, because, according to Dan Miron, \"dealing with them does not involve coming into contact with the materiality, the heaviness, the very reality of the goods he enumerates \u2014 all of which come from the earth or from the bodies of animals.\" [57]<\/a> Menachem-Mendl may spend his days in marketplaces, but he spurns the signifying animals that have passed from market to literary market. Longing for business, but without the stomach for gritty reality, Menachem-Mendl falls prey to every scheme he finds; his only truly marketable products are witty missives. Very much in the spirit of Bergsonian laughter, material products perpetually triumph over Menachem-Mendl's spirit, defeating the would-be speculator until he turns to more community-oriented literary pursuits. [58]<\/a> Between 1892 and 1913, years that witnessed new restrictions against Jews in Russia, a resurgence of anti-Jewish pogroms (many of which broke out in marketplaces) and the blood libel case against Mendel Beilis in Kyiv, Rabinovich's Menachem-Mendl travels to Odessa, Warsaw, America, and Palestine, gradually finding success only as he gains distance from Kasrilevke, and from his early marketplace ventures.<\/p>\n

Given the stereotypes sprinkled throughout his work, it is no wonder that Gogol has been dismissed by Jewish readers, from Simon Dubnow to the Soviet critic S. Mashinsky, as one of Russia's many literary anti-Semites. What Rabinovich was borrowing from Gogol, however, was the formal trope of exchange within literature, the commercial landscape in the Pale of Settlement, and the careful masking of danger (physical and spiritual) through laughter. After narrowly escaping a pogrom in Kyiv in 1905, the Yiddish writer left Ukraine, with his family, for Europe and the United States. What would have been all too clear to Rabinovich's readers, was that the marketplace, like all of laughter culture, is dangerous. In Rabinovich's prose, however, actual violence is merely intimated. Menachem-Mendl is financially torn apart on the market, while his limbs remain intact despite the unnamed fear of pogroms. The violence that remains masked by laughter in Rabinovich's prose certainly lurked below the surface, for writer and readers alike.<\/p>\n

Bakhtin's approach to the literary marketplace is most commonly understood to be positive, based on his discussion of Rabelaisan catharsis. It is in his earlier notes on Gogolian laughter, however, that he reads Gogol for the danger underlying his comedy: \"A school of nightmares and horror. The funny fiends [smeshnye strashilishcha<\/em>] in Gogol. The plague and laughter in Boccaccio. The funny fiends in \"The Sorochintsy Fair.\" [59]<\/a> These funny fiends, from \"The Sorochintsy Fair\" to Dead Souls<\/em>, are what drew Rabinovich into Gogol's marketplace.<\/p>\n

Both Rabinovich and Gogol, by moving from the marketplaces of Ukraine to the entire Russian Empire (Gogol) or the entire Jewish World (Rabinovich), are engaging in a form of enlightenment even as they caution their readers against the false handshakes of the world market. We can thus read their continual return to the provincial marketplace and its familiar forms of exchange as an attempt to force their readers to remember a space that stands in for a collective origin. The simultaneous awareness of an expanding world and self-conscious return to the Ukrainian memory-space involved the perpetual coexistence, for both authors, of joyful memory with a terrifying (and ever increasing) loss.<\/p>\n

We have seen that Gogol, already at the beginning of his career, was creating a space and an archetype for a mixture of joy and terror. His marketplace, as attested by the red coat, is ridden with evil. While the devil is generally a comic figure in folk theater, Gavriel Shapiro calls Gogol's devils \"frightening and ever-present \u2014 the embodiment of poshlost<\/em>', which Dmitrii Merezhkovskii defined as the physiognomy of the crowd, the aspiration to be like everyone else.\" [60]<\/a> The wedding that concludes \"The Sorochintsy Fair,\" however, is less a celebration of the young people's love than it is a terrifying marriage of marketplace types. A fiddler transforms the crowd \"into a scene of unity and harmony,\" including the old women \"whose ancient faces breathed the indifference of the tomb.\" This final dance, which absorbs the individual into the soul-less ubiquity of the market crowd, reveals Gogol's struggle between the laughter, provoked by material objects, and the spirit, which is threatened by the presence of these marketplace objects. Bergson, in probing the inevitable union of matter and spirit, has proposed that, \"whilst introspection reveals to us the distinction between matter and spirit, it also bears witness to their union.\" [61]<\/a> Gogol's narrator, frustrated by precisely this union, leaves us on an abrupt note of dissatisfaction. \"Is it not thus that joy, lovely and fleeting guest, flies from us, and in vain the last solitary note tries to express gaiety\u2026 Heavy and sorrowful is the heart and nothing can help it.\"[62]<\/a> The joy of a collective memory space is always necessarily accompanied by the tragic awareness of materialism. This sentiment, conceived in the chaos of the fair at Sorochintsy, would reappear in Gogol's famous \"laughter through tears\" passage in Dead Souls<\/em>, a work in which the past identities of the dead are exchanged for capitalist value.<\/em><\/p>\n

And for a long time still I am destined by a wondrous power to walk hand in hand with my strange heroes, to view the whole of hugely rushing life, to view it through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it! [skvoz' vidnyi miru smekh i nezrimye, nevedomye emu slezy!<\/em>] [63]<\/a><\/p>\n

On 15 May 1916, when Solomon Rabinovich was buried in the Mount Neboh Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens, his headstone was inscribed with his original epitaph, which ends with his own rendition of Gogol's \"laughter through tears\" motif:<\/p>\n

And just as the public was
\nLaughing, chortling, and making merry
\nHe suffered \u2014 this only God knows \u2014
\nIn secret, so that no one should see.<\/p>\n

[Un davke demolt ven der oylem hot
\ngelakht, geklatsht, un fleg zikh freyen,<\/em>
\nhot er gekrenkt \u2014 dos veys nor got \u2014
\nbesod, az keyner zol nit zeyen.<\/em>]\n

Rabinovich used to keep a Yiddish translation of Nikolai Gogol's \"laughter through tears\" passage from Dead Souls <\/em>on his desk. [64]<\/a> Gogol's urge to preserve a collective memory space in the face of a rapidly changing world is shared, albeit with a very different ideological goal, by his Yiddish reader. The fine line separating Yiddish literature as a means of enlightenment and enlightenment as a force destroying Yiddish gave Rabinovich the fear of loss that he would take with him, quite literally, to the grave.<\/p>\n

Rabinovich enclosed his epitaph in his Last Will and Testament, written on 19 September 1915, a few months before his death. In the first of ten points outlined in his will, the Yiddish writer specifies that:<\/p>\n

Wherever I die, I wish to be buried not among aristocrats, big shots, or wealthy people, but precisely among ordinary folk, workers, the real Jewish people, so that the gravestone which will be placed on my grave will beautify the simple graves around me, and the simple graves will beautify my grave, just as the simple, honest folk during my life beautified their folk-writer. [65]<\/a><\/p>\n

With this final wish, Rabinovich ensures a new memory space \u2014 one that will unite him with those readers whose spirit he sought to evoke through the markets and shtetls <\/em>of his fiction, and, of course, in a more subtle way, with the landscape and objects conjured by the memory of Nikolai Gogol.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Gogol, Taras Bulba<\/em>, Ch. 6, Sobranie Sochinenii v Semi Tomakh <\/em>(T. II) (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1984), 106.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Solomon Rabinovich (Sholem Aleichem), Inside Kasrilevke<\/em>, trans. Isidore Goldstick (New York: Schocken books, 1965), 7.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Bakhtin, Mikhail, \"Rabelais and Gogol,\" trans. Michael OToole, in Australian Journal of Cultural Studies<\/em>, no. 3 (1985), 28.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Bakhtin, Rabelais and Gogol<\/em>, 35.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Joseph Sherman, in his insightful reading of Gogol's \"The Overcoat\" and Rabinovich's \"On Account of a Hat\" has called attention to the deep differences in the two writers, \"since the world each of them displayed \u2026 though superficially similar, was nevertheless fundamentally distinct.\" While the differences between Rabinovich's Jewish milieu and Gogol's Russian world are extremely important to keep in mind, it is worth probing the kinship Rabinovich perceived, with an awareness of the many fundamental cultural differences. See Joseph Sherman, \"The Non-Reflecting Mirror: Gogol's Influence on Sholem Aleichem\" in Essays in Poetics: The Journal of the British Neo-Formalist Circle <\/em>28 (Autumn 2003): 101\u2013123, 102. See also \"God and the Tsar\": Ironic Ambiguity and Restorative Laughter in Gogol's \"Overcoat\" and Sholem Aleichem's \"On Account of a Hat\" [Iber a Hitl<\/em>] in The Waking Sphinx: South African Essays on Russian Culture<\/em>, ed. Henrietta Mondry (Johannesburg: The Library University of the Witwatersrand, 1989), 59\u201382.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Roskies, A Bridge of Longing <\/em>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 154.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> It is therefore particularly important that we distinguish between Gogol's descriptions of commerce and festivity from the Rabelaisan overturn that became the basis for Bakhtin's analysis. As Stallybrass and White have pointed out, \"Partly because he associated it with the utopian, the 'no-place of collective hopes and desires,' Bakhtin simplified the paradoxical, contradictory space of the market and the fair as a place-beyond-place, a pure outside.\" Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression <\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 28.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, \"Sorochinskaia iarmarka,\" Polnoe Sobranie sochinenii i pisem<\/em>, Volume I (Moskva: Nasledie, 2001), 75. Translation based on Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Village Evenings near Dikanka and Mirgorod<\/em>. Translated and edited by Christopher English (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> This includes writers in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. Edyta M. Bojanowska has discussed the influence of Taras Bulba <\/em>on Ukrainian literature, including Panteleimon Kulish's 1847 Black Council<\/em>, in which \"Kulish claims that Gogol and his Cossack epic inspired the Ukrainians to study their past and aim for national self-knowledge.\" See Bojanovska, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism <\/em>(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 308\u20139. The Hebrew and Yiddish language writer Sholem Abramovich (Mendele Moykher-Sforim) uses many of the commercial spaces in Ukraine for his wandering narrator. See Harriet Murav \"Gogol, Abramovitsh, and the Question of National Literature\" in Essays in Poetics <\/em>28 (Autumn 2003,): 124. In the twentieth century, Isaac Babel would re-map Gogolian landscapes in Konarmiia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Rabinovich, Funem Yarid <\/em>(Vilne-Varshe: Vilner Farlag fun B. Kletskin, 1926), 16. The work remained incomplete when the author died in 1916.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> The idea that material objects and the space that houses them could inspire the recollection of episodes in one's life reflects Bergson's notion that \"Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration, and thus by a twofold operation compels us, de facto<\/em>, to perceive matter in ourselves, whereas we, de jure<\/em>, perceive matter within matter.\" Bergson, Matter and Memory<\/em>, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 80.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Rabinovich, & Peretz <\/em>(Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 98\u2013101.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Gogol, PSS<\/em>, V. I: 80.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> \"Mysli o geografii (dlia detei) was written in 1829, published in 1831. Gogol, SS <\/em>V. 1. (St. Petersburg: 1998), 135. Gogol purportedly said that for any story to be successful the author had simply to describe a familiar room and street. Boris Eichenbaum, \"How 'The Overcoat' is Made\" in Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays<\/em>, trans. and ed. Robert Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 270. Eichenbaum cites Anenkov's \"N. V. Gogol' v Rime letom 1841 goda,\" in Literaturnye vospominaniya <\/em>(Moscow, 1960), 77.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Robert Maguire, Exploring Gogol <\/em>(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 285.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> As Yurii Mann has shown, Dikanka was the ideal setting for the stories, given its vague surrounding of farms and villages. See Mann, Gogol': Trudy i Dni, 1809\u20131845 <\/em>(Moscow: Aspekt-Press, 2004), 30.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Maguire, Exploring Gogol<\/em>, 78.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Of this passage, Dmitry Merezhkovsky writes, \"European enlightenment only makes the Russian gentleman even more aware of the age-old gulf that separates him as an 'enlightened citizen' from the ignorant common folk.\" \"Gogol and the Devil\" in Gogol From the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays<\/em>, ed. Robert Maguire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 83.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Gogol, SS <\/em>(T. III), 78.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Petersburg, with its linear shape and penetrable West-facing window, is more dangerous than Sorochintsy. As Robert Maguire observes, \"[Petersburg] was not Russian\u2026but having no real form, it could spread all the more easily to any corner of the country.\" Maguire, 80.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Gogol, PSS<\/em>, V. I: 80.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic <\/em>(New York: Cosimo, 2005), 29. Elsewhere in his study of laughter, Bergson cites a passage from Gogol's Revizor<\/em>: \"Your peculations are too extensive for an official of your rank.\"<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> Yurii Mann, Postigaia Gogolia <\/em>(Moscow: Aspect Press, 2005), 123.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> Mann, Postigaia Gogolia<\/em>, 124.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> David Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past<\/em>, 12.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> I differ from authors like Heschel Klepfisz, who claims, \"It is not possible to really understand and empathize with Tevyeh the Dairyman unless one has at least some knowledge of Ukrainian Jewish history.\" Rather, by bringing Ukrainian Jews, within his fiction, into ever larger, cosmopolitan spheres, Rabinovich is allowing his descriptions of Ukrainian shtetl <\/em>life to stand in for a universal experience of Jewish life. Heschel Klepfisz, Inexhaustible Wellspring: Reaping the Rewards of Shtetl Life <\/em>(Jerusalem: Devora, 2003), 209.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> Rabinovich, Sholem Aleykhem Ale Verk: ibergearbeyt un rekht oysgebesert un dos ershte mol aroysgegebn <\/em>V. I (Warsaw: \"Folksbildung,\" 1903), 663\u20134. Translation of \"The penknife\" in Some Laughter, Some Tears: Tales from the Old World and the New <\/em>(trans. from the Yiddish by Curt Leviant) (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968), 116.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> Rabinovich, \"The Penknife\" (Leviant trans.), 125.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> Rabinovich, \"The Penknife\" (Leviant trans.), 113.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> The stolen penknife replaces a lost knife that had been bought for ten kopecks (\"seven kopecks cash, three on credit.\" Rabinovich (Leviant trans.), 114.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> Rabinovich, Menakhem-Mendl <\/em>(Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario En El IWO, 1972), 34 Translation consults Hillel Halkin, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl; and Motl, the Cantor's Son <\/em>(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 3.<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> Rabinovich, Finf un zibetsik toyznt: a pekl tsoris <\/em>(Moscow: Der Emes, 1947); Joachim Neugroschel, trans. \"Seventy-Five Thousand (A pack of Tsoris)\" in No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present <\/em>(New York: Norton, 2002), 364.<\/p>\n

[33]<\/a> The devil promises to return in a year's time, but the Jew cannot help but sell the coat to a passing gentleman, for \"the cloth was better than anything you could get even in Mirgorod!\" Gogol, PSS<\/em>, V. 1, 88.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/a> Bakhtin, \"Rabelais and Gogol,\" (O'Toole trans.), 38.<\/p>\n

[35]<\/a> George G. Grabowicz, \"The Jewish Theme in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Literature\" in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective <\/em>(Second Edition), Howard Aster and Peter Potichnyj, ed. (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, U. of Alberta, 1990), 331.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/a> It is worth noting that Kotliarevsky, particularly in his description of sinful merchants, who we learn are baking [peklisia] in Hell, evidently draws from Rabelais: \"His high devilship sups very well on tradesmen, usurers, apothecaries, cheats, coiners, and adulterers of wares. Now and then, when he is on the merry pin, his second supper is of serving-wenches who, after they have by stealth soaked their faces with their master's good liquor, fill up the vessel with it at second hand, or with other stinking water. Rabelais, Chapter 4.XLVI, \"How a Junior Devil was fooled by a husbandman of Pope-Figland.\" Gargantua and Pantagruel. Translated into English by Sir Thomas Urquehart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux. (First edition, 1653).<\/p>\n

[37]<\/a> Ivan Kotliarevsky, Tvory u Dvokh Tomakh<\/em>, V. I (Kyiv: \"Dnipro,\" 1969), 119.<\/p>\n

[38]<\/a> I agree with Ronald LeBlanc's assertion that \"Belinsky's sweeping claim that Gogol 'had no model or precursors' is\u2026greatly exaggerated.\" (LeBlanc, 109).<\/p>\n

[39]<\/a> Mykola Zerov, Nove ukrains'ke pysmenstvo <\/em>(Kyiv: Slovo, 1924). Zerov credits S. Efremov with developing this term in his Istoriia ukrains'koho pys'menstva <\/em>(Kyiv, 1911). Ostap Stomecky has dealt with Kotliarevsky's influence on Gogol in detail. See Stromecky, Gogol <\/em>(Lviv: Lviv University Press, 1994).<\/p>\n

[40]<\/a> Gogol, PSS<\/em>, T. 1: 89.<\/p>\n

[41]<\/a> Gogol, SS <\/em>T. I: 32.<\/p>\n

[42]<\/a> Gogol, SS <\/em>T. I: 32. Kotliarevskii, Eneida<\/em>, 111. Note that in his citation Gogol omits the subject: Einei (Aeneas).<\/p>\n

[43]<\/a> Mikhail Bakhtin, \"Epic and Novel\" in Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, tr., The Dialogic Imagination <\/em>(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 35.<\/p>\n

[44]<\/a> Nikolai Gnedich would publish his translation of The Iliad <\/em>into Russian in St. Petersburg, a feat admired by many, particularly Pushkin, in 1829, the same year in which Gogol began writing his Dikanka <\/em>stories.<\/p>\n

[45]<\/a> Gogol, Taras Bulba <\/em>in Sobranie sochinenii<\/em>, T. 2: 247.<\/p>\n

[46]<\/a> Nikolai Gogol, The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories<\/em>, trans. Andrew R. Macandrew (New York: Signet Classics, 1961), 135\u20136.<\/p>\n

[47]<\/a> This portrayal of Yankel as a cultural anachronism can be read in light of Hegel's notion of the obsolete stages of human development. The Jews, representing an obsolete culture and language, are no longer fully participatory in the Hegelian \"world historical nations,\" or, in this case, in the Pan-Slavic Russian Empire. For a complication of Hegel's nationalist hierarchy, see Edward Said, Orientalism <\/em>(New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).<\/p>\n

[48]<\/a> Nikolai Gogol, \"Taras Bul'ba\" (redaktsiia 1835) in Taras Bul'ba<\/em>, ed. E. I. Prokhorov and N. L. Stepanov (Moscow: Adakemii Nauk SSSR, 1963), 124.<\/p>\n

[49]<\/a> Gogol, \"Taras Bul'ba\" (1842) in ed. Prokhorov and Stepanov, 53.<\/p>\n

[50]<\/a> Stephen Moeller-Sally, Gogol's Afterlife: The Evolution of a Classic in Imperial and Soviet Russia <\/em>(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 87\u201395.<\/p>\n

[51]<\/a> Ken Frieden, Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovich, Sholem Aleichem<\/em>, Peretz <\/em>(New York: SUNY Press, 1995), 103.<\/p>\n

[52]<\/a> S. Y. Abramovich, Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler: Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third<\/em>, ed. Dan Miron and Ken Frieden, trans. Ted Gorelick and Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 5.<\/p>\n

[53]<\/a> Dan Miron discusses this Yiddish storytelling device in detail in his A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century <\/em>(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).<\/p>\n

[54]<\/a> Cited in Miron, Traveler<\/em>, 28.<\/p>\n

[55]<\/a> Cited in Miron Traveler<\/em>, 28.<\/p>\n

[56]<\/a> Miron writes, for example, of From the Fair<\/em>, \"Indeed, no one could imagine [Rabinovich's] town as having a church, a priest, a church warden, or any other vestige of organized Christianity.\" Dan Miron, The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination <\/em>(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 2.<\/p>\n

[57]<\/a> Dan Miron, Image<\/em>, 157\u2013178, 166.<\/p>\n

[58]<\/a> Only upon meeting Menachem-Mendl in other story-cycles do we realize how undependable our luftmensch <\/em>really is. \"Tevye Blows a Small Fortune,\" centres on an unfortunate event in which the gullible Tevye gives his distant cousin (by marriage) Menachem-Mendl a large sum of money to invest. Rabinovich, Gants Tevye der Milkhiger <\/em>(New York: Sholem Aleykhem Folksfond Oysgabe, 1927, c1918).<\/p>\n

[59]<\/a> Mikhail Bakhtin, \"K voprosam ob istoricheskoi traditsii i o narodnykh istochnikakh gogolevkogo smekha<\/em>,\" in Sobraniie Sochinenii<\/em>, T. 5 (Moscow: Russkie slovari, 1997), 47.<\/p>\n

[60]<\/a> Shapiro, Gogol and the Baroque<\/em>, 57. Cites Dmitri Merezhkovskii, Gogol' i chort <\/em>(Moscow: Skorpion, 1906).<\/p>\n

[61]<\/a> Bergson, Matter and Memory<\/em>, 235.<\/p>\n

[62]<\/a> Gogol, PSS<\/em>, V. 1, 97\u20138. Translation based on Shapiro, 116.<\/p>\n

[63]<\/a> Gogol, SS<\/em>, V. 5, 124. Translation: Pevear and Volokhonsky, Dead Souls<\/em>, 135.<\/p>\n

[64]<\/a> Y. D. Berkovitsh, ed., Dos Rabinovich Bukh: Oytobiografishe Farseykhenungen <\/em>(New York: YKUF, 1958), 188\u20139.<\/p>\n

[65]<\/a> Rabinovich, The Three Great Classic Writers of Modern Yiddish Literature<\/em>, ed. and trans., Marvin Zuckerman and Marion Herbst (Malibu: Pangloss Press, 1994), 2:482.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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