At Home in Exile: The Living Paradoxes of Moyshe Nadir's Early 20th-Century American Yiddish Satire (Discussion and Translation)

Abstract

Moyshe Nadir [Itskhak Reiz] had been editing and contributing to humorous newspapers, Der yidisher gazlen, Der kibitser and Der groyse kundes [The Jewish Robber, The Kibitser and The Big Prankster] for several years when three-volume collection, Humor un satire, appeared in New York in 1912, containing Nadir's earliest satires. Nadir wrote at least thirty of sketches appearing in collection, under names Itskhok Rayz, Moyshe Nadir, Itskhak Ben-Meyer and Rinaldo; some of other pseudonyms may be his as well. This fertile exuberance and clowning, even at supposedly authoritative level of declaring authorship, reflects young Nadir's cheerful, iconoclastic attitude towards hybrid nature of American Yiddish-speaking community at time, and complexities of writing for such community. The audience for American Yiddish satire between 1905 and 1914 was an unprecedented mixture of rural peasants, urban workers, small shopkeepers, and radical intellectuals who had once been spread out across old European continent and who therefore spoke numerous variant forms of Yiddish, but who were now crammed into shared space of North American cities. Using laughter as means of simultaneously criticizing and easing assimilation into American culture, Yiddish satirists writing for new urban American audiences were attempting to fulfill diverse roles, including those previously played in European Yiddish folk culture by Purim players, trickster tales, and badkhn's [wedding jester] parodies. But they also used laughter to teach immigrant population and to guide them in their dealings with complex problems of their newly adopted society. In Bakhtinian terms, ambivalent laughter of folk satire, directed at Jews entering U.S. society, also reaffirmed their participation in it.(1) This article will discuss four of Nadir's early satires in relation to two distinct traditions of Yiddish and American humor. It will explore how this immigrant literature represents and mediates interrelation of two cultures and how it contributes to development of American Jewish identity within American popular culture. Jewish humor has been an especially successful contribution to American literary and popular culture; indeed, one study found that 80% of most famous American comedians were Jewish (Janus). In contrast to Hobbesian belief that humor is largely matter of dominating and belittling butt of joke, Jewish humor, from Sigmund Freud onward, has often been viewed as being self-critical and therefore an indication of self-hatred, or as pseudo-masochism serving to deflect or deflate hostility, as internal corrective ... and as ironic reversal (victory through defeat, virtues out of supposed vices) (Mintz 4). would like to collapse these divergent definitions into following: Laughter, even allegedy self-critical laughter, can be one of most efficient and subversive forms of attacking one's oppressors. Laughing at yourself is laughing at others because subtext is, If can laugh this hard at myself, imagine how loud can laugh when think of A strong parallel can be found within African American humorous folklore, in which principal figure is the weaker individual, who uses superior cleverness to overcome stronger opponents, often through use of satire (Cook 111). For many slaves, deception was only successful form of resistance (Osofsky 26). In modem era, ability to turn Jim Crow laws into joke, often through gallows humor, like Dick Gregory's definition of Southern moderate as a cat that'll lynch you from low tree (Watkins 502),(2) bears more than passing resemblance to similar tradition in Jewish humor that even allows one to joke about charge of having crucified Jesus. This charge has resulted in centuries of persecution, torture, and death, yet one is able to joke: Little Gerda [says] to little Moishe: I am no longer allowed to play with you. …