Inside Sholem Shachnah's Hat

Abstract

The author, after years of parading around in the ill-fitting hat of a lit-critical maverick--in which hat he consistently read Sholem Aleichem's On Account of a Hat as a subversive parable based upon the character of its hapless protagonist --is inspired by the writings of Eichenbaum, Bakhtin, Fanger, and other Russian literary scholars to switch hats, whereupon he discovers manifold contextual layers and multiple narrative voices, each with its own diction and direction, which in turn reveal the story to be an exemplar of Yiddish polyphony.