The return of Menachem Mendel: Sholem Aleichem as a political commentator

Abstract

The article analyses historical, political and ideological aspects of Sholem Aleichem's collection of political feuilletons, Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom (Menachem Mendel. The second volume). The feuilletons were published in the newspaper Haynt (Today) in Warsaw in 1913. They were written as correspondence between the famous personages of Sholem Aleichem's prose, Menachem Mendel and his wife Sheyne Sheyndl. Menachem Mendel. Der tsveiter tom presents a wide panoramic view of the political and everyday life of Russian Jewry on the eve of the First World War. Sholem Aleichem described many aspects and events of world, and of Russian and Russian-Jewish politics, among them the Balkan Wars, the 11th Zionist Congress in Vienna, Jewish emigration, the Jewish question in the imperial Russian State Duma, expulsion of Jews from villages in the Russian Empire, the territorialist movement and the struggle between Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1913, Russian Jews were, on the one hand, an oppressed minority locked in the Pale of Settlement, but on the other a real subject of Russian and world politics, involved with political parties and civil movements, newspapers, leaders, congresses and the like. Within Sholem Aleichem's final half-fictional half-journalistic work a complicated collective portrait of Russian Jews emerges.