Wandering Home Finding tradition in broken Yiddish and moose-meat knishes
BY SARAH MINTZ ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE ZOLA
I n the book Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer , the acclaimed Yid- dish author tells the story of a Jewish man who visits the city of Vilna (Lithuania, not Alberta). Upon returning from his trip, the man says to his friend, “The Jews of Vilna are remarkable!” The friend asks, “What’s so remarkable?” The man answers, “I saw a Jew in Vilna who schemed all day long about how to make money. I saw a Jew waving the red flag and calling for revolution. I saw a Jew who was running after every woman. I saw a Jew who was an ascetic. I saw a Jew who preached religion all the time.” His friend asks, “Why are you are so sur- prised? Vilna is a big city. There are many types of Jews.” “No,” says the first man, “it was all the same Jew.” Though amusing, Singer’s purpose in tell- ing the tale was to offer insight. He noted that the Jew is so restless he is almost everything at once , attributing this rest- lessness to a particular kind of intelligence that creates an energy and manifests as a need to always be doing, planning, or pur- suing with singular passion some abstract idea. While a generalization, it doesn’t feel
untrue—or at least it contains enough truth to make the joke work. To pile commentary upon commentary (Talmudically, if you wish), I would note that even as a collective, Jews are so restless they’re almost everything at once: the var- iety of language, lifestyle, class, ideology, and religiosity among Jewish people is such that it can feel reductionist to make any gen- eralization about our co-religionists. Singer’s story, then, works as an observa- tion even without the punchline. Indeed, by ruining the joke and turning it into a prompt for commenting broadly about the stereo- type—that of the anxious, changeable, wandering Jew—we perhaps fulfill Singer’s observation: that the Jew is so restless, so unsettled, they are wont to become al- most everything at once, whether by circum- stance, situation, necessity, or pilpulistic contrarianism. So, we contain multitudes. Are multitudin- ous—containing everything, wandering end- lessly, doing, planning, pursuing, assuming the stance of an exiled ancestor, making a personality out of history, living the charac- ter, and feeling it like fate—whether gathered through our genes or through our memes. But multitudes aside, the stereotypes per-
sist and are not always without merit. The Jews are an urban people. It’s been said, there are quotes. I can find them, I can have a computer find them for you. There are reasons given, there are reasons dis- puted. Jews are an urban people because we couldn’t own land, because we couldn’t join guilds. We’re an urban people because many excelled in trade, finance, and intel- lectual pursuits, all of which are central to urban environments. We’re an urban people for safety, to remain close to the centres of civilization to influence leadership so that we may live under a tolerant government. I have the sources, I’ll dig them up. There is truth in common utterances, there is con- tentiousness in them as well. We are all inevitably products of history—and histori- ography. We are born into circumstances, but also born into particular tellings of those circumstances. Both shape our perception, then our actions and contributions. Though the urban stereotype seems true enough, at least from the Haskalah (Enlight- enment) on, through immigration, assimi- lation, and modernization—there isn’t a lot going on in the other direction. No one says, “The Jews are a rural people.” Because not so much, not really. And again, we have the
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