“The Jewish Mark Twain: That Is What Sholom Rabinovich, Known as Sholom Aleichem, Was Called”
Pyotr Spivak

Jewish Newspaper of Kaliningrad, April 2013, No. 137

Humanity has culture, and within it there are many subcultures. The first seems clear enough to everyone: people tend to apply a single universal yardstick. The second immediately creates difficulties. Subcultures are like people sitting on an extra chair: they still do not have — or perhaps no longer have — an officially assigned and universally recognized place.

In scholarly terms, a subculture is a particular type of behavior, customs, values, and so on that differs from the dominant culture. It may arise, for example, on an ethnic basis, and Russian Jewry is one example. In pre-revolutionary times most Jews spoke Yiddish, but at first the language had no literary version. Then one emerged. One of those who stood at its origins was Sholom Rabinovich, born on 2 March 1859 and known as Sholom Aleichem (d. 1916). For today's readers he is above all a master storyteller, someone who tells stories in such a way that the voices of living, full-blooded life can be heard in every possible register — laughter through tears, as the saying goes. He was called the Jewish Mark Twain; remarkably, Mark Twain himself was inclined to regard himself as the American Sholom Aleichem.

In Sholom Aleichem's work invention is raised to the level of a real-life incident. “A fabrication does not seem like a fabrication if it could actually have happened,” Veniamin Kaverin once formulated it. The occasion for that observation was Sergei Evlakhishvili's television production of Tevye the Milkman, with Mikhail Ulyanov's brilliant performance in the title role. National and cultural specificity is an indispensable color — but only within the palette shared by all humanity.

Here, of course, the translator is a central figure. On 3 March 1858 the Russian zoologist and popularizer of science Nikolai Kholodkovsky (d. 1921) was born. His hobby was to render classics of world literature into his native language. For many years his translation of Goethe's Faust was regarded as canonical.

The diversity of humanity is realized in the most unpredictable and paradoxical forms. The calendar seems to remind us of Sholom Aleichem and his characters through another person who came from the same ethnocultural soil but represented an entirely different type: Vladimir Gelfand, born on 1 March 1923 (d. 1983). He was not a luminary of science or art, but an ordinary man. Almost ordinary. At the start of the war he was thoroughly a product of Russian culture, a Komsomol member with broad interests in the humanities. He became a front-line soldier, a platoon commander, and later a staff officer. And he was the author of the German Diary 1945–46, a precious uncensored testimony to the Soviet occupation zone, Germany's collapse, and the world of the victors. And what was Gelfand's particular worldview, if not a subculture of its own kind?

On 3 March 1937 Eduard Steinberg, the avant-garde artist, was born in Moscow; he died only recently, last year, in Paris. The avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s cannot be separated from the reality and problem of emigration. But in Steinberg we see yet another subcultural formation. He was the son of the poet and translator Arkady Steinberg, one of the key figures in the informal literary community of Tarusa. The younger Steinberg also exhibited in Tarusa and received his first recognition in his homeland there. He is buried there as well.

Eduard Steinberg's creative existence was a continuous dialogue with predecessors and contemporaries — those close to him in outlook as well as opponents: Malevich, Magritte, Kabakov. From one point of view, today they are almost at the same point in the cultural firmament. Culture as a whole and every conceivable or inconceivable subculture ultimately merge into a combined color and sound.

Pyotr Spivak

© Founder: Jewish Community of Kaliningrad. Editor A. Minin. Layout: I. Zaletsky. Print run: 600 copies. Signed for printing 21 March 2013, order No. 650.
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