A few years ago, a student came to my office at the University of Toronto to discuss the upcoming final exam for my introduction to diaspora studies course. Like many other students, he wanted to minimize the time spent on test preparation, and wanted to know which authors in the curriculum he should focus on in greater detail, and which ones he should ignore. “Some texts are super easy and fun,” he said, whereas “others,” he complained, “are impossible to remember! Take, for example, Menakhem Mendl, it is a piece of cake! I don’t even need to prepare for it. I wish all pieces were like this. . . .”

I was not surprised. The Yiddish novel The Adventures of Menakhem Mendl, written by Ukrainian writer Sholem Aleichem in the late nineteenth century, has long been students’ favorite in my diaspora studies classroom. This particular student was born in Egypt and moved to Canada at the age of eight with his family. For him, this was the first translated Yiddish novel that he ever read, and the “best reading” that resonated with him in terms of the immigrant experiences of his family.

This essay is about the unlikely journey of a nineteenth-century novel, primarily geared toward Yiddish speakers of the nineteenth century, into the twenty-first-century university classroom, filled with contemporary immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Shalom Rabinovitz, aka Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) is known as one of founding fathers of modern Yiddish literature. A supreme Jewish humorist, Sholem Aleichem was born in Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, and tapped into the energies of the East European, spoken-Yiddish idiom and invented modern Jewish archetypes, myths, and fables of unequaled imaginative potency and universal appeal.Footnote ¹ One such archetype is Menakhem-Mendl, a man without a profession or a stable source of income, an eternal entrepreneur who never succeeds.

Menakhem-Mendl first appeared in Sholem Aleichem’s story “Londons,” published in 1882, as a young husband going to Odessa to acquire his long-promised dowry, but failing to do so. Instead, he stays in Odessa and tries his luck at stock trading, again failing. The story is told through letters exchanged between Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyna-Sheyndl, his wife, who is waiting for him to return. In other stories, Mendl tries his luck as a stockbroker, an agent, a writer, and a matchmaker. But, as Max Erik observes, the “whole point of his character, however, is that he is not a stock broker, an agent or a matchmaker.” He is a true merchant only in his imagination.Footnote ² Six stories of Menakhem-Mendl’s adventures, each one in epistolary form, were first published in Yiddish in 1895, and were combined into one of Sholem Aleichem’s most famous novels and translated into English under the title The Adventures of Menachem-Mendl.Footnote ³ In views of many critics, this novel is much stronger than his most famous work, Tevye the Dairyman, due to the success of depicting the highly unusual yet somehow relatable figure of Menakhem-Mendl.

In the opinion of literary critic Dan Miron, Menachem-Mendl is trying to break free of traditional life. He has escaped to the city and is never going home, despite his wife’s desire that he return. At the same time, he does keep writing to her, suggesting that he cannot fully free himself; he wishes to maintain some contact with the traditional life he has left behind, even while seeking to throw himself into a more modern existence. Part of the comedy, which is also tragic, derives from Menachem-Mendl’s inability to fully understand the modernity in which he is trying to participate. Sheyna-Sheindl comprehends it even less, and there is humor in her misunderstanding of his references to coffee shops (she thinks they are the names of women) and her confusion over what her husband is doing.Footnote ⁴ In fact, the novel is a combination of slap-stick and a variation of Molierian comedy of manners, translated into the world of Jewish life in the Russian Pale of Settlement of the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century.

As mentioned, the novel is epistolary. It consists of letters compiled into twenty- to thirty-page-length six chapters, each encompassing a self-contained story. Each letter, either by Menakhem-Mendl or by Sheyna-Sheyndl, starts with a formal greeting. For example, one of Menakhem-Mendl’s reads:

What often follows is a story of “not such great news,” which include Menakhem’s adventures in trying to make money, always failing at the end, but often savoring the process of “almost succeeding.” Postscripts often request that Sheyna- Sheyndl send some money to help Menakhem-Mendl to stay afloat until his business ventures work out. Meanwhile, Sheyna-Sheyndl, always starts her letters by saying:

The statement is usually followed by description of problems at home, citations from Menakhem-Mendl’s mother-in-law, and profound and elaborate curses on Menakhem-Mendl for his failures.

The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl can have many uses in the classroom. One can assign the entire novel in English translation, one chapter, or, if one teaches Yiddish language, one letter only. I have studied and taught the novel many times in different courses and contexts, with various degrees of success. Following is a summary of what worked and what did not, both for me as a teacher and as a student.

I read the novel for the first time, in a Russian translation, when I was an undergraduate student in Jewish studies in Moscow in the 1990s, in the context of studying modern Yiddish literature. I found it funny and historically interesting. The image of a Jewish man who cannot achieve success and who is pushed around by his bossy wife represented Yiddish culture exactly as I was comfortable seeing it then: a product of the past, the discrimination of Jews, and located somewhere outside of Moscow. The idea resonated with the image of a “little man,” favored by Anton Chekhov, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. I was proud to think of Sholem Aleichem as the Jewish Chekhov, as well as someone who could create an image of a Jew who provoked sympathy, rather than hostility. Growing up in a country where ethnic and racial intolerance, including anti-Semitism was common, finding an author who could turn around the image of Jews to a positive one seemed like a tremendous accomplishment.

Later, in graduate school, at the medieval-looking and authority-inspiring Oxford, I read the novel again. This time, it was in its Yiddish original, when I studied to become a Yiddish scholar and learned from Mikhail Krutikov and David Roskies, both world-renown experts in Yiddish literature. We indulged into linguistic, literary, and socio-cultural analyses of the novel. I fell in love with Sholem Aleichem again, now because of his language. Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish is full with Slavic elements, Russian- and Ukrainian-derived words, and it is idiomatic in a way that completely made sense for me: Sholem Aleichem’s idioms came directly from the Russian and Ukrainian milieu, and I delighted in being able to appreciate them. It is because of these idioms, and impossibilities of their translation, that I never taught this novel in its original Yiddish, even for my advanced students in Canada. But I took every chance to teach it, or at least to talk about these idioms, with Yiddish speakers with Russian or Ukrainian backgrounds. I was convinced that only those who could understand these linguistic details could fully appreciate what Sholem Aleichem meant when he wrote his novel.

When I joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 2001 and was asked to teach an undergraduate course on Jewish literature in English translation, The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl was one of the first titles I included into the syllabus.

In the early 2000s, most students who took this course were descendants of Jewish immigrants who came to Canada either in the late-nineteenth century or after the Holocaust in the 1940s. They took the course in order to connect with their heritage. Sometimes, I would get non-Jewish students as well. These were kids who grew up either in the Jewish neighborhoods of Toronto in close proximity to them. Occasionally, forlorn German majors would also enroll in the course because they would need an extra course (any course!) to graduate with the degree in German literature. All of these students were born in Canada, many were third- to fifth-generation Canadians, almost always coming from middle- to upper-middle-class communities.

To help students understand the novel, I would always start with a discussion of the epistolary genre (a parody to popular templates of letter writing of the nineteenth century) and made sure I spent as much time talking about Sheyna-Sheyndl as I did about Menakhem-Mendl. I spent time discussing images of bossy women (they are bossy, I explained, because they do not want to become grass widows, thus they have to know exactly where their husbands are, even if they do not need them to be home).Footnote ⁷ For years, students and I read passages from the novel, the ones that included Sheyna-Sheyndl’s curses, citations of her mother to point out the fact that strong, entrepreneurial women become witches in Sholem Aleichem’s world. Their images, I explained, were used to criticize traditional Jewish society and the laws of Judaism that governed it. In other words, in Sholem Aleichem’s view, Judaism creates monsters out of women.Footnote ⁸

Students perceived the novel as a classical piece that thrives on the clash between tradition and modernity, a tale of the ignorant villager arriving into a city, a story of a practical woman making fun of her husband who lives in the clouds. They liked discussing Menakhem-Mendl’s attempt to work the stock market, arranging marriages for commission (and ultimately almost marrying two women, as opposed to a man and a woman), exploring coffee shops and urban synagogues, and selling insurance.

When we discussed the meanings and significances of Menakhem-Mendl’s experiences as part Sholem Aleichem’s attempt to create an image of an archetypical Jew (a person without occupation, caught up between worlds of tradition and education, with a problematic marriage, with limited rights in society, and an uncertain future), the novel begins to appear less straightforwardly funny and more tragic. The figure of Menakhem-Mendl is transformed from a clown into a victim, his supposed typicality as a Jew troubles rather than entertains.

We often discussed why Menakhem-Mendl was unemployed. Students needed to learn about the context of Jewish life in the Russian Empire of the nineteenth century: official restrictions on where Jews could reside, in addition to restrictions on their occupation, educational choices, and more. Menakhem-Mendl, I explained, was a victim of the government policies toward Jews in the Russian Empire. His lack of productivity and paralysis were results of discrimination and social injustice. I usually spent a considerable amount of time explaining that Jews were by far the poorest, economically and socially disadvantaged group in the Russian Empire.

We looked closely at jokes, both articulated for us through Menakhem-Mendl, and those told in Sheyna Sheyndl’s voice. This was also an opportune time to evoke Mary Douglas and Sigmund Freud and speak about the significance of jokes. We tried to find hidden aggression in Sholem Aleichem’s humor. Above all, we spoke about humor as a weapon of power of the weak. Something you can laugh at, I often told students, cannot kill you.

To help students visualize Menakhem-Mendl, I sometimes showed them segments from the silent film Jewish Luck, created by a Moscow film studio in 1925. The film is based on the script written by Isaac Babel, which was based on Sholem Aleichem’s novel. Solomon Mikhoels (1890–1947), the leading actor of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, was cast in the role of Menakhem-Mendl and portrayed him as a dodgy, fidgety, and restless man, always coming up with new ways to become rich. Mikhoels’s Menakhem-Mendl does not look anyone straight in the eye, unless he is trying to cheat him.

My students did not enjoy the movie because they found the image of Menakhem-Mendl too self-deprecating and borderline anti-Semitic. Many students of Jewish background found both the film and Sholem Aleichem’s novel offensive.

In fact, as years went by, it became difficult to teach this novel in the context of Jewish literature because students found it harder to see the aesthetic value in the novel: the humor seemed primitive and crude, and jokes outdated. For example, when studying the story of the wedding accidentally arranged between two women, some students took offense at some of the other students who laughed at the situation (because it offended their feelings about same-sex relationships). Historical circumstances of the novel seemed boring and irrelevant to many students. Overall, Sholem Aleichem’s ideas seemed to break many of the cultural norms of Canadian society of the twenty-first century. Canadian Jewish students refused to accept the writer as either Jewish or relevant to their heritage. Instead, they seemed to prefer stories by Yitzhok Leybush Peretz (1852–1915) another classic of Yiddish literature, whose works spoke about the universal values that can be found in Judaism and modern Jewish culture. As years went by, I taught less of Sholem Aleichem and more of Peretz.

In 2007, things changed. I joined the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and was asked to teach a course called Introduction to Diaspora Studies. Issues of home, displacement, loss and change of language, nostalgia, and identity are central to Yiddish culture, and I could not wait to introduce these concepts to students outside of Jewish studies.

The first year of teaching this course was a complete disaster. Diaspora studies students were predominantly first-generation Canadians. They wanted to know all about the problematic nature of home, adjustments, not being home anywhere or everywhere, shifting identity, nostalgia, and more. They did not want to study the Jewish diaspora, however, because they did not perceive it as reflective of their immigrant experiences. Many students dropped the class as soon as they saw the syllabus, oversaturated with readings on Jews. Others stayed, mainly waiting for the second semester, which was taught by another professor, and which would focus on Canadian immigrants. During lectures students refused to engage and barely looked up from their electronic devices.

This was until we read The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl.

For the first time, I saw a spark of interest in the eyes of my student audience. I started by asking if anything in the novel resonated with them and was shocked to see raised hands. Students could not stop talking.

They loved the character of Menakhem-Mendl, his humor, his attempts to establish his business. They delighted in details of him misunderstanding the functions of the stock market, coffee shops, and other urban novelties. They even cracked up at jokes, including the ones about the match between two women. They loved the fact that Menakhem-Mendl kept asking his wife for money and that she would always give it to him, thus enabling him to explore the new world, essentially at her expense. Even the fact that Menakhem-Mendl essentially abandoned his five children did not alter the sympathies of my students. They related to Menakhem-Mendl, to Sheyna-Sheynl, and even to their unnamed and barely mentioned children.

During the discussion, many students spoke about sacrifices their own parents had to make in order to succeed in a different country: some grew up seeing their fathers or mothers being unemployed, or, to the contrary, working three jobs, thus never having time for the children. Others spoke of parents who worked abroad, trying to provide for the families left behind and eventually bringing them to Canada. Even the epistolary genre resonated with students because they recognized letter exchange as a prehistorical email form of communication.

In short, the least favorite author of students of Jewish literature became the favorite of students of diaspora studies.

I learned something new about Sholem Aleichem, too. I realized that his message was not designed for established, financially comfortable middle-class Canadians. Instead, it was written for immigrants, no matter from where, so long as they make their first steps in a new country. I realized that prior to this experience, I never truly understood Sholem Aleichem, despite my nuanced understanding of his idiomatic Yiddish. I was ready, again, to bring my favorite writer back to all my courses, especially the ones on diaspora studies.

Since 2007, I have taught an introduction to diaspora studies many times. I have completely redesigned the syllabus to incorporate case studies from Chinese, Irish, African, African American, Indian, Philipino, Palestinian, and post-Soviet diasporas. We focus now largely on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We continue discussing notions of exile, displacement, home, problems of asking the “Where are you from?” question, nostalgia, gender and diaspora (classes on Chinese immigrant mothers are especially popular!), issues of discrimination, tolerance, pluralism, and multiculturalism.

The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl survived in all reincarnations of the syllabus. In fact, the novel became the only text that I taught that deals with the nineteenth century, and one of the few that discusses diasporas outside of Canada or the United States. The novel now sets the tone for the rest of the semester: we speak of Menakhem-Mendl and his adventures as typical pre-immigrant and immigrant experiences. Instead of watching Jewish Luck, we look at Marc Chagall’s painting The Wandering Jew and discuss the image of a floating man, a man without roots. We speak about the Yiddish word luftmensch, which literally means “a man of the air”, a person without certain occupation or sources of income. In Chagall’s painting, the luftmensch is floating, an artist’s take on wordplay illustrating the diasporic condition of European Jews.

The beggar in Chagall’s painting is going from nowhere to nowhere, his movement has no visible purpose. We then talk about the purpose of Menakhem-Mendl’s movement, about differences between being busy and creating an impression of being busy (we all can relate to that, especially students!).

Students often speak of Sholem Aleichem’s humor, too. Often, they use examples from their families, including jokes that their fathers made during the time they looked for work after immigrating to Canada, arguments that their parents had (which awfully resembled letters exchanged between Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyna Sheyndl), comical episodes, when families did not recognize certain foods as edible or other examples of adjustments to life in Canada.

In the eyes of these students, The Adventures of Menakhem-Mendl told a universal story of displacement and adjustment, one that traveled through geographical and temporal boundaries.

I do not know how the next generation of students will perceive the novel: Will the realities of immigration and adaptation change in our globalizing world to a situation in which adjustments will be less necessary? Will electronic communication make it harder to relate to the epistolary genre? Or, hopefully, will challenges of homelessness become irrelevant? One thing I am confident in is that there will be a way for Sholem Aleichem’s Advenures of Menakhem-Mendl to stay in my university classroom as a universal story of hope, loss, and self-deprecating humor.