Yehupets as Fantasy and Reality: Sholem Aleichem’s Kiev

ABSTRACT

The city of Kiev was an inexhaustible source of material for Sholem Aleichem’s prolific writings in various genres. The imaginary city of Yehupets functions in his writing as a transitional space between the traditional shtetl and the modern city. The insecurity of Jewish residence in the city created a sense of anxiety which is a defining feature of Sholem Aleichem’s characters and was partly shared by the author himself. Sholem Aleichem’s choice of shtetl Jews as our guides through the social and physical labyrinths of Jewish Yehupets had its limitations conditioned by their mentality. It worked well as the literary device of defamiliarization, which enabled the educated urban readers to see their familiar environment critically by highlighting the dehumanizing and corrupting effects of Yehupets as a microcosm of the Russian Empire.

KEYWORDS:

• Kiev
• Yiddish literature
• Sholem Aleichem
• Ukraine
• Russian Empire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mikhail Krutikov is Preston R. Tisch professor of Slavic and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 (Stanford University Press, 2001) and From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford University Press, 2011); he co-edited ten collections on Yiddish literature and culture, most recently, with Gennady Estraikh, Women, Men and Books: Gender Issues in YIddih Discourse. (Oxford: Legenda, 2019). His new book, Der Nister's Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People, was published by Indiana University Press in 2019. Since 1999 he has been a cultural columnist for the Yiddish Forward. A collection of his Yiddish essays Tsvishn shures: notitsn vegn yidisher kultur (Between Lines: Notes on Jewish Culture) came out in Israel 2018.

Notes

1 Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, 5.

2 Hamm, Kiev, 13.

3 Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, 133.

4 For historical accounts of Jews in Kiev, see Meir, Kiev and Khiterer, Jewish City, or Inferno of Russian Israel.

5 Meir, Kiev, 110–1.

6 Ibid., 117.

7 Ibid., 103.

8 Sholem Aleichem, Letter to Simon Dubnov, September 2, 1888, Sobranie sochinenii, v. 6 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), 676.

9 Ibid.

10 Stempenyu in The Shtetl, 367.

11 Ibid., 368.

12 Ibid., 369.

13 Oyslender, “Der yunger Sholem-Aleykhem un zayn roman ‘Stempenyu’,” 6.

14 Ibid., 9.

15 Dauber, The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem.

16 Sholem Aleykhem, Ale verk, v. 13, 260.

17 Ibid., 257.

18 Ibid., 216.

19 Ibid., 229.

20 Ibid., 225.

21 Ibid., 230

22 Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl, 40.

23 Muravyov, Kiev i ego sviatynia, 118.

24 Sholem Aleichem, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl, 42.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 50.

28 Ibid., 52.

29 Ibid., 63.

30 Ibid., 67–8.

31 Ibid., 84.

32 Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, 27.

33 29.

34 Ibid., 82.

35 Sholem Aleichem, Menakhem-Mendl, 277.

36 Ibid., 278.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 279

39 Ibid., 280.

40 Ibid.

41 Sholem Aleichem, Der mabl.

42 Ibid., 10.

43 Kalnitskii, Evreiskie adresa Kieva, 186–7.

44 Sholem Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, 88.

45 Sholem Aleichem, “The Judgment of Shomer,” 138.

46 Sholem Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, 76.

47 Meir, Kiev, 175.

48 Sholem Aleichem, The Bloody Hoax, 152–3.

49 Sholem Aleichem, From the Fair, 254–5.

50 Ibid., 256.

51 Ibid,. 257.