Lost Worlds

I have lately been absorbed in the work of the great Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, whose work chronicles the world of the eastern European shtetl with humor and warmth just at the moment when that world was dissolving. Like the daughters of his most famous character, Tevye the milkman, Aleichem's Jews--who had lived uninterruptedly for centuries in the Pale of Settlement between Russia and the West--were leaving for America, for the cities, for radical causes, for a life outside Jewry. Aleichem himself tried but failed to relocate his career to America after the 1905 revolution and its consequent pogroms; the Old World author was repudiated by New York audiences. Despite his loving attachment to the Yiddish language, which he brought to new heights of expressivity in its written form, Aleichem encouraged his children to use Russian as their primary language. Born in a shtetl, he lived much of his adult life an a bourgeois in Kiev, and in the end, under the pressures of illness, Russian persecutions, and the Great War, he left Europe to die in America. And of course, despite a brief resurgence in the early years of the Soviet Union, the Yiddish culture he gave voice to was utterly eradicated, first by Stalin's purges and then by the murderous onslaught of the Nazis and indigenous militias. In short, Aleichem's glorious celebration of a folk culture and its accumulated verbal brilliance owes much of its poignancy to its aura of transience and imminent loss.

Analogies are slippery things, and I don't want to lean too heavily on this one. But I sometimes feel that the culture I was born into--now marginalized by the term 'analog'--is also slipping away, not to America or a mass grave but more nebulously into that digital, virtual space where most of us spend so many of our hours. I feel this getting on the bus or even walking down the street, as most of those around me--and everyone under 30, without exception--are looking at the devices in their hands. What are they doing, I ask myself--a harder question than it might be if, like them, I owned a smart phone. Of course now, having made little forays into Twitter and Facebook, I have a better idea. And since 2008 I have seized the opportunity to write a series of blogs, and I truly love the internet and all its treasures. But still I'm not fooling anybody, least of all myself: I'm most at home in person or on the printed page. I still think of the telephone as a device for speaking to someone not physically present. And after 140 characters I'm not only not finished with my message--I'm barely warmed up.

I was recently told by a young friend--politely, because all my young friends are scrupulously if sometimes patronizingly polite--that my prose, elegant as it is with its subordinate clauses, its deferred subjects and apostrophic flourishes, simply takes too long to read. And those long paragraphs! Use bullet points, she counseled me. Bold--she meant 'embolden'--the words you want people to really notice. And of course she's right.

In that vast river of information, that flows unceasingly across our screens, most of it visual for easy absorption, who has time to stop, reflect, correlate, or even--dear God--reread? I'm no Sholom Aleichem, booed off the stage on Second Avenue after one of his old-fashioned melodramas flopped, but I do--alas, children--sometimes feel that my caravan has moved on. Taking with it, I might add, much of the literary legacy our forebears took such pains to store up. I love the 'new television' as much as anyone, and I even find myself claiming that works like "Mad Men" or "The Wire" are our new, great novels. But I know, deep down, that they will not replace the interiority, the solitary and reflective experience of reading what are often referred to these days as 'doorstop' novels.

But no need to worry--we have Sholom Aleichem with us still. That's the beauty of great literature. So I brighten up when he ends the tragic story of Tevye's daughter Chava by saying "Let us talk of something more cheerful," and then asks "Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?" That's a writer I could stand behind.