Language:
English
Year of publication:
2020
Titel der Quelle:
In Geveb; a Journal of Yiddish Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2020) 13 pp.
Keywords:
Sholem Aleichem,
;
Yiddish fiction History and criticism
;
Yiddish language Spoken Yiddish
;
Language and languages in literature
Abstract:
In this essay, Wisse analyzes the relationship between speech and communication in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman. Wisse argues that the relationship between Sholem Aleichem and Tevye constitutes a miniature Jewish territory where together they reassert moral control over everything that they endure. Tevye’s humor often reports on misunderstanding and failures of speech— two decades of setbacks involving misunderstanding, concealment, suppressed information, fabrication, double-entendre, threat, and worse. But between the speaker and his listener there is a deepening interdependency. Their durable communion provides a kind of security, holding the culture together democratically on middle ground, even if it is impossible to reproduce generationally and it cannot repel those external forces that come to destroy it.
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink