Word: shtetl
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...lets it come down. It is as if one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Hasidic schoolboys were managing Tolstoy's estate and Dostoevsky's psychoses. The Brothers Karamazov meet the Brothers Marx; the epic of War and Peace is reduced to a battle of church and shtetl; Boris scatters Yiddishisms and one-liners all the way back to St. Petersburg and the girl he loves like a brothel...
...repression. Just as the assimilating Jew repressed the crude Yiddish-keit of his inner being, says Cuddihy, so did the Gentile repress the id that was at the root of everybody's being. As Ordeal would have it: "The importunate 'Yid' released from ghetto and shtetl is the model, I contend, for Freud's coarse, importunate Td.'" Marx, like Freud, is depicted as an iconoclastic unmasker of the hypocritical civility of the Gentiles...
Where, for instance, is the veering frenzy of Freud's early years, the huge ambition thrusting out of old shtetl terrors and the hidden struggle with a Jewish mother who called him "mein goldener Sigi" till the day she died? As Stone presents him, the young Freud is just another nice, bright Jewish boy, "my son the doctor," and his long and lust-tormented engagement to Martha Bernays is a Victorian idyl of sweet reason and unspattered upholstery...
...Singer looked wistful again as he spoke of his favorite topic-the shtetl, now nothing but dust and ashes'. "It's true that the world which I describe has vanished physically; but in literature nothing dies, nothing vanishes. The holocaust did not really destory Jewish culture. The same people or their children built Israel. To me the people from Warsaw are as much alive as those in New York today...
Singer has pronounced opinions on literary humor. He rejects the savage and cruel mocking irony of younger writers in favor of the self-deprecatory humor of the shtetl. "I will tell you." he said, prefacing his remarks with the characteristic phrase of the born racontear: "If you laugh, either you laugh at others or you laugh at yourself. If you don't want to laugh at others, you have to make humor about yourself...