How Do You Do?

THE OLD COUNTRY (434 pp.)--Sholom Aleichem (translated by Julius and Frances Butwin)--Crown ($3).

Ben Hecht calls Solomon Rabinowitch "the greatest humorist the Jews ever produced." Rabinowitch was born in Pereyaslav, the Ukraine, in 1859. In his father's inn Sol grew from boyhood to manhood--and observed the customers. At 23, he began to write--about the customers--for Hamelitz, a Jewish periodical. He took the pen name Sholom Aleichem, the Jewish equivalent of "How do you do?", and turned out copy like a mimeograph.

In 1905, when the Kiev massacres drove him from Russia (with his wife and six children), he found that fame had preceded him. When he reached New York, even Mark Twain came calling. Twain's opening remark: "I've been anxious to meet you for a long time, because people have been telling me I'm the American Sholom Aleichem."

In 1916, Solomon Rabinowitch died in The Bronx. He left a massive literature: 300 short stories, five novels, four plays, innumerable articles. Last week, 30 years after his death, the English-reading world got its first wide sampling of the stories. Translators Butwin caution that the flavor of all 27 stories in The Old Country is weakened by translation. Even so, they taste pretty strong.

A few are just literary exercises in devious plot & counterplot; a few are plotless casuals of Jews at home, at work & play; but most of them employ a simple plot to make a simple point--the joy, or sadness, or mystery of living.

Considered singly, each story is like a peasant hut of "the old country," crammed with populous, colloquial Jewish life. Most of the characters are credible: they haggle over fish, are starved or stuffed, often pray, sometimes forsake their faith, sometimes commit suicide. But occasionally Aleichem takes off from reality, and then he is at his best. He tells of people with one eyebrow black and the other white, who cut up a sofa to make a fiddle, whose goats change sex, whose clocks strike 13, who drink so much they catch fire inside and burn to death.

Taken together, the stories will give the non-Jewish reader an explanation, wealthy with humor, of what has seldom been more readably explained--the intense, hieratic climate of the Jewish community.

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