Word: jewish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Jewish quarter at Sachsenhausen). "Dante's Inferno couldn't be worse. There were more than a thousand Jews; that is, they had once been Jews and human beings, now they were living skeletons, beastlike in their mad hunger. They flung themselves on the dust bins, or rather plunged into them, head and shoulders, several at a time; they scratched up everything, absolutely everything that was lying in them, potato peel, garbage, rottenness of every kind . . . The whole time, without a break, the blows from rubber truncheons were hailing down on them...
...Love. A leading figure of the Jewish literary renaissance of the 1900s, Aleichem wrote with passionate love for the Jewish religious tradition; at the same time, he edged his stories with the skepticism that was sweeping European Jewry. He became the spokesman and critic of an entire people. When Tevye mangled a Biblical quotation, bemoaned his everlasting poverty, or quarreled with God (whom Tevye loved so well he could risk familiarity), Jewish readers could recognize both the story and its bite...
Tevye the dairyman was really a simple soul. He lived quietly in a Russian village during the early days of the century, when Czarism was cracking and the old Jewish communal life had begun to crack, too. All he wanted from life was a chance to sell his butter and cheese, an occasional glance into the Old Testament or the Talmud, and some reliable husbands for his sprouting daughters. "The Lord," he sarcastically remarked, "wanted to be good to Tevye, so He blessed him with seven female children ... all of them good-looking and charming . . . like young pine trees...
Tevye and his troubles are at the center of Sholom Aleichem's classic Yiddish tales, which in the past half century have become an integral part of Jewish folk life. Some have been translated into English in Tevye's Daughters-though with only a shade of the ironic, shoulder-shrugging spirit of the original...
Though these stories may seem mere half-sad, half-merry anecdotes, they are actually incisive portraits of European Jewish life. Through Tevye's irony, they underline the weaknesses of that life: "I was . . . asking questions of the Almighty and answering them myself ... I wasn't worried about God so much, I could come to terms with Him . . . What bothered me was people...