Poverty: when imagination becomes a refuge and suffering turns to song

Source: Kabtziel: city of poets and beggars

"There is nothing so conducive to poetry as poverty... Poverty brings wisdom; poverty prepares the soul for feeling and good character... How many schemes and extravagant pleasures must be invented to delight the sated soul of the children of the rich... Whereas for the soul of the poor, a small thing is enough to stir it and make it feel a holy abundance. Any good thing at all... lifts their spirit and gladdens their mind... Over a new kapote [coat] and new shoes... they recite a blessing and say Hallelujah! Take heed of the children of beggars, for from them come many poets!"

(Mendele Mocher Sforim, "In the Valley of Tears", Book Seven, 1)

Explanation: Bitter satire: when praise conceals despair

Mendele, the greatest of Hebrew satirists, depicts the fictional town of "Kabtziel" (Beggartown). He employs reverent language ("holy abundance," "Hallelujah!") to portray a tragic reality. The rich require extravagant thrills because their senses are dulled; the poor person, by contrast, experiences spiritual ecstasy over a simple pair of shoes, because they live in perpetual deprivation. Yet Mendele does not genuinely mean to praise poverty; he is mocking a reality he knew intimately from his own childhood—a reality where people are forced to flee into an elaborate world of imagination ("poetry") simply because their physical reality is unbearable. He twists the sages' dictum, "Take heed of the children of the poor, for from them Torah shall go forth," into a warning: from poverty come people who live in their imaginations, because they have no life in reality.

Perspective: Puncturing the myth of the tortured artist

We are devoted to the myth of the "tortured artist" and the romance of poverty. We love to think that suffering purifies the soul and that the poor are more "spiritual" people—much like we thought when reading about Diogenes. Mendele sticks a pin into this hypocritical balloon. He says: make no mistake. The poor person's ability to rejoice over a crust of bread is not noble, chosen "modesty"; it is a symptom of starvation. When we marvel at the "authenticity" of slums or the "soul" of street children, we are merely turning their suffering into our entertainment. And yet, had the young Mendele not been poor and orphaned, we might have lost the "grandfather" of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature—a member of the last generation of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), and the foremost writer of the Revival period.

Going Deeper: Between Diogenes and Maslow: does poverty empower or paralyze?

Unlike Diogenes (Tuesday), who chose poverty as an ideology of power, Mendele's characters did not choose anything. They are "poets" against their will. The psychologist Abraham Maslow (of the famous hierarchy of needs), who was also Jewish, would argue against Mendele that one cannot achieve self-actualization—the peak of the pyramid—when basic needs go unmet. Mendele answers him with Jewish cynicism: when basic needs are absent, self-actualization is the only thing left, but it does not grow from fertile soil; it grows from decay. And often, in truth, only the decay remains.

Culture: Tevye the Dairyman: when song puts no bread on the table

The musical Fiddler on the Roof (based on Sholem Aleichem, Mendele's disciple) features Tevye the Dairyman singing "If I Were a Rich Man." Tevye is precisely Mendele's "poet." He has gornisht mit gornisht (Yiddish for "nothing at all"), but he has rich heart-to-heart conversations with God and an entire choreography of dreams. His song is the anthem of someone who turned lack into art. The audience applauds, moved by Tevye's "soul," but at the end of the show—he is still poor, exiled, and homeless. Poetry did not save him; it merely romanticized the "culture of poverty." And you can't buy groceries with romance—though maybe, just maybe, you can with joy.

The video clip is from another adaptation of Sholem Aleichem, Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, the source of the famous line, "I'm lucky—I'm an orphan!" since everyone takes pity on him.