Basic texts …

… Ruth Wisse on Jewish Humour | Five Books | Five Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… when you read [Tevye] on the page he really is a standup comic. He is speaking to Mr. Sholem Aleichem so that they have formed a kind of magic circle, a cultural island, within a sea of change. They are this stable unit, Mr Sholem Aleichem is the audience but he is a very important audience because he is the entrepreneur who is taking these heavy monologues and publishing them. It's an extremely complicated work in the way it is fashioned. It seems simple and straightforward — the man telling the story is so amiable and so forth — but it is one of the most perpetually fascinating texts because of the various levels of interaction between the character and the listener and in relation to the devastation that he is describing. The trajectory of the plot is totally downward from the first story to the end, it becomes more and more tragic. He is bereft of everything that was important to him. But he remains a speaker. He is the one who keeps reinterpreting all that happens, and it's through his eyes that you see this. So, in a sense, nothing is taken away from him because he is the one who has the last word. I think Jewish readers began to see themselves in this model. They would quote him. They would see themselves as a people who — as long as they were in possession of the narrative — it didn't really matter all that much what happened.