4: First sentence of Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” (1913), translated into English by Isaac Rosenfeld (1953).

4: First sentence of Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” (1913), translated into English by Isaac Rosenfeld (1953).

After you’ve thought (using resource #3 of this kit) about the song “Train Across Ukraine”—and the portrait it creates of Sholem Aleichem as a railroad passenger keeping his ear perked up for the stories of his fellow travelers—take some time to examine the very beginning of “On Account of a Hat.” The first sentence of the story is attributed to the merchant from Kasrilevka: “Did I hear you say absent-minded?” [“Alts heyst bay aykh tsetrogn?”]

As becomes clear later in the same paragraph, this monologue is addressed directly to Sholem Aleichem, whose name the merchant mentions as the subject of his second-person address: “…what I could tell you, Mr. Sholem Aleichem…” The merchant from Kasrilevka, it would seem, had been standing near another group of people—a group which included Sholem Aleichem. These people were speaking about an issue entirely unrelated to the unfortunate Sholem Shachnah—in fact, the reader of the story is never told what they had been talking about. We as readers are left to assume that Sholem Aleichem must have said something about someone else being “absent-minded,” and, at that very moment, the merchant from Kasrilevka seized upon this utterance as an opening to join the conversation—and launched into his tale about his absent-minded townsman, Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain, which he had been dying to relay to the famous writer Sholem Aleichem.

Suggested Activity: Read the story’s first sentence—or, better yet, its entire first paragraph. Why does the merchant of Kasrilevka essentially butt into a conversation? Put yourself in his shoes: how would you feel if you ran into a famous person, or just some person you’ve always wanted to talk to, just standing around in a public place talking with other people? The merchant from Kasrilevka must have recognized Sholem Aleichem, a popular figure widely known to so many Jews in the Pale of Settlement from his portraits in literary periodicals; an opportunity to tell a story about a hapless townsman to a famous writer known for retelling narratives attributed to fellow Jews must have seemed incredibly enticing. Imagine that you are in a group of peers you perceive to be “cooler” than yourself—they are all having a conversation, and you’re struggling to get a word in edge-wise, and suddenly one of the “cool kids” says a word that gives you the perfect opening and you jump in and begin talking. Have you been in a situation like this? This is one way to imagine how the Kasrilevka merchant’s story begins, and how Sholem Aleichem, the famous writer posing as an attentive listener, first hears the story that he later claims to share with his readers.

Source: Sholem Aleichem, “On Account of a Hat,” trans. Isaac Rosenfeld in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, eds. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Penguin, 1990).