7: Excerpt from Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” (1913), translated by Isaac Rosenfeld (1953).

7: Excerpt from Sholem Aleichem’s “On Account of a Hat” (1913), translated by Isaac Rosenfeld (1953).

Suggested Activity: First, read the passage about Sholem Shachnah’s encounter with the man the story refers to as Buttons, and try to reverse-engineer how Sholem Shachnah might have arrived at the numerous assumptions in this description, starting with the protagonist’s moniker—which is not his name (neither the reader nor Sholem Shachnah knows this man’s name!)—and ending with how Sholem Shachnah imagines the life of Buttons leading up to his arrival at the train station. Buttons is not Jewish, and he wears a cap of some sort that Sholem Shachnah takes for a sign of the man’s social status and his place in the social hierarchy. How might Sholem Shachnah—a member of a persecuted ethno-religious minority without a real way to access or socialize with members of the Russian Empire’s ethno-religious majority—have come to stereotype the man he encounters in the way that he does?

Second, look for the descriptions of the two other prominent non-Jewish characters—the porter Yeremei and the horse-drawn wagon driver Ivan Zlodi—and consider how Sholem Shachnah understands these two men. How, for example, is Sholem Shachnah’s communication and contractual relationship with Yeremei shaped by what Sholem Shachnah assumes about Yeremei’s intelligence, as opposed to his own? How do you understand the origins of Ivan Zlodi in Sholem Shachnah’s psychology as a character who appears in Sholem Shachnah’s dream/nightmare and is thus a kind of manifestation of his fears about non-Jews? (Note that Ivan’s nickname, Zlodi, has the same Russian-language root—which means “evil”—as the name of the train station, Zolodievka.”)

Finally, how might Sholem Shachnah’s mocking assumptions that Buttons is most certainly a drunkard and Yeremei is most certainly not too bright—as compared to Sholem Shachnah who credits his yidishe kop (a Jewish head on his shoulders) with his superior intelligence—themselves be a product of a kind of defense mechanism by a member of a persecuted minority who elevates himself in his own mind by demeaning those in the more powerful majority?

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), 113.