The Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books Teacher Resources

Who is the Sholem Aleichem who shows up as a protagonist in “On Account of a Hat”?

“On Account of a Hat” opens with a frame story, narrated by Sholem Aleichem, who claims to have heard a story about one Sholem Shachnah—nicknamed Rattlebrain [drey zikh in Yiddish]—from a merchant from Rattlebrain’s hometown, Kasrilevka, who himself remains nameless. But why does the unnamed merchant from Kasrilevka tell the story about his hapless townsman Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain to, of all people, Sholem Aleichem?

Sholem Aleichem—a pen name of the writer Sholem Rabinovitch—was widely known among a vast Yiddish-language readership across the Pale of Settlement, as well as in America and elsewhere where readers of Yiddish began to migrate from the Russian Empire in the 1880s. In particular, in a series of stories set on railroads, the author Sholem Rabinovitch who published under the pen name Sholem Aleichem invented the literary persona of Sholem Aleichem—and that Sholem Aleichem was a traveler, along with simple Jews, in the same cheap third-class seats of overcrowded trains crisscrossing the Pale of Settlement, conversing with the regular folk about their thoughts and troubles, and relaying their stories to the public.

Suggested Activity: Listen to the song “Train Across Ukraine,” by the New York-based Klezmer punk band Golem. The lyrics of the song include a first-person narration which is attributed to Sholem Aleichem, popularizing the figure of the writer-traveler to audiences in the twenty-first century. What are Sholem Aleichem’s motivations—as they are relayed in this song—for his way of traveling? What kinds of things does Sholem Aleichem, as imagined in this song, pay attention to as he travels across Ukraine? “On Account of a Hat” is one of many stories in which the writer Sholem Aleichem conveyed the tales of railroad passengers; if you’re feeling inspired by Golem’s upbeat tune, consider reading more of Sholem Aleichem’s railroad stories.

If you take another look at the first activity in this resource kit—the “map” exercise—you’ll notice that what is common to all the layers of the narrative in “On Account of a Hat” is their timing. Always, in each layer, it is the eve of Passover: Sholem Aleichem’s story in the Yiddish original is subtitled “a mayse lekoved peysekh” (“a tale on the occasion of Passover”) and is one of numerous stories that Sholem Aleichem wrote for specific Jewish holidays; the merchant from Kasrilevka tells Sholem Aleichem that “[i]t’s a pity [that he is] in such a hurry on account of the Passover”; Sholem Shachnah Rattlebrain tries to get home in time for Passover, and the Kasrilevka merchant relays this story to Sholem Aleichem on the eve of Passover as well; Sholem Shachnah’s nightmare of not being able to get home, which he dreams up while he is asleep at the train station on Zlodievka, is also set on Passover eve.

Passover in “On Account of a Hat” is not merely a single occasion or a holiday, but a way of thinking about time. “On Account of a Hat” stages a kind of dramatic clash between two entirely different ways of understanding how time works.

On the one hand, there is “Jewish time”—the time marked by the Jewish holidays that occur at the same time of the year every year, at regular intervals as specified by religious sources such as the Hebrew Bible. In “On Account of a Hat,” events unfold on the eve of Passover, one of the most important holidays in the Jewish year. The Jewish year itself unfolds according to a lunar calendar, in which the changing of months is tethered to the cycles of the moon and the changing of the seasons and agricultural cycles in nature: Passover always occurs in the spring, a time of renewal. The multiple narratives in “On Account of a Hat” all occur at what the Yiddish language may colloquially refer to as peysekh-tsaytns—Passover time.

On the other hand, “On Account of a Hat” also runs according to what is customarily known as “railroad time” or “railway time.” First introduced in England in November of 1840, railway time was the standardized time necessary to operate an expanding network of trains; prior to the construction of railroads and the standardization of time, different towns would observe less formal local conventions of time—marked, for example, by a sundial. As railroad networks began to expand, time became standardized so that passengers in different towns could know when the trains were going to arrive and depart (and so that trains didn’t crash into each other while en route).

Suggested Activity:

• First, scan the story and make a list of all references to Passover and particularly of references to Passover in terms of time, as an event that is imminently around the corner. Look at the illustration of the Jewish calendar. It is a circle and Passover, no matter how much time a person might need to get home, will arrive when it must no matter what, as the yearly cycle rotates the way it always has and always will—the start of Passover, in other words, cannot be delayed. Put yourself in Sholem Shachnah’s shoes—or, for that matter, in the shoes of the Kasrilevka merchant or Sholem Aleichem: what kinds of feelings would you experience if you desperately wanted to get home in time for Passover, which is about to begin, so you can spend the holiday with your family?
• Second, scan the story and make a list of references to the train, especially its schedule and timing. How does the merchant from Kasrilevka think about the extension of the rail line from the main railroad to his small hometown that had, before the arrival of the train, been in the middle of nowhere? What kind of schedule is the Kasrilevka train supposed to run on—and how is the planned schedule different from the train’s actual schedule in terms of the experience of passengers? Consider the Russian imperial train schedule from 1908. Note how the passengers have to read this timetable linearly (from top to bottom, in the case of this particular train schedule), noting the progress of the train according to specified intervals of time as it moves forward from one station to another.
• Now, put yourself in Sholem Shachnah’s shoes again: what do you think Sholem Shachnah experiences as he is caught between the two ways of understanding time—the cyclical calendar of Jewish holidays and the linear calendar of the train? As Sholem Shachnah tries to get home for Passover—an imperative based on the cyclical calendar of traditional Jewish observance—the train moves on an entirely different schedule that is in no way tethered to Passover and Jewish time. How might we think about the stakes involved in making this journey—especially if trains on Sholem Shachnah’s route are known to be delayed?

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?

The humorous mishap at the center of the story couldn’t, at first glance, be more straightforward: by accident, Sholem Shachnah picks up a hat that belongs to Buttons—supposedly, an official of some sort—and is immediately transformed in the eyes of those around him from a hapless Jewish traveler into a person who is somehow believed to occupy a position of some esteem in the social hierarchy. But it’s worthwhile to think about the eponymous hat—or, rather, the hats—in more detail.

Suggested Activity: First, re-read the story and note all the sentences and passages that allude to hats. There is, of course, the hat that belongs to Buttons, but it functions very differently on the head of the official as compared to on the head of Sholem Shachnah. However, that’s not the only hat in the story: there is also the hat that Sholem Shachnah wears initially—which readers can fairly assume to be the traditional headcovering worn by observant Jewish men. What do you make of the switcheroo itself—the exchange of one kind of head covering for another, especially given the fact that Sholem Shachnah loses his own hat twice, both while waiting at the train station in Zolodievka and during the ride home in his dream?

Second, how do you understand what happens to Sholem Shachnah when—after being treated as though he were a Russian official of some sort and not a simple Jew because of the hat on his head—he fails to recognize himself in the mirror? Think beyond the joke here: what can we say about Sholem Shachnah and his ability to travel through the world dominated by non-Jews that he literally stops recognizing himself the minute he begins to resemble someone who dresses differently from him? Didn’t Sholem Shachnah feel entitled to be treated equally to Buttons? Why, then, does he lose his sense of self once his wish is granted?