Sholem Asch (, ; 1 November 1880 – 10 July 1957), also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. A prolific and widely translated writer, Asch wrote about Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America, producing novels, short stories, and plays that reached international audiences. Asch initially wrote in Hebrew, but, on the advice of the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, he subsequently decided to write only in Yiddish, becoming a significant cultural figure in the Yiddishist movement.
Asch's career was marked by both critical acclaim and controversy. His 1904 work A Shtetl offered an idyllic portrait of traditional Polish-Jewish life. In 1920, a 12-volume set of his collected works was published in honor of his 40th birthday. His 1906 play God of Vengeance, set in a Jewish brothel and featuring a lesbian relationship, sparked fierce debates both within the Jewish community and the greater political landscape. God of Vengeance encountered bans, arrests, and an obscenity trial when it played on Broadway in 1923. Lord Chamberlain banned the London production in 1946. Asch's trilogy Three Cities (1929–31) chronicled Jewish life in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Moscow. Asch was awarded Poland's Polonia Restituta decoration in 1932.
In his later career, Asch wrote another trilogy: The Nazarene (1939), The Apostle (1943), and Mary (1949), about the lives of Jesus, Paul, and the Virgin Mary. While Asch intended these works as a bridge between Jews and Christians and remained Jewish throughout his life, the trilogy generated controversy and many critics within the Jewish literary community viewed the books as promoting Christianity. Time Magazine praised the series, in a review of the final book in the trilogy, published in 1949.
Asch was a founding member of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and was active in relief efforts for Jewish war victims in Europe. In 1953, Asch left the United States, after being questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and amid ongoing controversy over his writing. He stated, "I am returning to England with a broken heart." He then split his time between London, continental Europe, and Israel. He died in London in 1957. His house in Bat Yam, Israel, is now the Sholem Asch Museum.
Asch was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
In 2023, Asch was recognized as a notable Yiddishist figure in the exhibit, Yiddish: A Global Culture, at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. This exhibit was curated by Chief Curator David Mazower, and curators Mindle Cohen and Caraid O'Brien. O'Brien has also translated Asch's plays into English and was credited by The New York Times with contributing to a modern revival of interest in Asch's work.
Asch's work has been translated into English, Hebrew, French, German, Russian and other languages.
In recent years, his hometown of Kutno, Poland has hosted the Sholem Asch Festival to honor him.
Life and work
Early Life and Upbringing Asch was born Szalom Asz in 1880 in Kutno, Congress Poland, to Moyshe Gombiner Asch (Moszek Asz in Polish, b.1825, Gąbin – d.1905, Kutno), a business man, who was both a livestock trader and innkeeper, and Frajda Malka, née Widawska, also known as Malka (born 1850, Łęczyca). He grew up in a Hasidic family.
Moyshe's first wife Rude Shmit died in 1873, leaving him seven children. He remarried, to Frajda Malka.
Sholem was the fourth of the ten children that Moszek (Moyshe) and Frajda Malka had together. Moyshe had 17 children total. Asch's father Moszek spent all week on the road and returned home every Friday in time for the Sabbath. He was known as a very charitable man who would dispense money to the poor.
Asch grew up in Kutno, then a majority Jewish town, in which Jews constituted over 70% of the population in the 19th century. It was a diverse community that included Zionists, Bundists, and Hasidic Jews from various sects, and was known as a center of Torah study. Growing up, Asch thought Jews were the majority in the rest of the world as well.
In Kutno, Jews and gentiles mostly got along, barring some tension. As a child, Sholem had to sneak through a majority gentile area to get to a lake where he loved to swim, where he was once cornered by boys wielding sticks and dogs. These boys demanded he admit to killing "Christ" or they would rip his coat. Asch did not, at the time, know this to be a name for Jesus. He admitted to killing Christ out of fear, but they beat him and tore his coat anyway. Throughout his life, Asch remained fearful of dogs from that incident.
Early Education Asch's parents sent him to the best cheder (religious school), where the wealthy families sent their children. There, he spent most of his childhood studying the Talmud and Torah, and would later study the Haggadah on his own time.
Asch's parents had high hopes that he would become a rabbi, and they separated him from his brothers and sent him to the best tutors with whom he studied just like “the very wealthiest children of the city." Moyshe expected Sholem's observable gifts as a student to translate into a career as a rabbi, while Sholem recalled feeling choked by his religious studies and by his sole language, Yiddish.
Sholem was fluent not only in his native Yiddish but in Russian, and literate in Hebrew.
In his adolescence, he moved on from the cheder to the Beit Midrash (religious House of Study). At age fifteen or sixteen, he began to read non-religious books.
Asch became aware of major social changes in popular Jewish thinking. New ideas and the Enlightenment were asserting themselves in the Jewish world. At his friend's house, Sholem explored these new ideas by secretly reading many secular books, which led him to believe himself too worldly to become a rabbi.
At age 17, his parents found out about his reading what they considered profane literature and sent him to live with relatives in a nearby village, where he became a Hebrew teacher. After a few months there, he received a more liberal education at Włocławek, where he supported himself as a letter writer for the illiterate townspeople. In Włocławek, he became enamored with the work of prominent Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. While there, he also began writing. He attempted to master the short story and wrote in Hebrew. What he wrote there was later revised, translated into Yiddish, and ultimately, launched his career.
Young adulthood
In 1899, he moved to Warsaw where he met I. L. Peretz and other young writers under Peretz's mentorship such as David Pinski, Abraham Reisen, and Hersh Dovid Nomberg. Influenced by the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), Asch initially wrote in Hebrew, but Peretz convinced him to switch to Yiddish. Asch's reputation was established in 1902 with his first book of stories, In a shlekhter tsayt (In a Bad Time). In 1903, he married Mathilde Shapiro/Madzhe Szpiro, the daughter of the Polish-Jewish teacher and poet Menahem Mendel Shapiro.
In 1904, Asch released one of his most well-known works, A shtetl, an idyllic portrait of traditional Polish-Jewish life. In January 1905, he released the first play of his incredibly successful play-writing career, Tsurikgekumen (Coming Back).
Asch wrote the drama Got fun nekome (God of Vengeance) in the winter of 1906 in Cologne, Germany.Schalom Asch, "Rückblick," Jahrbuch (Berlin: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1931), p. 67. It is about a Jewish brothel owner who attempts to become respectable by commissioning a Torah scroll and marrying off his daughter to a yeshiva student. Set in a brothel, the play includes Jewish prostitutes and a lesbian scene. I. L. Peretz famously said of the play after reading it: "Burn it, Asch, burn it!" Instead, Asch went to Berlin to pitch it to director Max Reinhardt and actor Rudolph Schildkraut, who produced it at the Deutsches Theater. God of Vengeance opened on March 19, 1907, and ran for six months, and soon was translated and performed in a dozen European languages.
The play was first brought to New York City by David Kessler in 1907. The audience mostly came for Kessler, and they booed the rest of the cast. The New York production sparked a major press war between local Yiddish papers, led by the Orthodox Jewish Tageplatt and even the secular Forverts.The Strange Story of Sholom Asch, Bernard Lerner. The Sentinel, November 4, 1943. p.7 Orthodox papers referred to God of Vengeance as "filthy," "immoral," and "indecent," while radical papers described it as "moral," "artistic," and "beautiful". Some of the more provocative scenes in the production were changed, but it wasn't enough for the Orthodox papers. Even Yiddish intellectuals and the play's supporters had problems with the play's inauthentic portrayal of Jewish tradition, especially Yankl's use of the Torah, which they said Asch seemed to be using mostly for cheap effects; they also expressed concern over how it might stigmatize Jewish people who already faced much anti-Semitism. The association with Jews and sex work was a popular stereotype at the time. Other intellectuals criticized the writing itself, claiming that the second act was beautifully written but the first and third acts failed to support it.
God of Vengeance was published in English-language translation in 1918, translated by Isaac Goldberg.Sholom Ash, The God of Vengeance, trans. Isaac Goldberg (Boston: Stratford, 1918) In 1922, it was staged in New York City at the Provincetown Theatre in Greenwich Village, and moved to the Apollo Theatre on Broadway on February 19, 1923, with a cast that included the acclaimed Jewish immigrant actor Rudolph Schildkraut. Its run was cut short on March 6, when the entire cast, producer Harry Weinberger, and one of the owners of the theater were indicted for violating the state's Penal Code, and later convicted on charges of obscenity."Broadway Cast of ‘God Of Vengeance’ Arrested on Obscenity Charges". English translation, by Chana Pollack, of the article that appeared in the Yiddish Forward (Forverts) on March 7, 1923. Forward. January 14, 2017. forward.com. Retrieved 2017-04-09. Weinberger, who was also a prominent attorney, represented the group at the trial. The chief witness against the play was Rabbi Joseph Silberman, who declared in an interview with Forverts: "This play libels the Jewish religion. Even the greatest anti-Semite could not have written such a thing". After a protracted battle, the conviction was successfully appealed. In Europe, the play was popular enough to be translated into German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Italian, Czech, Romanian and Norwegian.
Indecent is a 2015 play written by Paula Vogel that recounts the controversy of God of Vengeance. It opened on Broadway at the Cort Theater in April 2017, directed by Rebecca Taichman.
Asch attended the Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference of 1908, which declared Yiddish to be "a national language of the Jewish people." He traveled to Palestine in 1908 and the United States in 1910, a place about which he felt deeply ambivalent.
Later adult career
In the pursuit of a safe haven from the violence in Europe, he, Mathilde and their four children moved to the United States in 1914, moving around New York City for a while before settling in Staten Island. In New York, he began to write for Forverts, the mass-circulation Yiddish daily that had also covered his plays, a job provided both income and an intellectual circle.