“A greisse shishke has arrived”: Jewish Humor as a Key to Understanding Social Change in A. Mryi’s Novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes”

The paper is dedicated to the representations of Jewish humor as a space of developing an understanding of the social experiments of the social change of the 1920s as depicted in a satirical novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes” written by a Belarusian writer A. Mryi in 1929. The novel’s main character, an ambitious civil servant, simultaneously naïve and unscrupulous, struggles to grasp the ever elusive spirit of the times and discerns its clearest shile also the most painful manifestations in the humor expressed by his Jewish neighbors as a reaction to his endeavors. The novel shows how the Jewish humor is intuitively understood by Jews and Slavs alike, even to those who are being laughed at and who are otherwise immune to any kind of critique directed at them. In this regard, the Jewish humor appears simultaneously a mode of mutual understanding between the Jewish and Slavic parts of the population and shared understanding of the social transformation, because it unmasks the often invalid claims of novelty in the agents of the local implementations of the social experiments of the 1920s. At the same time, this understanding gives limited yet quite reliable ways of checking the consequences of these experiments and recreating, even beyond the façade of the radical social transformations, of the former unity of collective and individual identity.