You saying how America was a lend of business? Det's how it's suppose to be. - Sholem Aleichem in New York

Sholem Aleichem left Russia in 1905, after witnessing a pogrom from the second story of a hotel. From then on, until his death in 1916, he was a wanderer, to New York and back to Europe, writing and performing his monologues. He and his family ended up in New York City; Sholem Aleichem is buried in Queens.

His relationship with the new world was complicated. New York (and Argentina, and Canada) were refuges for persecuted Jews, and presented great economic opportunities. But in Sholem Aleichem's New York stories, the materialism seems to overpower Jewish culture. He had always satirized greed, but his New York monologues are angrier.

The beginning of "A Business with a Greenhorn: How Mr. Tummler, a Business Broker, 'Loined' a Greenhorn Who Got Merry Wid a Goil for Business. Retold Here in His Own Words":

"You saying how America was a lend of business? Never mine! Det's how it's suppose to be. But a fella getting merry wid a goil for business? Det, you'll poddon me, is mean end doity. Now, I ain't preaching no morality here, but I am telling you it's a fect; when nine-end-ninety procent of grinnhorns in dis country is getting merry for business, it is making me med! End if I am meeting op wid such a kind of grinnhorn, belive me he don't get off dry. You live it to me!"

Then Mr. Tummler tells us, in a few pages, and one burst of words, how he sells a young couple a laundry business, drives them out to re-purchase it at a discount, and then sells it to them again, in the process consuming their savings and destroying their marriage. Perfectly horrible.

Why would he tell this to Sholem Aleichem, or whoever the listener is? Because, like he says above, he is entirely justified. "Because it ain't enough he got his hends on soch a poifect peach to make whoopee wid plus make hay wid her tousend dollar in kesh, but he wants she should woik so he can sit rond wid his pels all day playing pinochle, end son on - because, mister, I know my pipple!"

It's a sort of revenge on the baser instincts of humanity by the basest of them all. In this story, New York is dangerous and brutal, and it is other Jews that are the danger.

The dialect of these passages is an attempt by the translator to render the Yinglish of the original. There's another reason for Sholem Aleichem's anger. America may save Yiddish in some ways (later, terribly, more than anyone could have guessed), but it might also destroy the language.

I'm quoting from Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz (2004), ed. Ken Frieden, tr. Ted Gorelick. Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things has the same story as well as a funnier, somewhat less brutal New York monologue, "Mister Grinn Gotta Job. As Told by Himself and Here Set Down in His Own Words ."