Hope and Despair: Jewish Operetta and Greek Tragedy

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If a recurrent theme in Jewish history is alienation and resultant suffering, Operetta, as an expression of Jewish culture, offers a curious paradox: a people, the Jews, who have endured centuries of persecution—the horrors of the Holocaust, the brutal Russian pogroms—producing melodies that soar with unbridled optimism. Meanwhile, the ancient Greek choruses, progenitors of democracy and philosophy, lament fatalism and the inexorable descent into despair.

Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, set in a Russian shtetl, tells of a young woman who inherits a fortune and returns home seeking love and community. The characters burst into song not to escape reality, but to affirm life amidst acute hardship and adversity.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman muses, “Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us.” Yet, he dances. The fiddler plays on, a metaphor for balance in precarious times.

In stark contrast, Greek tragedy descends into the abyss of human suffering. Sophocles’ Oedipus, in his quest to overleap his destiny, inadvertently embraces it. His realization—that he has fulfilled a dreadful prophecy—captures the essence of tragic despair. Or consider Medea’s anguish, her vengeance a manifestation of existential betrayal: the gods remain distant, indifferent.

Russian polymath Pavel Florensky, in The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, illuminates this Greek despondency:

“The Greeks looked upon death with hopeless sorrow. And pitilessly clear for them was the thought of the illusoriness of existence after death. The profound symbol of this consciousness was Odysseus’ meeting the shadow of his mother in Hades: I longed to clasp my mother’s shade within my arms. Three times—my heart kept urging me—I tried; and three times she escaped my hands, much like a shadow or a dream. The pain grew sharp and sharper in my heart.”

For Florensky, Odysseus’ futile attempts to embrace his mother’s ghost epitomize the Greek conception of the bleak emptiness of the afterlife: The dead are but echoes, fading with time.

He continues:

“Despite constant remembrance, there is no constant memory and thus no reality after death for the dead. Life after death is nothing more than a simulacrum of earthly life that has been washed out and eroded by Time.”

For the Greeks, memory erodes; existence slips into oblivion.

Why, then, does Jewish operetta—emerging from a history marred by suffering—radiate optimism? The Yiddish theatre birthed laughter and tears intertwined. The melodies didn’t ignore pain; they transcended it.

Florensky muses on memory:

“But what is memory? Even its psychological definition, i.e., ‘the innate capacity for representations,’ indicates, despite its abstractness, the essential connection of memory with thinking processes in general.”

The Jewish concept of Zachor—to remember—is sacrosanct. Feasts like Pesach don’t merely commemorate; they re-live. Stories are passed down, rituals observed, ensuring that the past remains ever-present. Where the Greeks saw the afterlife as a fading shadow, Jewish tradition views memory as a span across time, uniting the generations in an unbroken chain.