Wealth & Money Quote by Sholom Aleichem

Pride and hunger are both forms of swelling, but only one is allowed to pass for dignity. Sholom Aleichem compresses an entire social order into a grotesque bodily joke: the rich literally expand with self-regard while the poor bloat from deprivation. It lands because it refuses the sentimental split between “spiritual” suffering and “material” hardship. He yokes them together with the same verb, as if to say the rich man’s ego and the poor man’s starvation are not separate stories; they’re parallel symptoms of the same system.

The intent is sharp, not abstract. Aleichem wrote out of the late-tsarist Jewish world where poverty wasn’t a metaphor and class hierarchy was enforced by law, custom, and periodic violence. In that environment, “pride” isn’t just an emotion; it’s a social technology, the rich performing entitlement so consistently it becomes their physique. The poor, meanwhile, carry inequality in their bodies. Hunger “swelling” hints at edema and malnutrition, the cruel medical irony that starvation can make you look full.

The subtext is aimed at moral narratives that sanctify wealth and blame poverty. If the rich swell with pride, their abundance doesn’t make them admirable; it makes them inflated. If the poor swell from hunger, their condition is not lack of discipline but the visible consequence of being squeezed. Aleichem’s wit does what his fiction often does: it smuggles anger in through comedy, letting a laugh curdle into recognition.