Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

Genres: Classics; Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

For the 150th anniversary of the birth of the "Jewish Mark Twain,"a new translation of his most famous works

Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son are the most celebrated characters in all of Jewish fiction. Tevye is the lovable, Bible-quoting father of seven daughters, a modern Job whose wisdom, humor, and resilience inspired the lead character in Fiddler on the Roof. And Motl is the spirited and mischievous nine-year-old boy who accompanies his family on a journey from their Russian shtetl to New York, and whose comical, poignant, and clear-eyed observations capture with remarkable insight the struggles and hopes and triumphs of Jewish immigrants to America at the turn of the twentieth century.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Release date: January 27, 2009

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 416

Sample

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

 

TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN

KOTONTI—I AM UNWORTHY

THE GREAT WINDFALL

THE ROOF FALLS IN

TODAY’S CHILDREN

HODL

CHAVA

SHPRINTZE

TEVYE IS GOING TO ERETZ YISROEL

“GET THEE GONE”

VACHALAKLOKOS

 

MOTL THE CANTOR’S SONWritings of an Orphan Boy

PART ONE - Home in Kasrilevka

PART TWO - In America

 

Glossary

TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN AND MOTL THE CANTOR’S SON

SHOLEM ALEICHEM is the pen name of Sholem Rabinovitch (1859-1916), the most beloved writer in Yiddish literature and the creator of the famous Tevye character in the musical Fiddler on the Roof. His hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, poems, and feuilletons are still read, studied, produced, and translated all over the world.

Born in a small town in Ukraine, he began writing in Hebrew at an early age and first supported himself as a teacher of Russian. He also worked as a government rabbi, a clerk, and a businessman-speculator. He married the daughter of a wealthy landowner, upon whose death he became the administrator of her family’s large estate in Kiev. He turned to writing Yiddish fiction in 1883 and encouraged a number of Jewish writers, who were writing in Hebrew, to write in Yiddish as well, offering to publish their work as an incentive.

After the 1905 pogrom in Kiev, Sholem Aleichem and his large family left Russia, seeking refuge in Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, and America. He returned to Europe a year later, making personal appearances to great acclaim, but in 1914, at the start of World War I, he settled in New York, where his wit and writings caused some to call him the “Jewish Mark Twain.” He died two years later after a long illness, writing until his last day. His funeral procession was witnessed by one hundred thousand mourners.

ALIZA SHEVRIN is the foremost translator of Sholem Aleichem, having translated eight other volumes of his fiction as well as novels and stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer and I. L. Peretz. The daughter of a rabbi, she grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Brooklyn and attended Farband Yiddish schools until the age of fifteen. She holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Cornell University and a master’s degree in social work from the University of Kansas. The recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to preserve Yiddish works by rendering them into English, she has also been a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller-Bellagio Study Center in Italy, where she translated Sholem Aleichem’s novel In the Storm. She lives with her husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

DAN MIRON is William Kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of A Traveler Disguised.

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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2009

 

 

Translation copyright © Aliza Shevrin, 2009 Introduction copyright © Dan Miron, 2009

All rights reserved

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916. [Tevye der milkhiker. English]

Tevye the dairyman : and Motl the cantor’s son / Sholem Aleichem; translated by Aliza Shevrin; introduction by Dan Miron. p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

eISBN : 978-1-101-02214-6

1. Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916—Translations into English. I. Shevrin, Aliza. II. Miron, Dan. III. Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916. Motel Peysi dem hazens. English. IV. Title. V. Title: Motl, the cantor’s son. PJ5129.R2T’.133—dc22 2008028578

 

 

 

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For my family, with love:
Howie
our four children and their spouses
our seven grandchildren

Introduction

SHOLEM ALEICHEM

Sholem Rabinovitch (1859-1916), born in the Ukrainian regional center of Peryeslav but raised throughout his childhood in the tiny village of Voronkov (where he was steeped in the ambience of the eastern European Jewish hamlet, the shtetl), first received a traditional Jewish cheder (primary school) education. Then, the family having moved back to Peryeslav, he attended a Russian high school—his father’s partial exposure to modernity (as a follower of the Hebrew Enlightenment) made this possible. Thus he amassed Jewish booklore, was fully proficient as a Hebraist, and was inspired by modern Russian literature and liberal ideals. A scion of the old-style Jewish middle class (the family’s business was the cutting and shipping of timber)—which, under the circumstances of the relatively advanced capitalism in Russia of the late nineteenth century, came down in the world—he was motivated since childhood by two dreams: to become fabulously rich and to become a famous Jewish writer who would elevate Jewish literature to the level of its Russian counterpart. The former dream sent him to the stock exchanges of Kiev and Odessa, where he squandered the considerable wealth of his in-laws, the Loyev family. (That fiasco engendered his first literary masterpiece, an epistolary story based on the correspondence of the misguided speculator and broker Menachem-Mendl and his wife Sheyne-Sheynd, which he started in 1892.) The second dream he managed, to a considerable extent, to realize.

Initially Rabinovitch intended to become either a Russian or a Hebrew writer. (He would try both options with scant success.) But in 1883 he “bumped,” as if by accident, into Yiddish, the spoken language of eastern European Jews, and soon became obsessed with the meshugas, the dizzying idiomatic energy of that language as a writing tool. No one else was to tap the immense resources of Yiddish as he did, while endowing his entire corpus, no matter how varying and uneven the artistic level of its many hundreds of units (the twenty-eight volumes of his official collected edition barely cover half of his output), with unparalleled linguistic élan and unflagging rhythmic drive.

In the 1880s the use of Yiddish did not bestow upon a writer literary status, so the young author, driven by high ambitions, decided to gentrify and elevate it forthwith as the language of a respectable European literature. He proceeded to publish “thick” and very selective literary almanacs in the contemporary Russian format; launched a critical campaign against Yiddish Schund (trash) and for realism in Yiddish writing; and produced a series of realist novels that he dubbed “Jewish novels,” which tried to synthesize romance (considered an essential ingredient of the novel genre) and realities of the Jewish traditional milieu (where romance was not allowed to play an important role). In the process he managed to establish intimate contact with the then rapidly growing Yiddish reading public through the “funny” persona Sholem Aleichem (an absurd appellation meaning “how d’you do”). Comic, folksy personae were rife in Yiddish writing of the time, mediating between the semitraditional, barely educated reading public and modernist, “enlightened” authors. In this respect and in others Sholem Rabinovitch learned much from the practices of his mentor Sh. Y. Abramovitch and his persona Mendele the Book Peddler. However, Sholem Aleichem, crafted as a whimsical, clever, high-spirited, but quite unruly and unpredictable vagabond, caught the imagination of the readers as did no other persona. People fell in love with his jocular causerie and regarded him as a welcome guest. The success of the persona was such that Rabinovitch could not afford to part with it, and its features merged with the core of his literary-performative identity.

This was one reason that novel writing, in spite of the author’s high aspirations, never became his highest level of achievement. As a chatty, omniscient narrator, Sholem Aleichem rarely allowed for a sophisticated novelistic synthesis. Always aware of the limitations of the reading public, he simplified and overexplained his characters and their interactions and insisted on being entertaining even where the narrative hardly justified his intervention. His stories were far more subtle; in them, the characters were allowed to speak for themselves, and Sholem Aleichem was reduced to the role of a silent but omnipresent interlocutor, one whom the characters wished to impress, cajole, or even attack. Informed by this formula, the author created his chief masterpieces, Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman, started in 1894) foremost among them. Here and in a long series of brilliant monologues written between 1900 and 1910, Sholem Aleichem, having “regressed” from the novelistic synthesis to its “primitive” rudiments (monologue, letter), achieved the shimmering brilliance of a world-class master.

Following the failed revolution of 1905 and the subsequent pogroms, he decided to leave forever his Ukrainian homeland. He tried and failed to establish himself as a playwright in New York, then began a life of wandering in western and central Europe. In summer 1908 he collapsed with an attack of open pulmonary tuberculosis, which for some years bound him to sanatoria and southern winter resorts. The pace of his literary production, however, did not slacken. Moreover, his writing gained in depth and scope from an exposure to modernistic trends, particularly those of contemporary Russian “Silver Age” literature. Sholem Aleichem reassessed his views of men, women, and children and felt free to expose undercurrents of egotism, frustrated sexuality, and nihilism in his characters’ behavior. He also reassessed his earlier liberal and Zionist ideals and concluded that Jewish existence depended on making a shift from an idealistic eastern European culture to the materialism and hedonism he detected in the Jewish immigrant community in the United States. Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl the Cantor’s Son) was the masterpiece he produced during this phase of his development.

The outbreak of World War I caught him in Berlin as the subject of a hostile country; he thereupon managed, with great difficulties, to reach New York, where he attempted to resume his writing career. His health, however, was failing, and the bitter news that his son had succumbed to tuberculosis in Europe overwhelmed him. He died in May 1916 in New York, the most popular Yiddish writer ever. A large part of the eastern European Jewish community of the city came into the streets in a state of mourning comparable to that which would follow the death of Rudolph Valentino, the film star. Sholem Aleichem bequeathed to the Jewish world not only his literary works but also a universal recognition that the new American Jewish community was a resourceful sociopolitical entity with its own culture and a distinct role to play both in American affairs and in those of world Jewry.

WHO WOULD WANT TO LISTEN TO TEVYE?

I will speak, that I may find relief; I will open my lips and answer.

—JOB 32:20

 

 

For over a century Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman) has been universally acknowledged as Sholem Aleichem’s masterpiece. Endowed with a deep humanity, a delicate equilibrium between tragedy and comedy, and a vivacious comic narration, Tevye soars above the author’s other achievements, brilliant as they are. Its vitality is such that it has survived a score of translations of uneven quality and questionable fidelity; various stage adaptations (including one prepared by the author himself), which for ideological or commercial considerations wrenched the story’s heart out of its ribcage, crudely transmuting and obfuscating its meaning; and even a successful stage version as one of Broadway’s schmaltziest musicals, Fiddler on the Roof, which superimposed upon the popular imagination a Tevye figure—a diluted, semi-Judaized Zorba—that tenuously, if not accidentally, resembles Sholem Aleichem’s original creation no more than a beautified postcard resembles the reality of a foreign city. To withstand all this treatment, a work of art has to possess a formidable inner strength. Our task here is to point to the sources of that strength.

In the last century scholars and critics dwelled mainly on Tevye’s social and cultural implications or on the character of Tevye and his symbolic or archetypal significance. Both topics are, of course, of considerable importance, but neither yields a full understanding of the work’s unique qualities.

Its social and cultural significance is far-reaching. A historical panorama, the unfolding of which would normally necessitate the writing of a cycle of voluminous novels, is here squeezed into eight short novellas. The affairs of a provincial dairyman and the fortunes of his daughters become prisms that refract much of what is essential in the history of the Jews in the czarist empire during the last two turbulent decades of its existence. Because the eight tales were written intermittently, in each one the author was in a position to look at a different aspect of progressively endangered Jews living amid a hostile non-Jewish population and under a hostile autocratic regime. Starting with the rustic mock-idyll of Tevye’s “miraculous” deliverance from penury, the tales gradually shed light on wider historical arenas, pointing to realities that loom far beyond the protagonist’s provincial circumference: the revolutionary mood that swept the czarist empire in the first years of the twentieth century; the pogroms triggered by the failed 1905 revolution; the egotistic and hedonistic culture that emerged in the wake of the stillborn revolution, with its emphases on unbridled sexual gratification and the liberation of women from traditional restrictions on the one hand, and its epidemic of suicides on the other; the rise of a new Jewish plutocracy during the Russo-Japanese War; and finally the waves of vicious anti-Semitism that engulfed the Jewish population in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, finding expression in the famous Beiliss blood-libel trial (1911-13) and the expulsion of Jews from the countryside. Thus the cycle, from its quasi-pastoral beginning to the pandemonium of its ending (where Tevye, once a rooted villager, roams as a homeless refugee by foot, cart, and train throughout Ukraine), is chock-full of historical vistas and sociocultural insights. But the greatness of Tevye does not inhere in this historical panorama. Sholem Aleichem’s narrative art, while making full use of the given milieu, transcends its sheer mimetic presentation. It is not as a historical pseudo-novel that Tevye carries this art to the ultimate realization of its aesthetic potential.

Nor does this realization occur through a presentation of Tevye as an archetypal hero, a folksy philosopher symbolizing Jewish fortitude and tenacity, able to hold on to life due to a well-balanced personality and an unbreakable bitokhn (confidence) in a divine providence. Tevye, as reflected in his monologues (all his tales are written in the form of dramatic monologues recited by himself for the benefit of the literary persona Sholem Aleichem, the silent but solidly present interlocutor), has nothing exemplary about him. In all aspects of his personality but one—his extraordinary talent as a raconteur—he is a deeply conventional, limited, and flawed person of his time and class. His vast respect for money and social status amply illustrates his conventionality, as does his disrespect for women and his nagging need to assert his male superiority. (“Tevye is not a woman” and “a woman remains no more than a woman” are his mantras, and he parades, in the most inappropriate situations, his Jewish “erudition”—book learning being in traditional Jewish society the exclusive prerogative of males.) Hardworking as he is, Tevye lacks faith in his ability to become affluent, leave the village, and join the traditional shtetl society, where he would be respected as a learned and generous philanthropist. Were he to achieve such goals at all, it should have been through the efforts of others; his beautiful daughters, through lucrative matches, were in a position to free their father from hard work, while a millionaire son-in-law might trust him with a well-paid job. But not for the life of him could Tevye understand how these successful others had achieved the power and riches he coveted. To him, self-improvement and will are divorced. Enterprise, acumen, courage, and practical cleverness never count as means of self-elevation, for which only sheer luck or the unfathomable will of God is responsible.

From the very beginning of the first tale, Tevye sticks to the formula: man cannot improve his lot by his own volition or seykhel (cleverness). For all his piety and purported intimacy with God, his religious bitokhn, when examined closely, rarely amounts to more than fatalism or rather a passive acquiescence to “things as they are”; for if things are the way they are, it must be because God wanted them so. Tevye more than once compares his troubles with those of biblical Job, but the comparison is misleading; the Book of Job makes the point that one must question God’s ways and rebel against divine injustice if one is to retain active faith in Him. Tevye’s self-serving need to view himself as a latter-day Job (because he wishes to see himself, like the great biblical sufferer, not at all responsible for the disasters that befall him) is rooted in nothing like Job’s moral courage, let alone readiness for a confrontational (and therefore vital) I-Thou dialogue with God such as the Bible ascribes to such moral paragons as Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Job. Indeed, Tevye’s position amounts to the very opposite of the courage and risk taking that Abraham displayed as he challenged God: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).

The only domain where Tevye can be seen as “great” is that of narrative performance. What he inadvertently tells about himself as a husband and a father is far from appealing or morally acceptable. But the telling itself is nothing less than seductive, and the best proof is the critics’ (and readers’) love for Tevye, which blinds them to his many shortcomings. Tevye’s “greatness” belongs to the realm of the aesthetic rather than the moral or intellectual. The artistic brilliance of his tales emanates neither from his moral presence nor from the social background they unfold but rather from the narrative and rhetorical formula that is repeated from one tale to another, in which a loquacious Tevye endlessly talks to his ubiquitous interlocutor, Sholem Aleichem. Tevye der milkhiker, like many other creations of Sholem Aleichem’s, is above all a story of talking and listening and their complementary dynamics, of a nagging need for verbal self-exposure and the will to absorb what is told. Such verbal interaction rather than the tales’ content defines and prescribes the essence of Tevye’s reality, a rhetorical rather than a mimetic one. Whatever mimetic reality Tevye’s narrative conveys is, of course, interesting—indeed, it is riveting—but it is not half as real or fascinating as the talking itself, its meandering progression and changing rhythms.

Tevye knows how to make the best of a good story and takes great pleasure in doing so. No matter how tragic or even personally humiliating his stories may be, we can count on him to tell them as effectively as he possibly can. His impotence in the face of life’s vicissitudes never contaminates its dexterous and clever narrative articulation. On the contrary, the impotence is counterbalanced, and to a certain extent overcome, by plenipotentiary narration. As good raconteurs often do, Tevye tells the truth but not necessarily the whole or the exact truth, for no genuine storyteller would allow the facts to undermine the dramatic effect of his story. If one succumbs to the charm and warmth of the narration or accepts its confessional tonality at face value, the little discrepancies strewn all over the stories will help in maintaining one’s vigilance. Tevye skillfully manipulates the rhetoric of sincerity, but he is not always in full control of it, and when he momentarily slips, we have our chance to glimpse through the cracks in his mask.

Some discrepancies can be attributed to the fact that the tales were composed at different times and places.1 Others, by far more significant, cannot be explained away. For example: in “Shprintze,” the sixth and most tragic of the tales, Tevye tells of his daughter’s suicide by drowning after being seduced by a rich city boy (to whom she had been introduced by Tevye himself). Starting the woeful tale by describing how the strapping young man and his friends are invited by Tevye to his cottage, Tevye waxes lyrical about the beauty of the village in springtime, the magnificent canopy of the blue sky, and the pleasures of living in the lap of bountiful nature. (Even the cows, he says, smile as they chew their cuds in the meadow.) Yet he has told Sholem Aleichem often enough how distasteful is his life in the countryside and how fervently he wishes to move to a proper Jewish shtetl. “No,” he concludes, refuting an imaginary objection, “say what you will, I wouldn’t trade it for the best job in the town, I would not for the world swap places with you.”2 This, of course, does not hinder him from reverting a few pages later to his original pro-urban position. Once he starts fantasizing about his daughter marrying her affluent lover boy, he sees himself again in town, an important, well-to-do member of the community. What explains this blatant discrepancy? The inherent needs of the story itself. Tevye is about to tell a very painful tale, which he feels he has to organize aesthetically and morally around the binary oppositions of nature/civilization, innocence/moral irresponsibility, naïveté/cunning, village/city if it is to have its full impact. His daughter (and by inference himself as well) represents the virtues of nature, innocence, naïveté, and the village, whereas the seducing young man’s rich relatives stand for the corrupt civilization of city, money, and moral irresponsibility: Tevye and his daughter are the blameless rustic victims of heartless city predators. Ever the expert storyteller, Tevye knows that such a melodrama also minimizes, perhaps even obliterates, his own responsibility for orchestrating the disastrous meeting of the youngsters. (The boy’s uncle justifiably asks him what, as a reasonable man, he could have thought when he had brought the two together.)

Clearly we are permitted to characterize Tevye as an unreliable narrator. He manipulates the truth because he needs to charm his listener and buy his sympathy as a way to avert, or at least soften, the harsh judgment that his listener would otherwise pass on him. Tevye knows he has much to account for. He has never taken good care of his family, and he has let trouble run its full course without doing anything to stop it. More often than not he brings trouble on himself, exhibiting a strange pattern of self-defeating, passive-aggressive behavior, the origins of which he cannot fully gauge. In his second tale Tevye loses his meager savings by bringing home a distant relative, the irresponsible and unrealistic stock-exchange speculator Menachem-Mendl (the protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s other chef d’oeuvres), and allows himself to be tempted by the charlatan’s wild promises of riches. How could he have made such a fool of himself, Tevye wonders, ascribing his silly behavior, as always, to God’s will: “If God wants to punish a person, he deprives him of his good sense.” This pattern reemerges in some of the other tales, and Tevye, unable to control it, keeps wondering, “What was at the root of this? Perhaps my innate gullibility, which makes me trust everybody?—But what am I to do, I ask you, if, in spite of everything, such is my nature?” Of course this behavior, which becomes progressively more self-destructive, is caused by more than sheer gullibility. Tevye never faces the fact that each of his mistakes corresponds to a need or desire of his: his craving for riches, the need for self-importance, his yearning for young men who either intellectually or even physically and erotically attract him, allowing him to fantasize about playing the role of father figure to them and unconsciously or semiconsciously transmitting to his daughters, who are very much attuned to their father’s secret wishes, his interest in these men, and when the daughters establish a connection with them, he savors their closeness, which he craves for himself. Tevye cannot know much about the workings of these underground motivations, but he still feels that somehow, by following his desires and fantasies, he has let down those who are closest and dearest to him.

By the same token, Tevye seems aware of the fact that he systematically evades people, particularly family members, when they urgently need his attention or help. Shprintze, realizing that she is about to bring shame on the heads of her parents, starts her downward slide toward lethal depression that will end in her self-destruction. By refusing to talk to her, Tevye reinforces her sense that her out-of-wedlock pregnancy is unacceptable. More commonly he pushes people away by talking to them in a manner that is both irrelevant and offensive. Much has been written about Tevye’s wit, his playful game of quoting and mistranslating the sacred texts.3 What has rarely been noticed, however, is how much of a defense mechanism his clever pseudo-scholarly discourse is, or how much aggression it releases. On the one hand, Tevye intentionally talks above the head of a certain kind of interlocutor (particularly the kind who has a social or financial advantage over him) in order to humiliate him. On the other hand, he is quick to hide behind his quotations and references as soon as a serious issue is to be discussed or a difficult decision made. When his wife, Golde, reminds him that they urgently need to marry off their older daughters, he responds by referring her to a series of midrashim (exegetical, narrative, and homiletic glosses appended to the sacred texts), whereupon Golde, only too familiar with his subterfuges, cuts him short, maintaining that “grown daughters are a good enough midrash in their own right.” After his daughter Chava’s elopement with her Gentile lover (which Tevye could have seen coming and might have prevented), he pounces on poor Golde: how could she, a mother, not have seen what was going on under her nose! And why did she not alert him in time? Once again, Golde’s answer is cutting: how and why would she tell him anything? “When one tells you something, you immediately respond with a biblical quotation. You buzz my head off with quotations and think you have done your share!” For a moment Tevye seems struck by the bitter truth of his wife’s rebuke, then takes shelter behind his habitual disrespect for women. “She has a point,” he thinks; he should not have blamed her, for “what does a wom