Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

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?

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 woman understand?”

The most blatant example of Tevye’s strategy of shutting off reality with clever words is found in the opening section of the seventh tale, when Tevye tells about Golde’s last days. Golde, depressed, desperately sick, and aware of her impending death, was never properly taken care of. Tevye never thinks of seeking medical help for her. (When he finally does bring in a physician, she is already dead.) Instead he offers her some argument concerning God’s handling of the world’s affairs. Once again Golde stops him short and in a whisper puts to him a simple question, her ultimate response to his intentional obtuseness: “I am dying, Tevye; who will cook your dinner?” Never has our protagonist been so floored by such a direct, authentic, and devastating existential question. Never has the hollowness of his wit been so sweepingly exposed. But Tevye holds on for dear life to his quibbling — his only defense. As much as Golde’s words touch him, his response consists of a proverb, a biblical quotation, a midrash and yet another midrash. Under the circumstances, what is left for him to say? Throughout his life he has wrapped himself with this insulating stuff, and it’s too late to tear open his cocoon. Indeed, by tearing it open he probably would have exposed himself to the same withering radiation that killed Golde. Tevye has to go on talking, narrating, being clever and funny, quoting and playfully mistranslating. This is his hold on life, for what is he if not a Jewish Scheherazade, whose head will be cut off the morning after he loses his ability to charm and please through narrating?

Talking, however, does not altogether assuage his guilt. He divulges his sins halfheartedly, only when he can explain them as resulting from sheer naïveté. Other, graver sins, both of commission and of omission, he cannot afford to admit, but we can glimpse them in the narrative. For example, toward the end of “Shprintze” he suddenly puts to Sholem Aleichem an uncharacteristic question, which, he says, he has intended to ask his learned and worldly friend for some time: Why are the eyes of people who have died by drowning always open, whereas dead people’s eyes are usually shut? But Tevye does not wait for an answer — he cuts the conversation short and bolts. Both the unexpected question and the sudden haste hint at what Tevye was about to divulge, had he not caught himself. Haunted by the wide-open stare of his dead daughter as she was being fished out of the river, he was on the verge of acknowledging his guilt. His question was as clumsy as it was disingenuous: most people do not die with their eyes shut; rather, their eyes are shut to produce the semblance of sleep for the benefit of the mourners. But Tevye had seen his daughter before this could be done, and her horrible stare was burned into his memory.

For all his lighthearted prattling, Tevye is gnawed by guilt. But as a rule, when he talks about blows inflicted on the national collective, his mood immediately improves — indeed, it soars. No matter how many conventional expressions of sorrow he piles one upon the other (“What times we live in! What a miserable time to be a Jew!” etc.) or how many times he mentions the urgent need for the coming of the Messiah, he himself is in high spirits, and his dialogue with God, usually replete with bitterness and self-effacement, is for once spirited and upbeat, refreshingly free of sarcasm as well as servility. This changed tonality dominates “Lekh lekho,” Tevye’s last tale, the main topics of which are pogroms, the Beiliss blood-libel trial, and the expulsion of Jews from the villages. Here Tevye is more than self-controlled; he is actually relaxed and almost happy, even though the expulsion decree has reduced him to beggary and vagrancy.

How is this mood shift to be understood? It is an expression of Tevye’s elation at being relieved, if only temporarily, of his guilt. For once the disaster — of being expelled from one’s home and cut off from one’s source of income — is not one he brought upon himself and his family. Taking care of the nation’s fate is God’s business, and the onus is on Him. Being the victim rather than the culprit feels good; and besides, when hundreds of thousands are afflicted, one’s personal losses are somehow minimized and marginalized. “Tsores rabim khatsi nekhome!” (“The tribulation of the many is half consolation”), Tevye says with obvious satisfaction when he learns that he is not the only local Jew to be expelled, and that the powerful householders of the neighboring shtetl Anetevke will soon follow, since the authorities, in their unfathomable wisdom, are about to redefine small provincial towns as villages and thus apply the decree of expulsion to their Jewish inhabitants. In short, Tevye is happy because for once, with easy conscience, he can shift responsibility for his and his family’s undoing to something bigger than himself. The tale “Lekh lekho” offers a catharsis of sorts, and this immense relief brings the Tevye cycle to closure. In fact, if the Tevye-Job analogy is at all valid, it is not because Tevye resembles Job but because God answers his complaints as He answered Job’s—“out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), the whirlwind or storm being national holocaust. Only through holocausts does God now speak to his chosen people and silence their complaints. In any case, Tevye, the obsessive talker, can be silenced, as Job was (“I repent in dust and ashes,” Job 42:6), because he has been purged, regaining through devastation a state of innocence.

If silencing Tevye signals the end of his story, then his talking constitutes the center. By obsessively verbalizing, he seeks to release the burden of his guilt and, in his roundabout and perhaps not entirely conscious way, inch toward a confession. Otherwise, why would Tevye seek the company of his “Pani Sholem Aleichem” in the wake of each disastrous event in his life?

Why does Tevye choose Sholem Aleichem as his father-confessor, and why does Sholem Aleichem acquiesce in playing that role, taking upon himself the responsibility of purging Tevye’s guilt and absolving him? The answer to both questions must be that Sholem Aleichem plays the role because he is a writer, a virtuoso storyteller, a man of words, a sublimator of real-life events into works of art. In short, Sholem Aleichem is chosen because he resembles Tevye, duplicating his behavior at a higher and more symbolic level. He can become Tevye’s alter ego — or his superego and as such have the authority to judge and absolve. Absolution is activated particularly through humor, since humor is the strategy (the narcissistic strategy, according to Freud) that the superego employs for the purpose of shrinking or minimizing the ego’s painful feelings of hurt and guilt.⁴

The foundations of this relationship between Tevye and his alter ego or superego are laid bare in Tevye’s first tale, and even more so in Tevye’s letter, which in the original 1894 version serves as its epilogue or appendix. (In the canonical editions it functions as a prologue to the entire cycle under the biblical title “Kotonti—I Am Unworthy,” a reference to Jacob’s humble acknowledgment of the mercies and goodwill shown to him by the angels in Genesis 32:10.) Ostensibly this is a mere thank-you letter for the author’s intention of putting Tevye in a book, an honor of which the dairyman deems himself unworthy. The letter contains, however, implicit background information as well as explicit statements that belie Tevye’s supposed gratefulness and humility. The most interesting is Tevye’s reference to the fact that his acquaintance with Sholem Aleichem goes back quite a few years. Tevye remembers those earlier contacts, although he’s not sure Sholem Aleichem remembers them, since the writer was a rich person in those years, who could afford a summerhouse in Boiberik (the suburb of Yehupetz-Kiev where most of Tevye’s customers reside and where the present meeting between the dairyman and the writer takes place), and Tevye can hardly expect a rich entrepreneur (who also dabbled in writing) to pay attention to a mere dairyman. Circumstances changed, however, once Sholem Aleichem’s fortunes took a dive (which they did in 1890), reducing him, now a writer eking out a living from his scribbling, to a position not unlike that of Tevye himself. Are they not on par as hardworking producers and suppliers of goods (dairy products, stories) who depend on the market and have to find buyers for their merchandise? Not that Tevye forgets the difference between a published author, who is by definition a learned person, and a rustic dairyman. He never fails to acknowledge this difference, to defer to his interlocutor in all matters pertaining to learning and erudition and to find other ways of giving him the ego-massage at which he is an expert (having practiced for years the art of keeping disgruntled customers pleased). Nevertheless, Tevye does not refrain from discreetly reminding Sholem Aleichem of the shrinkage in the social gap between them. For instance, at the end of the first tale he urges both himself and his interlocutor to go back to work and attend to their respective businesses, since neither is in a position to indulge in pleasant conversation for its own sake. Both have to go back to their means of production: “Ir tsu ayere bikhlekh, ikh tsu mayne teplekh un tsu mayne kriglekh. .” (“You to your little books, I to my little pots and to my little jugs”). The list of three diminutives (bikhlekh, teplekh, kriglekh) conveys not only Tevye’s understanding of books as mere containers (like pots and jugs) into which one pours one’s verbal merchandise, but also his sense that he and his interlocutor are both small fry, people who, far from playing important roles in the world, offer the public items to which the language of diminution is applicable.

But why should Tevye tell Sholem Aleichem his story? What, under the changing circumstances, could be the purpose of the telling? It could be quasi commercial: Tevye’s story is something valuable that Sholem Aleichem might want to buy, or as he delicately puts it, “It’s worth your while, I swear, to listen to the entire story from beginning to end.” Sholem Aleichem, in his turn, could pay Tevye back with money or advertisement, or even more desirable, he could pay Tevye by listening to his stories, not only because they are fresh merchandise, grist for an author’s mill, but also because as a writer Sholem Aleichem cannot fail to be charmed by them and thus offer Tevye his needed self-exposure.

This need for self-exposure explains, more than anything else, Tevye’s motivation for bonding with the literary persona, a bond that becomes on both sides progressively stronger, more emotionally charged, and more complex. Sholem Aleichem initially presents Tevye as a type, a jolly character, one of the many that he makes fun of and regales his readers with, but he stops doing so by the second tale, moving ever-larger parts of his mental being into alignment with Tevye’s interiority. As the Hebrew writer J. H. Brenner aptly put it, Sholem Aleichem becomes “Tevye’s bard,” even his “stenographer de gracia dei,”⁵ taking dictation and adding to his protagonist’s flow of speech the amenities of felicitous écriture.

This symbiosis between two such different entities — a traditional, half-educated, provincial dairyman and the literary persona of a modern writer — may seem strange, but it actually is inevitable, at least as far as Tevye and his needs are concerned. Tevye understands instinctively that only an artist, perhaps a storyteller like himself, can serve as his confessor. What other figure of intellectual or moral authority could he turn to? A rabbi or a Chasidic saint would regard the way he has brought up his daughters as scandalous, for it contradicts the basic tenets of both the Halacha and the tradition. No God-fearing person would permit his unmarried daughters to become friendly with young men of questionable morals, including a Gentile — what can he expect for such a sin other than a terrible retribution? By the same token, blaming God for the consequences of one’s behavior amounts to the worst kind of blasphemy: Tevye should prostrate himself before God and dedicate the rest of his life to repentance — such would probably be the reaction of a traditional sage. Nor could Tevye expect a more positive reaction from a modern secularist or humanist, who would damn him for being passive, unable to fend for himself and protect his family; for evading his moral responsibilities; for shifting the burden of his failings onto an irrelevant God; for being deeply prejudiced against women; for being spiritually swaddled and mummified within an irrelevant textual cocoon; and so on. A moralist would point with derision to his craving for riches achieved through no effort of his own. A socialist would decry his respect for money, power, and social status. A Jewish scholar would laugh at his scholarly pretensions and pronounce him a fake, an ignoramus. In short, everybody but a Sholem Aleichem would regard him as blameworthy. Only a writer can accept him, even look up to him as towering above nondescript humanity through his inspired loquacity and riveting storytelling.

Besides, nobody but Sholem Aleichem would want to listen to Tevye. Even the people who surround him, almost without exception, are sick and tired of him, abhor his incessant talking, and stop listening at the first biblical verse or midrashic gloss. This is why he falls headlong in love with whoever does not immediately recoil from his discourse — like the young revolutionary Fefferl, whom he brings home and who will marry Tevye’s most beloved daughter, Hodl. Tevye will do almost anything for whoever will listen to him. So much more so for Sholem Aleichem, who savors every word he utters, understands the subversive irrelevance of his quotations, and appreciates the wit of his mistranslations. (Of course, almost all of Tevye’s mistakes are intentional and subversive, undermining, for the fun of it, the sacred sources to which he professes loyalty.) Such a listener is to him a heaven-sent boon.

But what is Tevye to Sholem Aleichem? For one thing, Sholem Aleichem does what any writer worth his salt would do: he sticks by his informant, the one who delivers first-rate stories. Sholem Aleichem also identifies with Tevye, with his pain and needs — he is himself a flawed person who seeks redemption in art, having squandered his in-laws’ estate and doomed a large family to a life of permanent financial difficulty. Most important, the persona Sholem Aleichem, as an artist and a thinker (who cogitates through narration, characters, and situations), accepts the impotence of the protagonists, their passivity, and their ability to hold on to life only through sheer endurance, inertia, and garrulity. These are to him the people who experience the human condition authentically. Suspending judgment, eschewing ideological fiats, and allowing his protagonists to advocate for themselves, Sholem Aleichem embraces the kind of people other writers satirize. He is never offended by their lies or self-delusions, which are to him as precious as any truth, being, under the circumstances, the only truths they can afford. Never demanding from them heroics of any kind, he suffers them to bombard their own consciousness and that of everybody around them with words. He accepts their bavardage as their talisman, their sole means of avoiding mental breakdown, and he makes brilliant artistic use of it — nowhere more brilliantly than in Tevye der milkhiker, where he first discovers this winning formula.

And what about us, the readers? We, too, in our capacity as consumers of the aesthetic, embrace Tevye, suspending our judgment and abiding by artistic rather than moral or practical criteria. Were we to live with a Tevye-like person, we would reject him as impossible. Had he tried, as he must, to impress us with his stories and clever quibbling, we would flee him as a pest. Who would want to listen to a Tevye? Fortunately, we do not have to endure Tevye in real life. That’s why we can love and look up to him — he is safely ensconced in a book. The same loquacity that in real life would turn us off acquires in the book the enticing quality of flowing honey, of which we cannot have enough. We are even willing to be hoodwinked by Tevye and say and write rather unwise things about the qualities he does not possess, for most of us still refuse to see where the greatness of Sholem Aleichem’s chief creation lies.

In Tevye der milkhiker Sholem Aleichem wrote the most audacious critique of the heroic humanist ethos that dominated modern, secular, and particularly nationalist Jewish culture — and that he himself, as a run-of-the-mill Jewish intellectual (and Zionist) of the turn of the nineteenth century, swore by in his many moments of mediocrity. But once he emerged as the genial artist who blazed paths into a new kind of Jewish culture, he started undermining this ethos, burrowing underneath it. Modern secular Jewish culture reprimanded traditional Jews; criticized them for being weak, passive, unrealistic, and tardy; and urged them both by positive exhortation and by biting satirical jabs to wake up, seize history by its horns, and replace texts and words with deeds and actions. Sholem Aleichem, however, in his moments of true greatness embraced passivity, weakness, wordiness, inertia, and minority — everything that almost everybody else rejected. In depth, originality, and authenticity, his acceptance of Jewish passivity was equal to that of S. J. Agnon and was surpassed only by that of Franz Kafka. In fact, the best introduction to Tevye der milkhiker can be found not in the misguided interpretations of the work as the epitome of Jewish spiritual fortitude, but rather in Agnon’s stories about passive Jews and even more in Kafka’s haunting explorations of Jewish weakness, texts such as Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Where Sholem Aleichem approximated the depth of Kafka’s parables, there the modern Jewish literary imagination celebrated, by exercising a negative capability, its greatest triumphs.

THE BLESSINGS OF ORPHANHOOD

Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl the Cantor’s Son) is one of the two major works that Sholem Aleichem wrote in the last decade of his life (1906-16), the other being his exquisite Railway Stories (1909-10). Working throughout this hectic decade on many large-scale projects — long, panoramic novels, a multivolume autobiography — he nevertheless broke new ground and approximated the artistic level of his earlier masterpieces in these two somewhat less ambitious works. Conceived and started in 1906, during the author’s disappointing — indeed, humiliating — stay in the United States, Motl was written intermittently in 1907 (the “European” part) and then in 1915-16 (the unfinished “American” part). It represents a revolutionary breakthrough and is perhaps the most subversive and unconventional of Sholem Aleichem’s extended fictions, although cloaked in the innocent comic narration of a lively child protagonist.

Initially the Motl tales were not perceived as innovative, either thematically or technically. On the contrary, at a time when novelty in Yiddish fiction meant individualism, these stories seemed to move in an opposite direction, toward collectivism (as a further treatment of the shtetl theme, which contemporary Yiddish fiction had already sucked dry) and social tragicomedy. In Motl Sholem Aleichem seemed to be projecting through a comic perspective — that of a child who hardly grasped what was taking place before his eyes — a dark panorama of eastern European Jewish traditional society as it succumbed to unstoppable historical forces. The author, it seemed, was up to his usual tricks.

But Motl was innovative neither in its social content nor in its method of narration. The two interconnected themes of Motl—the rapid disintegration of traditional eastern European shtetl society due to economic dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and sheer physical vulnerability, and the resulting mass emigration to the West, which at the time assumed the dimensions of a veritable Völkerwanderung—were among the most prominent in Yiddish fiction of the time. That the author chose to present this theme through the perspective of the shtetl’s middle class and its culture agents (the so-called kli-koydesh, or holy vessels: rabbis, ritual slaughterers, cantors), rather than that of the poorer and less educated members of the community, was also reflective of the era. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was mainly the poorer members of traditional Jewish society who were affected by the decline of shtetl life, but as conditions worsened at the beginning of the twentieth, even the more stable and culturally entrenched members found reason to emigrate. As for themes of proletarianization; industrial exploitation; loss of human dignity (through numbing, underpaid labor, prostitution, labor-caused sickness, penury, and devastation); and the advent of Jewish trade unionism, socialist and anarchist agitation, and the like, which were to be treated in the “American” part of the story, they too were hardly new; this entire complex had been explored for almost two decades by both the poets and fiction writers of the so-called American Yiddish “shop” literature, from the first wave of eastern European Jewish influx into the United States.

Nor was there much novelty in child narrators. Sholem Aleichem, among many others, had repeatedly employed them since the publication in 1886 of his short story “Dos messerl” (The Penknife). In the tradition of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Mark Twain, he focused on children as the most vulnerable and oppressed, but also the most rebellious, members of the traditional Jewish community. He saw in the lives of Jewish children, exposed to the traditional educational system, the clash between the “natural” man, still relatively untamed, and the broken-in, “socialized” Jew. In the many stories he wrote about children, instinctual, libidinal, and aesthetic urges are pitted against a harsh and restrictive social and educational order, whose members, embittered by weakness, poverty, and harassment, scapegoat those who are even weaker than themselves. Encounters between children and adults offered many opportunities for comic, even hilarious narration. They would usually make for stories constructed as episodes replete with pranks — the satisfying of sinful appetites and wishes — but ending with a comic catastrophe, which started children in the process of internalizing the norms of their civilization and the limitations of the world they lived in. The same structural principle controls many of the Motl stories, rendering them stories of socialization and growth, albeit under the special circumstances of emigration and acculturation. In this way some critics saw Motl as father of the man. He would become, one said, a latter-day Tevye.⁶

The narration of the Motl tales seems to follow the rules set in Sholem Aleichem’s earlier stories narrated by children. In most if not all of those tales of childish crime and punishment, the narrators are the children-culprits themselves. Since the mind of a child, not to mention a child’s linguistic abilities, cannot articulate all the insights that the stories are supposed to convey, the child narrator — in Motl as well as other stories narrated by children — is actually a kind of hybrid, in which the voices of a child and an adult complement each other. The attentive reader of Motl will detect this on the first page of the first episode, in the description of the child and his “friend,” the calf Meni, expressing their “dankbarkeyt tsu der natur” (gratitude to nature) through a wild dance and a “singing,” which is “a song without words, without notes, with no motifs, a kind of a nature-song of a waterfall, of racing waves.” Obviously, while the child and the calf are dancing and shrieking and bellowing, it is an adult narrator, well versed in the conventions of romantic hyperbole, who does much of the telling.

This artificial arrangement extends to the incredible subtitle of the Motl cycle: “ksovim fun a yingl a yosem,” writings of an orphan boy. How could a mere nine-year-old boy with no education produce ksovim, literary works? The implausibility of the subtitle has the effect of drawing attention to the author’s role, and of undermining the status of Motl as a realistic, three-dimensional fictional character. (None of Sholem Aleichem’s child protagonists would ever attain the realistic solidity and subtlety of Tevye.) The author aimed to create a child narrator who could nevertheless convey adult truth.

Motl is trusted with an extraordinary artistic mission: to say a truth about the crisis of eastern European Jewry in the first decade of the twentieth century that nobody else would dare to say, a truth that could be reported only by someone as innocent and guileless as a child — as in Hans Christian Andersen’s satirical parable of the child who pronounces the king naked. Motl is put forward to say, in his childish way, that the demise of the traditional eastern European Jewish civilization is not only unavoidable but also welcome; that it is high time for the shtetl culture to leave the historical stage for something else, no matter how primitive and crass, as long as it is alive and healthy; that being an orphan is, under certain circumstances, preferable to being burdened with a moribund ancestry.

As a fictional character, Motl is what Deleuze and Guattari, in their discourse on minor literature, refer to as agencement, an arrangement of traits and narrative inflections that convey an attitude rather than the reality of a specific fictionalized human being. The function that he is to fulfill demands a Peter Pan-like narrator, and therefore, while the locations and social environments that Motl observes and describes are in constant flux, he himself remains static, a fixture, his character immune to the process of aging and to being reconditioned by drastically changing life situations. This sameness subtly influences the presentation of the story’s plot, to the extent that it is determined by chronology. In fact, all the indications of time progression and linear sequential chronology in the story are blurry and indeterminate. As much as Motl’s age at the beginning is unclear (the author wavered on whether he should be presented as a five-year-old or a nine-year-old), his age at the end, left unfinished because of the author’s death, is even more ambiguous. How many months or years elapse between Motl’s family’s departure from Kasrilevke and their arrival in America? Six months? A year and a half? A few years? And how many months or years separate their arrival in America from their rise into the lower middle class as the owners of a newspaper and candy kiosk in New York? Nowhere in the story do we find firm chronological ground on which to base our calculations. The Jewish holidays, which in many Hebrew and Yiddish stories provide the key to chronology, are of little help here. Their significance is merely symbolic: Pentecost (as the story begins) stands in for the springtime recurrence of growth and instinctual vitality (and not for the reception of the Torah by Moses on Mount Sinai), and Yom Kippur (at the start of part 2) represents the crisis of the passage from the Old World to the New. Nature and its seasons play an even smaller role in the articulation of the story’s time sequence. Mysteriously, there is no winter at all in Motl, as if cold weather, snow, and winter storms were unknown in Ukraine, western Europe, and North America. Just one autumnal sea storm is allowed, breaking up what seems an eternal summer. As much as the story necessitates a fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable observer-narrator, it also seems to require a continually bright, warm season. The heat complements Motl, allowing him to be himself — nimble, energetic, and bright, unencumbered by heavy clothes, never seeking the warmth of hearth and home, always Puck-like, ready to walk, to run, almost to fly.

Motl’s personality consists of both “hot” and “cold” components. On the one hand, he flows with everything that is vibrant: appetites, vitality, effervescence, motility, optimism, lust for life, and freedom. On the other hand, he is a keen, unemotional, unflinching observer. The “hot” component informs the escapades he reports, his total rejection of the stasis of the shtetl, and his fervent identification with traveling — and the staccato rhythms of his short sentences. The “cold” component inheres in the devastating caricatures he draws of almost all the characters in the story, including those nearest and dearest to him, such as his widowed mother. The very emotional scene of his mother, about to start on the voyage to America, taking leave of her good neighbor Pessi displays how coldly observant he is: “Suddenly everyone is kissing, and crying and howling, worse than Tisha B’Av,” the official day of mourning for the destruction of the two Jerusalemite temples. His red-eyed mother falls, as if in a swoon, into the big arms of the overweight Pessi, “whose double chin swings, and big tears as big as peas roll over her cheeks.” Far from being attuned to the emotional states of the characters he portrays, Motl focuses on whatever is discordant and inviting ridicule, such as Pessi’s shiny, fat cheeks. This is consistent with his passion for drawing cartoons that emphasize all kinds of unseemly metonymies: his mother’s red eyes (highlighting her role as the Niobe of the story or mother Rachel bewailing the fate of her exiled children — everybody grows tired of her lachrymosity); his brother Elye’s fledgling beard, which sprouts not from his chin but from his throat (exploding his brother’s posture of virility and manly self-importance); Elye’s wife Bruche’s large, coarse, unfeminine legs and feet (indicating who in his brother’s family wears the trousers).

Sholem Aleichem intended for Motl to be artistic in some way. As the scion of a cantorial family, Motl was originally meant to be musical, but even as the first episodes were being serialized, Sholem Aleichem reconceived him as a cartoonist. His Motl, he realized, should not be contaminated by any vestige of the traditional shtetl culture; nor should he in any way be seen as an extension of his father, whose death at the beginning of the story is supposed to symbolize the final expiration of his world. Drawing, being essentially a non-Jewish art (did not the Lord prescribe through Moses: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” [Exodus 20:4]?), dovetails with the innovative, nontraditional aspects of Motl’s personality. Above all else, being a cartoonist rather than a musician goes hand in hand with his detached manner of observing and describing.

Motl’s inclination toward caricature contributes to Sholem Aleichem’s objective to deconstruct shtetl literature, to dismantle its components and expose it as nonfunctional. Together they present the metamorphosis of a people, driven by the sheer instinct of survival, in the harsh terms of a comic epic that rarely if ever allows the pathetic fallacy to cloud its mimetic transparency. It has to be viewed as comic because the tragedy it supposedly is camouflages a sham. What died with shtetl culture had already, for a long time, not been really alive; shtetl culture had been for some time a caricature of itself. Its social order had been bankrupted; its ethos of communal unity and responsibility was a fraud, as Motl’s family discovers in their hour of need; its hallowed rabbinical culture went gaga, as the horrified Motl learns when he is hired to spend the nights with a demented scholar who carries the proud traditional name of Luria (the name of the great sixteenth-century cabalist known as Ha-ari, as well as that of a host of other rabbis, scholars, and writers); its texts, as represented by the Aramaic prayer for the dead, the kaddish, amount, as far as Motl is concerned, to sheer gibberish. If this culture has to be sloughed off in the process of emigration and acculturation, no tears should be shed over it. No matter how crass and culturally clumsy those denuded of it are, the option they represent is preferable to the one they reject. Motl at once incorporates the vitality and talent for survival that render their metamorphosis possible, and he functions as its epic recorder. His vivacity and health, contrasted with the ugliness he sees around him, define the message of the work as a whole: in the darkening world of eastern European Jewry, Motl’s vital spark represents the refusal of the shtetl Jews to loosen their hold on life, and that is what pushes them along to the new Canaan of economic self-sufficiency.

At the beginning of the book Motl is presented as a prospective victim. The analogy between him and his only friend, the calf Meni, speaks for itself: healthy, normal, and equipped with the biological tools necessary for living and savoring life, Motl is primed for slaughter. His impoverished family, desperately trying to save some remnants of its middle-class status, first sells its furniture and sacred books; then in direct continuation its two sons. Elye, the older brother, an eligible youngster with yikhes (pedigree, good parentage) and no money, is sold into a marriage of convenience to the coarse daughter of a nouveau riche, while young Motl is sold to whoever will cover his basic expenses. He becomes a servant, a day laborer, the nanny of a miserable cripple, and finally a babysitter who is to spend his nights with a madman who threatens (in a demented parody of Maimonides’ inductive logic) to eat him alive. Motl’s environment — exploitative, grotesque, sick, vitiated both physically and mentally — is quite ready to swallow him, to quash his high spirits, to imbue him with its lugubrious moribundity, and to stunt his mental and emotional growth forever. Paradoxically, only the death of his father and the final downfall of his family as a result of the bankruptcy of Elye’s in-laws save Motl from the life of bourgeois respectability that a marriage like his brother’s would have locked him into.

When destitution and penury drive the family out of its hometown and middle-class decorum, Motl is finally allowed to be happy; and he is genuinely happy, the happiest among Sholem Aleichem’s child protagonists, perhaps the only genuinely happy boy protagonist in a contemporary Yiddish literature rife with miserable orphans and dejected youngsters. Of all of Sholem Aleichem’s books featuring children, Motl is the only one in which the fire of child rebellion is not extinguished, and the child’s libidinous and instinctual egotism is not crushed by a brutal process of socialization. As the shtetl’s oppressive system of education, along with its economy and social order, finally fall apart, Motl is spared the internalization of its punitive ethos — the fears, the guilt, the sense of sin, the endless chain of crime and punishment. When Motl’s father, his superego, so horrendous in his decrepitude and decomposition, dies, Motl celebrates his independence. “Mir iz gut — ikh bin a yosem” (I have it good, I’m an orphan) is Motl’s motto. It sounds like a paradox, but it actually articulates in one compressed sentence the historical truth: orphanhood and pauperization not only saved Motl’s life but also freed the entire community from paralysis and propelled it in search of food and shelter. Motl is a book about an orphaned people who finally emerges from historical lethargy and, once whipped into wakefulness, gropes for the happiness that has evaded it for so long.

The first part of the book, in every way superior to its unfinished sequel, is subtly organized as a series of variations on the themes of sickness and death versus health and rebirth. They play out not just at face level — the obvious encounter between Motl and his father in the first chapter — but also through witty polysemies such as Motl’s joyful interjection “a feld, a fargenign, a gan-eyden” (“a field, what pleasure! sheer paradise!”), which he utters as the family’s beds are sold, reducing him and his brother to sleeping on the bare floorboards. Motl is delighted that he can now roll in his sleep across the empty room, as wide as “a field.” In Yiddish, however, feld, besides signifying a field, also means a cemetery, and paradise is where the souls of the saintly dead reside. Motl’s enjoyment of his enlarged sleeping space parodies the eternal rest of the dead in their graves and the ethereal pleasure of souls in paradise. In a later chapter Motl attempts a reentry into the forbidden paradise, in the form of an orchard whose gate is blocked by an angry, niggardly woman — a hilarious version of the cherubim positioned, flaming swords in hand, at the gate of paradise. Motl devises a means of reaching for the tree of life and enjoying its delectable fruit. The punishment promised by scripture (death) is reduced to a minor embarrassment, since Motl is protected by the armor of orphanhood. Then Motl fakes sickness, triggering his mother’s worst anxieties, only to miraculously recuperate without touching the bitter medicine that the local hack prescribes. False premonitions of death are replaced by a phony last-minute resurrection.

In the section following the marriage of Elye and the bankruptcy of his father-in-law, the themes of sickness and health are developed under a new and surprising guise. While Elye tries in vain to earn a fortune by producing suspicious commodities nobody needs, the family, like the putrefying social body it actually is, poisons the environment, selling beverages made of dirty soapy water, contaminating the local rivulet with ink, and spreading mouse poison. In these minor ecological disasters Motl, as his brother’s emissary, gleefully plays the role of contaminator and is almost caught by the police and incarcerated. He is saved by the final collapse of the family fortune, making emigration unavoidable. Thus commences Motl’s great adventure. The family’s slow movement along the emigrants’ trail is replete with sickness and suffering, but they somehow do not touch the boy, vibrant, upbeat, and impatient as he is to get on with the voyage. As they illegally cross the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the family is shot at by guards, and only quick movement — Motl’s specialty — saves them. The loss of their luggage pales in comparison with the death, rape, and plunder that the pogroms’ refugees are now fleeing. Eye ailments get pride of place in Motl’s account, because healthy eyes are supposed to open the gates of America for the immigrants. Motl’s mother’s constantly red eyes loom ominously as a possible impediment to the family’s entry into the promised land. But Motl’s eyes are literally and metaphorically crystal clear, as healthy and coldly observant as ever. True, he temporarily develops a crush on a girl whose eye sickness has separated her from her family, and he lapses into sentimentality, promising to send the girl bluestone salve (an eye cure) as soon as he reaches America, but he quickly overcomes this weak moment, and as soon as he sets foot on the deck of the Prince Albert, he altogether forgets the poor girl. The short stay in foggy and rainy London and the difficult ocean passage amplify the theme of death and sickness and bring about its culmination. Throughout, Motl’s high spirits counterbalance the hopelessness, fatigue, and frustration of those around him. Together with Mendl (an orphan he befriends along the way), Motl ridicules his mother and Bruche, his sister-in-law, eliciting from the two old ladies a hilarious scene of competition over who is more miserable. But it is Motl’s spark of vitality, found in every one of the emigrants, that carries them forward through the maze of inefficient charitable organizations toward their destination: America.

The main themes of part 2, the American section of the book, are youth and freedom. Having concluded that only the young and unencumbered, those whose burden of shtetl culture is minimal, will find their place in America and successfully adapt to its pace and rugged individualistic ethos,⁷ Sholem Aleichem mobilizes Motl and Mendl in portraying America as a boys’ paradise. His two child protagonists immerse themselves in New York’s hectic ambience. They love the city’s bustle, its noisy and quick subway and elevated trains; the new American art, the cinema, fascinates them, and they choose for their hero and model Charlie Chaplin, in his classic role as a small but nimble-bodied vagabond who always gets himself into but also out of trouble. The huge metropolis never strikes these newcomers as alien and threatening — it immediately becomes their normative habitat.

It is not entirely clear in what direction Sholem Aleichem might have sent his Motl had he lived to bring the book to a close. He hints that his friend Mendl would rise to prominence as a chief organizer of the Jewish trade union movement, whereas Motl himself might flourish as a successful cartoonist. (This single instance of a future perspective suggests that the American chapters of Motl were written while the artistic discipline of the author was already in decline.) But how might the two boys, particularly our chief protagonist, arrive at their respective destinations unsullied and not coarsened? We have no answer. The book ends in the middle of the eighteenth chapter of part 2. Motl is about to throw himself into a family business, which would squeeze from him (and from every member of the family) all his energy and steal his last minutes of freedom. Would he have retained his high spirits and clarity of vision throughout many years of fierce struggle for upward mobility? Would his Peter Pan charm and Puck-like dexterity have withstood the test? Surely the agencement consisting of both naïveté and perspicacity, energy and meticulous observation, would have to be dismantled. And what about the sexual awakening that was certainly in store for this normal, full-blooded boy, whose sensuality has found expression in his craving for food and fondling (Motl enjoys sleeping in his mother’s bed)? For the time being, as far as the story goes, Motl, although aware of the role of sex in the lives of the people who surround him, is almost sexless. His is the romance of the pleasure principle played out against the backdrop not only of eternal summer but also of eternal latency. If he were to grow, latency would have to be replaced by puberty. The author would have had to sentimentalize his protagonist’s pubescence, cover it with Victorian drapery, or have him jump headlong into puerile sexuality, masturbation, erotic daydreams, and the like. In other words, Motl would have had to lose his honesty and straightforward attitude toward the facts of life, or allow it to be muddled. Both options would have destroyed the coherence of his story. Perhaps it is better for Motl to have been left unfinished as it tragically was. Unfinished, it can retain its narrative and ideological consistency and stand out as one of the author’s best and most original works.

NOTES

1 For example, the much-debated issue of whether Tevye “really” had seven daughters, since he tells about only five and barely mentions the sixth; the seventh altogether disappears. See Khone Shmeruk, “Tevye der milkhiker—letoldoteha shel yetsira,” Ayarot ukhrakim: prakim bytsirato shel Shalom Aleichem (Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 9-32.

2 All references are to Gauts Tevye der milkhiker, vol. 5 of the so-called Folksfond edition of Sholem Aleichem’s collected works, New York, 1917, and for the purposes of literary analysis, the translations are my own.

3 See, for instance, Michael Stern, “Tevye’s Art of Quotation,” Prooftexts 6 (1986), 79–96.

4 Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London, 1961), 159-66.

5 J. H. Brenner, “Leshalom Aleichem,” Ktavim 4 (1985), 1422-28.

6 Shmuel Niger, “Sholem Aleichem,” Vegn yidishe shrayber, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1912), 111-12.

7 Khone Shmeruk, “Sholem Aleichem and America,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Research 20 (1991), 211-38.