The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

Introduction

Taken together, Sholem Aleichem’s three great semicomic works, Tevye the Dairyman, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl, and Motl, the Cantor’s Son, might be said to compose a right triangle. The sides of the right angle are formed by Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl, which meet each other squarely. Motl joins the two obliquely. The trio bounds Sholem Aleichem’s fictional world.

Each moves along a geographical line. Tevye shuttles back and forth from his native village of “Boiberik” to the nearby Ukrainian capital of Kiev, called “Yehupetz” by Sholem Aleichem. Boiberik is even closer to “Kasrilevke,” the town in which Motl grows up and the wife and children of Menakhem-Mendl live. We encounter Menakhem-Mendl, however, mainly in Yehupetz before he heads for America, which is also the destination of Motl and his family. And it is in Yehupetz that Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl — quite literally in a chapter of Tevye the Dairyman—run into each other, while it is from Boiberik-Kasrilevke that Tevye and Motl set out and in New York City that Motl and Menakhem-Mendl (although only in one version of his story) end up. These three points are the physical coordinates of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction, and nearly everything he wrote takes place in them or the intermediate space between.

Thematically, too, these three works, all of which share an episodic structure resulting from their irregular serialization in the Yiddish press, enclose a common world. In it we find the typical components of a Sholem Aleichem family: the roaming, harried, mentally curious husband; the conservative, querulous, stay-at-home wife; the strained but loyal relations between them; the independent child that goes its own way. We find the economic fight for survival, a preoccupation in most of Sholem Aleichem’s writing as it was of the Russian Jewry he wrote about. We find the disintegration of traditional eastern European Jewish life beneath the hammer blows of modernization, emigration, and assimilation. And we find the recurrent sequence of dream, disappointment, and new dream, that repetitive pattern of nadir, rise, fall, and recovery that is the psychological matrix of Sholem Aleichem’s most memorable characters and has been compared by the critic Dan Miron to the great life-death-resurrection cycles of religious myth.[1]

A cursory look at Sholem Aleichem’s biography reveals this to have been the pattern of his own life. Born Sholem Rabinovich in 1859 in the Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav, he passed a happy childhood in the rural community of Voronko, where his father, Nachum, was a well-to-do and respected figure, a master of many trades who, as Sholem Aleichem’s daughter Marie Waife-Goldberg wrote years later, “acted as agent for land-lease properties, supplied sugar mills with beets, ran the rural post office, traded in wheat, handled freight on barges on the Dnieper River, cut lumber, fattened oxen for the market,” and managed at the same time to run a dry-goods store that also sold groceries, hay, oats, home remedies, and hardware.[2]

These years ended suddenly for Sholem, who was twelve, when his father was swindled and ruined by a business partner. The family moved back to Pereyaslav, where Nachum opened an inn in the hope of reestablishing himself. The venture failed, Nachum’s wife died of cholera, and the new wife he took had all the attributes of the wicked stepmother of a fairy tale. One of the most vivid memories described in Sholem Aleichem’s autobiography From the Fair is of being stationed in front of the inn to attract customers, daydreaming of the riches that would come his way if he succeeded, only to suffer his stepmother’s curses when night fell on its empty rooms.[3]

Just as suddenly, however, this emotionally depressing adolescence underwent a miraculous reversal. Sent into the world by his father to seek work as a Hebrew tutor, the eighteen-year-old Sholem landed, by sheer luck, the ideal job: a position with a wealthy landowner named Elimelech Loyeff, one of the few Jews of the times to possess a country estate in the manner of a Russian aristocrat. Not only that, the child Loyeff sought a tutor for was his charming teenage daughter Olga. Tutor and pupil fell in love, and Sholem spent the next three years in a pastoral idyll as an honored member of the household.

Then disaster struck. The young couple made the mistake of showing their affections too openly, and Olga’s father banished the tutor from his paradise. For the next four years the lovelorn Sholem drudged away as a small-town “certified rabbi”—little more than a government registry clerk for Jewish births, deaths, marriages, and divorces — until his luck changed again. Having stayed secretly in touch all along, he and Olga eloped, and Elimelech Loyeff unexpectedly made his peace with the match. Supported by his new father-in-law, Sholem now began to devote himself full time to his writing, using the pen name of Sholem Aleichem for the first time. When Loyeff died of a heart attack in 1884 the Rabinoviches inherited most of his property, which they sold for enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

The poor son of the wicked stepmother was now an independent author-prince. Between 1887 and 1890 he wrote his first three mature novels, Sender Blank, Stempenyu, and Yosele Solovey, and founded the Yiddishe Folks Bibliotek, or Jewish Folk Library, an ambitious project that made him Yiddish literature’s foremost publisher. But the wheel of fortune was still spinning. In 1888 Sholem Aleichem moved with Olga to Kiev, where he took to speculating on the stock exchange. For a while he did well. Then, in 1890, the market crashed and he lost everything.

Elimelech Loyeff ’s inheritance had gone up in smoke, and the Rabinoviches were left bankrupt with four small children. (Two more were still to come.) They fled Kiev to escape their creditors, traveled homelessly for a while, and finally settled in Odessa, where Sholem Aleichem borrowed money from Olga’s family and reinvested in the market, determined to recoup his losses. Once again he succeeded initially; once again his shares ultimately plunged, wiping him out. Forced to start over from scratch, the family returned to Kiev, where Olga studied dentistry and opened a practice while her husband found work as a broker and continued to write.

They remained in Kiev until 1905. This was the longest period of economic security that Sholem Aleichem was to know, and in it he wrote the serialized chapters of Tevye the Dairyman, his novel The Bloody Hoax, several volumes’ worth of subsequently collected short stories, and a number of plays for the Yiddish stage. Life, so it seemed, had settled down at last — until, following the abortive 1905 revolution, a wave of pogroms swept over Russia and through Kiev, killing hundreds of Jews and coming dangerously close to the hotel in which the Rabinoviches were hiding. Badly shaken, they decided to leave Russia and join the mass westward flight of its Jews.

Sholem Aleichem’s last years were marked by wandering (mostly in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy), illness, and financial worry. Although he was the world’s most famous Jewish writer, read by a vast audience in the numerous Yiddish newspapers and periodicals in which he appeared, this rarely translated into economic success. Time and again he pinned his hopes on some new literary venture; time and again he fell victim to unscrupulous publishers, badly drawn contracts, feuding editors, papers forced to cut their budgets; time and again he had to resort to exhausting reading tours or hurried writing that did not reflect his full talents. In 1906 he traveled by himself to New York, hoping to capitalize on the vigorous cultural life of the Jewish immigrant community there. At first he was exhilarated by his reception, which included an annual five-thousand-dollar contract — an unprecedented sum in those days — with the new Hearst-published Jewish American and the commissioning of two plays for the Second Avenue Yiddish theater. But the Jewish American soon folded, the plays were box-office failures, and he returned to Europe with his hopes dashed.

In late 1914, more as a refugee from the world war that had broken out than as an immigrant counting on a better future, he sailed for New York again, this time with his family. He died there in May 1916, still struggling to make ends meet and writing practically to his last day. Despite failing health, he published in these months a large part of From the Fair and the unfinished American half of Motl. His funeral procession, said to have been the largest in New York City’s history, included more than one hundred thousand participants. Most were devoted readers. All over the Jewish world — in Warsaw, in Odessa, in London, in Jerusalem, in Vilna, in Berlin, in Buenos Aires — he was mourned by many times that number.

Menakhem-Mendl and his wife Sheyne-Sheyndl made their debut in 1892, when “Londons,” the first of the six chapters that compose the second, 1910 edition of their letters, from which the present translation is made, was published in a volume of the Jewish Folk Library. Chapter 2, “Stocks & Bonds,” appeared in 1896 in the periodical Der Hoyzfraynd, and Chapter 3, “Millions,” was serialized in the newspaper Der Yid in 1899–1900.

Although based on Sholem Aleichem’s experience with the Kiev and Odessa stock markets, these letters are hardly autobiographical. Not only is the scolding Sheyne-Sheyndl purely fictional, Menakhem-Mendl himself is too fatuous a figure to be considered a full-bodied imaginative projection of the author. Sholem Aleichem took apparent pains to emphasize this when he wrote in a preface to the 1910 edition that Menakhem-Mendl was not imaginary but a real person, with whom

the author is personally and intimately acquainted, having lived through a great deal with him for nearly twenty years. Since our first meeting in 1892 on the “Little Exchange” of Odessa, we have gone through all the circles of hell together. I was with him in the market in Kiev, all the way to St. Petersburg and Warsaw; went through crisis after crisis with him; threw myself with him into one livelihood after another; and — alas! — having had no luck, was forced to do what all Jews do and emigrate to America.[4]

And yet quite apart from the fact that Sholem Aleichem had not emigrated to America at this point and was reversing the order of the Kiev and Odessa crashes, this entire claim was fictional, since unlike Tevye, who was modeled on a real-life individual, no single prototype for Menakhem-Mendl existed. Or rather, the only such prototype with whom Sholem Aleichem went through “all the circles of hell” for “twenty years” was Sholem Aleichem himself, who, in inventing Menakhem-Mendl, isolated an element of his own character and exaggerated it wildly for comic purposes. Omitted in this translation, the 1910 preface is an ironically tongue-in-cheek document, designed to point the finger away from and toward the author at one and the same time.

Of course, the character of Menakhem-Mendl was also based on many of the small-time Jewish speculators and traders the author encountered in his years on and around the Exchange. Such types are described at length in the letters to Sheyne-Sheyndl and immediately identified by her, with her instinctive practicality, as luftmentshn, or “air people,” a Yiddish term denoting those would-be alchemists of profit who seek to make a living out of nothing — an enterprise that, as Sheyne-Sheyndl repeatedly warns, more often turns to nothing even the little that exists. And Menakhem-Mendl is the luftmentsh par excellence, so much so that in Yiddish his name has become a synonym for the term. Azoy a Menakhem-Mendl! — “What a Menakhem-Mendl!”—is both a way of calling someone an inept spinner of financial fantasies and a tribute to Sholem Aleichem’s powers of characterization.

But if Menakhem-Mendl is a superbly drawn caricature, he is one not only of the deluded believer in his own luck who compulsively gambles and loses each time, but also of a harsh economic reality in which the Jews of his time were trapped. Confined by tsarist regulations to the Pale of Settlement, the area of western and southwestern Russia whose largest metropolis, Kiev, was declared out of bounds to them (hence Menakhem-Mendl’s worries about being there); increasingly squeezed from their traditional occupations as small tradesmen and petty merchants by heightened competition and the growing availability of industrialized goods and services; and lacking access to entrepreneurial capital, Russia’s largely rural Jews were progressively reduced to marginal pursuits. One result was emigration. Another was proletarianization. Another was Menakhem-Mendelization — the creation of a newly urbanized class of Jewish fixers, jobbers, riggers, go-betweens, hangers-on, operators, and carpetbaggers frantically looking for the temporary niches and opportunities that could be manipulated for a quick gain. Menakhem-Mendl’s letters to Sheyne-Sheyndl are the classic portrait of this class.

It is the class aspect of Menakhem-Mendl that has particularly endeared his letters to Marxist literary critics, who have tended to consider them the high point of Sholem Aleichem’s career. Whereas, wrote the noted Soviet critic Max Erik, in Tevye “Sholem Aleichem glorified the petty bourgeois[ie] and portrayed it as an ideal …[in] Menakhem-Mendl, Sholem Aleichem unmasked the petty bourgeoisie.” Menakhem-Mendl “embodies the stubborn efforts of the lower middle class to make it into the bourgeoisie, to achieve the latter’s unfulfilled capitalist dreams”; he is “a compressed, highly trenchant expression of the illusoriness of the petty bourgeois existence under capitalism; a terribly bitter and decisive exposé of his ostensible independence and self-determination.”[5] Precisely because, in other words, he is naively apolitical and makes no connection between politics and economics, or indeed, between the world of economic success he yearns to belong to and the system that controls this world for its own benefit, Menakhem-Mendl’s letters are revolutionary in their implications; for they tell us that nothing short of an upheaval in both his consciousness and society at large can emancipate him from the treadmill on which he must otherwise run until he drops.

Even leaving aside Sholem Aleichem’s own political views, however, which were conventionally middle class, critics like Erik exaggerate Menakhem-Mendl’s “bitterness” and overlook how its hero, for all his pathetic denial of reality, is affectionately individuated in a way that is fatally flattened by reduction to a mere economic symbol. He has a zest for experience that, while it rarely understands what it is looking at, makes Kasrilevke several sizes too small for him; a refusal to stay down that causes us to laugh at him but never to pity him; and feelings, however primitive, for his wife and children, revealed when we hear his voice crack or change at key moments, that periodically break the spell of his self-absorption. Even his abandonment of his family to pursue his pipe dreams is an attempt to become the admired husband and father that, henpecked by a domineering wife, he cannot be at home, where his only future is to become either the storekeeper Sheyne-Sheyndl would like him to be or the teacher of children for which his unfinished studies qualify him. The never-explained dowry money that he absconds with in his first letter, and that is Sholem Aleichem’s device for setting the story in motion, is, we come to realize, the chance of a lifetime that Menakhem-Mendl can hardly be blamed — that he must even be credited with courage — for seizing.

Sheyne-Sheyndl, too, her narrow provincialism notwithstanding, is a sympathetically drawn figure. (This is especially true in the 1910 edition, in which Sholem Aleichem tempered her shrewishness.) Laughably ignorant and no more aware of her inner motives than Menakhem-Mendl is of his, she is nevertheless the more discerning of the two, and her love for her husband, or, more accurately, her pride in his education and ingrained sense of wifely duty that serve her as substitutes for love, survive — at least for as long as she keeps writing him — her growing exasperation at his folly. Nor, despite her complaints about his absence, is it clear how much she wants him back; rather, the more the two of them protest their mutual longing, the more we suspect that their separation suits them both. As unchallenged queen of her domestic realm, Sheyne-Sheyndl, sufficiently aided by her parents to manage financially, hardly needs a bumbling consort to get in her way, and considering that Yehupetz is a short journey from Kasrilevke, it is remarkable that she never carries out her threat of going there. Although her gossipy news items from Kasrilevke, which start in Chapter 2, may appear calculated at first glance to entice her husband back, a considered reading of them suggests that they represent more her acceptance of his permanent absence and the consequent need to keep him informed.

Indeed this is more than just a suspicion. In a letter written by Menakhem-Mendl not to Sheyne-Sheyndl but to (in the guise of an acquaintance) Sholem Aleichem and published in Der Yid in April 1900, two months after the last exchange in “Millions,” Menakhem-Mendl actually returns for a Passover seder to Kasrilevke — and to a wife less than overjoyed to see him. Arriving the day before the holiday when Sheyne-Sheyndl and her compulsively proverb-quoting mother are at the height of their preparations, he is greeted in the language of her epistolary tirades:

“Why, damn your eyes!” she said to me. “A fine time you’ve found to come home! For years you rot in that sickbed, you live in every hole there is, there’s no revolting thing you don’t do, and of all the times to come creeping home you choose the day before Passover, when we’re busy with the cleaning and there’s not a moment to talk.”[6]

Menakhem-Mendl dashes off this letter to Sholem Aleichem the same day, so that there is no knowing how long he stays in Kasrilevke, but when next heard from in August 1900 he is in Yehupetz again, writing Sheyne-Sheyndl about his new life as a writer. Sholem Aleichem never returned him to Kasrilevke and left the Passover visit out of the 1910 edition.

It should be apparent by now that the textual history of Menakhem-Mendl is complex. As was the case with Tevye, Sholem Aleichem did not at first create Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl with the idea of a book in mind. “Londons,” the first round of their correspondence, was originally conceived as a finished product in itself, an epistolary short story to which no sequel was planned. As was also the case with Tevye, however, husband and wife took on a life of their own. They were liked by their audience; and Sholem Aleichem, who was in the habit of keeping successful characters in the wings for further use, brought them back for repeat performances in “Stocks & Bonds” and “Millions.” Meanwhile, he introduced Menakhem-Mendl into other situations as well, making him a character in two plays and in the second chapter of Tevye the Dairyman, where he talks Tevye into lending him money for a joint investment that goes down the drain. In addition, Sholem Aleichem began a new series of letters between Menakhem-Mendl and himself, of which that describing the Passover visit to Kasrilevke was the second. Among the last of these were three letters from America, written in 1903–1904.[7]

Menakhem-Mendl’s American letters were a follow-up to “Always a Loser,” the sixth and last chapter of the 1910 edition, at the end of which Menakhem-Mendl informs Sheyne-Sheyndl that he is setting out for the port of Hamburg and the New World. When it originally appeared in 1901, however, “Always a Loser” was written to Sholem Aleichem, as also were Chapters 4 and 5 of the 1910 edition, “A Respectable Profession” and “It’s No Go,” both published in 1900.[8] This was the reason that in 1903, when Sholem Aleichem issued his first edition of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl’s collected letters, Chapters 4–6 were not in it. They were added to the 1910 edition after being rewritten and readdressed to Sheyne-Sheyndl, for whom the author composed replies for Chapter 4 alone.

Finally, Menakhem-Mendl was given one more lease on life in 1913, when Sholem Aleichem started a new series for the Warsaw newspaper Haynt in which Sheyne-Sheyndl is written regularly by her husband, now working for a Warsaw paper himself, on the subject of Jewish, Russian, and international politics. These letters (which conclude with several from Vienna, to which Menakhem-Mendl goes to cover a Zionist congress) fill a book twice the size of the 1910 edition. Yet not only do they lack the latter’s madcap verve and verbal sparkle, they are a contradiction in terms, since a Menakhem-Mendl who holds a paying job as a journalist is by definition no longer a Menakhem-Mendl. Neither Haynt not Sholem Aleichem were particularly happy with the series, and it was discontinued before the year was out and omitted by the author from all editions of his collected work.[9]

Against such a background of improvisation, revision, addition and deletion of material, and multiple versions of the same texts and characters, it can be asked who the real Menakhem-Mendl is. Is he the man who reaches New York and returns from there to Warsaw, or the one last heard from heading for Hamburg? Has he or has he not been back to Kasrilevke? Has he blown Tevye’s money or is there no evidence that the two men even know each other?

Of course such questions, like all that confuse fiction with reality, have no answer. They would never arise had the episodes left out of the 1910 edition been mere manuscript drafts that Sholem Aleichem discarded, it being their previous publication that makes one feel that they have “really happened.” And yet this does not make it any less meaningful to ask whether the 1910 edition reflects sound literary judgment. Numerous Yiddish critics have felt it does not. Some, like Y. Y. Trunk, have claimed that the 1903 edition is superior, since the three chapters added in 1910 are of a farcical quality that fails to sustain, as Trunk put it, “the tragic rhythm” of the earlier letters. Others, like Moyshe Mezhritsky, have gone further by contending that even the 1903 edition mistakenly sought to create a book out of independent parts that do not add up to a greater whole. “The chapters [of Menakhem-Mendl],” wrote Mezhritsky, “are not organically bound to one another…. You can change the order of Menakhem-Mendl, putting the last chapter first, without it being any the worse off, because at the end of it the characters are no different from what they were at the beginning.”[10]

The same accusation of being narratively static has also been leveled against Tevye and Motl, the forward movement of which, too, seems at times to be obstructed by repetitive patterns of plot, language, and behavior. Nor, inasmuch as Sholem Aleichem could not have written as voluminously as he did without occasionally resorting to such stratagems, is the charge wholly without merit. Ultimately, though, it is unjustified. Menakhem-Mendl, certainly, does change in the course of his letters, which span several years. (We can gauge the passing of time in them by the age of his son Moyshe-Hirshele, who is barely speaking in Chapter 2 and already learning to read in Chapter 4.) Although he may struggle to sound as jaunty in the last paragraph of his last letter as he does in the first paragraph of his first, his desperation grows perceptibly greater all the time. The man who writes to his wife in Chapter 6, after being bamboozled by a transparent insurance scam, “But it’s as your mother says: once a loser, always a loser,” is not the same man who wrote in Chapter 2, following the dive taken by his stocks, “When all is said and done, you see, I know the market inside and out…. Brains, praise God, I have as much of as any investor.” His self-confidence and self-respect (more precisely, the facade of them, since at bottom he has none to begin with) have been badly eroded.

As for Sheyne-Sheyndl, even if we do not interpret her silence in Chapters 5 and 6 as a decision to stop writing her husband (there is after all a more practical explanation: he is on the road and she has no address for him), we see her attitude toward him shift from semi-credulous hope to furious impatience and thence to open contempt. Like him, she still begins and ends her letters with the same rote formulas (real features of traditional Yiddish epistolary style that are comically contrasted by Sholem Aleichem with the actual content that they frame), but her belief in him, and in the prospect of his ever supporting their family, steadily shrinks.

The Israeli scholar Abraham Novershtern has written an essay pointing out, not only how rigorously Sholem Aleichem weighed the contents of the 1910 edition from a literary point of view, but how, in editing and arranging them, he gave them a dramatic structure that might be described (the image is mine) as funnel-shaped, since the more Menakhem-Mendl slides downward, the more his horizons close in on him.[11] Starting out in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, where he dreams of making millions in the futures market, he next unsuccessfully buys and sells shares in more provincial Kiev; then flops as a middleman working on commission; then fails as a writer, a “respectable profession,” as he puts it, but one that pays paltry sums; then, returning to small-town Ukraine, is made a fool of in the once but no longer reputable occupation of matchmaker; and finally is hoodwinked while peddling insurance in Bessarabia, a rural boondocks near the Rumanian border that makes Kasrilevke seem the center of the world. He has ended up considerably behind his starting point, and the lower the bar is set each time, the more crushing is his failure to clear it. What is left to try but America?

Although it would have been possible for Sholem Aleichem to readress Menakhem-Mendl’s 1903–1904 letters from New York to Sheyne-Sheyndl also, thus adding a seventh, American chapter to the 1910 edition, he had good reasons for not doing so. Between 1904 and 1910 he had been in America himself, and despite his personal disappointments there, he had seen what a land of opportunity for its Jewish immigrants it was. Even in 1903, he had had Menakhem-Mendl comment on the fundamental economic difference between the United States and Russia. On the one hand, writes Menakhem-Mendl, the immigrant to America takes any work, does things no one would dream of doing back home; why, he relates, he has just met a man, a respected Jew in the Old Country, who is proud to have found a job sorting dirty underwear in a laundry! Yet on the other hand, in America even a menial job like this pays well enough for a man to save — Menakhem-Mendl uses the Yiddishized English word onseyvn—and get ahead. Ot vos heyst a gebentsht land, “Now that’s what I call a blessed land,” he concludes in a tone midway between irony and amazement.[12]

Of course, one can be a Menakhem-Mendl in America, too, but with a difference, for here one’s failures are purely personal and in no way reflect the general condition. Even were he less of a shlemiel, Menakhem-Mendl could get nowhere in Russia, because there is no such thing there as upward mobility; he is indeed the stymied symbol of his class that the Marxist critics make him out to be, and his fantasies are his only alternative to accepting this. But who is to say what is fantasy in America? Ordinary people do make money there on the stock market, since it is not just a game for suckers, and Menakhem-Mendl’s harebrained scheme of a super-efficient chain of matchmaking bureaus with a centralized list of customers is harebrained only in Yehupetz. In America, with the help of an affordable bank loan, it just might work.

Menakhem-Mendl must therefore never make it to America, for whether he fails or succeeds there (and in his letters from New York he does succeed, launching the journalist’s career that eluded him in Yehupetz and that he is later to pursue in Warsaw), he either goes on being himself and ceases to be an archetype or becomes a new archetype and ceases to be himself. To be both the archetypal Jewish immigrant to America and himself, Sholem Aleichem had to invent someone else: Motl, Peysi the cantor’s son.

The “sunniest” of Sholem Aleichem’s major works, as it has been called, one in which the characteristically rambling, anxious voice of his protagonists yields to the direct speech of a high-spirited child, Motl, the Cantor’s Son has a simpler publishing history than Menakhem-Mendl; it too, however, bears the author’s typical stamp of multiple versions and interrupted composition. Part I, written under the influence of Sholem Aleichem’s 1906 visit to America, was serialized in 1907–1908 in the New York Yiddish paper Der Amerikaner. Twenty of its chapters were reprinted in book form in 1911; two others, “I Land a Swell Job” and “With the Emigrants,” omitted from the 1911 edition, have been restored in the present translation.[13] Part II, serialized in 1916 in the New York Yiddish paper Di Varhayt and in English translation in the New York World, was never finished. Sholem Aleichem was still writing it at the time of his death, and one can feel his health flagging as he wrote, the weekly installments growing shorter and more fragmentary, as if gasping for breath like Motl’s dying father in the book’s opening pages. Besides its seventeen completed chapters, several paragraphs were written of an eighteenth, tentatively titled Mir moofn, “We Moof [to a new apartment].”[14]

It is his father’s death in Kasrilevke, ironically, that makes Motl the most carefree boy in Jewish literature, for with it he has inherited the best of both worlds: a mother and an elder brother who still provide him with love and security, and a life unburdened by a patriarchal religion and its demands of strict decorum, long hours of study, and scrupulous attention to ritual observance. From the little we know about Peysi, Motl’s father, he would have enforced these demands rigorously, since as a synagogue cantor (and one, it would seem, of stern temperament) he is a foremost member of the religious establishment of the shtetl. Motl’s comic refrain of “Lucky me, I’m an orphan” is thus truer than a boy his age can comprehend. Emancipated from a tradition he is not weighed down by like his brother Elye, he is ready for the freedom of America before he even knows what or where it is.

Just how old Motl is when his father dies is, like the wanderings of Menakhem-Mendl or the number of Tevye’s daughters, a question of variant texts. In the present translation his age is mentioned in Chapter 1, where his brother calls him “almost nine,” in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 19, in which he tells us he is the same age as his friend Bumpy, who is “nine going on ten.” But although this is the wording of the posthumous 1920 edition of Motl edited by Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law Y. D. Berkovits, his Hebrew translator and a Hebrew author in his own right, it is not that of the 1911 edition edited by the author himself. There, Elye calls Motl a “five-year-old” and Bumpy is described as “seven going on eight.” “Nine” was Berkovits’ emendation, based on his, and possibly Sholem Aleichem’s reconsidered, judgment that Motl, as revealed to us by his language and perceptions, is too mature to be only five or even seven. Sholem Aleichem himself was clearly aware of this problem, because elsewhere he wavered over Motl’s age, making him six and eight in other passages in the serialized version of Part I that were deleted from the 1911 edition, and casting him as a boy of twelve or thirteen in a 1915 outline for a film script.[15]

It has been argued that these differences were deliberate and reflect the passage of time in the story, which some critics have viewed as either indeterminate or spanning a very long period.[16] A careful reading of the text, however, shows that it is neither and that approximately two and a half years elapse from beginning to end: some six months from the death of Motl’s father on the holiday of Shavuos in late spring to his family’s departure from Kasrilevke in autumn, soon after the High Holy Days; a year of traveling to New York, which is reached several days after Yom Kippur; and another year in New York, where summer has ended as the story breaks off. Moreover, even if we allow for Motl’s growing older — a boy of five-plus in Chapter 1 could indeed have turned seven by Chapter 19—the fact remains that it is in the book’s opening paragraphs, when Motl is youngest, that his language is most unlike a child’s. Conceivably, this could be explained by reading his narrative, or parts of it, as an adult recollection of childhood — a construction that, while it does not harmonize well with most of the text, is supported by a number of passages. (Most notably the lines in the chapter “On Solid Ground” in which Motl speaks of his friend Mendl from the vantage point of many years later.) Alternately, Khone Shmeruk has proposed that Sholem Aleichem might have begun the first chapter of Motl as a third- rather than first-person narrative and neglected to simplify its language when he made the switch.[17] One way or another, too much should not be made of such inconsistencies. Under the pressure of newspaper deadlines and bills to be paid Sholem Aleichem often wrote hurriedly, and the internal discrepancies resulting from this were not always eliminated in subsequent revisions.

Nor is the question of Motl’s age that crucial, because in the final analysis, it is not what he understands but what he sees and hears, often without understanding, that makes him our window on events. Although he is too young and buoyant to be worried about the things that trouble the adult world around him, he is also keenly curious, and our knowledge of this world and its complexities is the product of a partnership in which he observes and we interpret. It is only, for example, because Motl itches to “find out every secret in the world” that we overhear Pinye and Elye’s conversation in Kasrilevke about emigrating to America; but it is left to us to formulate what lies at the heart of the two men’s competitive relationship — namely, that while Elye prides himself on his enterprise and practicality, it is the absentminded Pinye who is the real innovator and initiator and Elye who gets dragged along behind him.

Motl and Pinye are natural allies. It is they, Motl tells us, who feel “made for America” and are sure they’ll “make it to the top there,” for they alone are sufficiently open to new experience to embrace it with both arms. Even before New York is reached, we know who in our party of travelers will Americanize the quickest, with the list headed by Motl, followed by Pinye, Elye, Brokheh, Taybl, and (although she will prove to have a resourcefulness of her own) Motl’s mother. Sholem Aleichem, a writer adept at making his main characters both believable individuals and representative types, was well aware that this reflected general categories. Young Jewish males, sociologically, were more eager to emigrate from eastern Europe than females, and less tradition-minded males like Pinye were the most so; upon arrival in the United States, acculturation proceeded in the same order. Unlike Elye, who continues to think in Old World terms, Pinye has cast these aside even before reaching “Ella’s Island.” It is he who supports going to work in a sweatshop as a first step up the economic ladder when Elye feels this is beneath his dignity; who throws himself into the garment workers’ strike that Elye holds back from; who first shaves off the beard that is a symbol of religious orthodoxy; who presses for going into business; who realizes that a corner stand is too small an operation; who grasps that aggressive advertising is the key to economic success in America. There may be something in him of Menakhem-Mendl, whose faith in the capitalist dream he shares, but Pinye understands the workings of capitalism as Menakhem-Mendl does not, and in him we see — although only in its earliest stages, since Motl, the Cantor’s Son breaks off before he can rise very far — the dream coming true.

Beginning with the writing of its first chapters, Sholem Aleichem intended Motl, the Cantor’s Son to be a saga of Russian-Jewish emigration to America in which Motl’s story would be continued through adolescence and into adulthood. His initial plan was for his hero to be a successful musician taking after his father, and the opening of Part I abounds in references to Motl’s musical talents. On his return trip from New York to Europe in 1907, however, Sholem Aleichem met aboard ship a young man, the son of Jewish immigrants to America, who was traveling to Europe to study art, and, much taken by him, converted Motl into a budding artist — a motif introduced for the first time in Chapter 17 of Part I, in which Motl tells us, “I’ve liked to draw since I was little.” As Dan Miron perceptively points out, the reason for this change was probably the author’s realization that, on a symbolic level, the character of Motl worked better if he did not follow in his father’s footsteps but rather struck out on his own in a creative field that, unlike music, was not traditionally Jewish.[18]

It is entertaining to speculate what would have become of Motl had his creator lived to keep writing about him. A well-known painter? A syndicated cartoonist? Perhaps even an animated filmmaker in Hollywood? Any of these would have been in keeping with Sholem Aleichem’s expansive sense of the prospects America held for its Jews, the historical acumen of which seems even greater in light of his own failure to do well there. (Motl itself was discontinued in 1908 because the editor of Der Amerikaner thought it boring!)

As for Pinye, who knows? “Prehzident,” which in his ignorance of constitutional law he believes himself eligible for, he will never be, nor as rich as his triumvirate of heroes, “Kahnegi,” “Rahknfelleh,” and “Vendehbilt.” But why not (if not a writer of lyrics for songs and Broadway musicals) president of his own large ad agency? He is still young, in his late teens or early twenties (Kasrilevke marriages take place at an early age — Elye’s when he has barely begun to grow a beard), and with his drive and a few years of night school, there is no reason why Pinye cannot go far.

Elye should do well as a small-time businessman. Despite his comic entrepreneurial adventures in Kasrilevke, he is too hesitant and brooding to take larger risks and has Brokheh at his side to see that he doesn’t. A nice “foinitsheh” store — after all, he already knows the business — seems a good bet, unless he ends up going into his father-in-law’s knish business.

Elye and even Pinye will always remain immigrants; they are too old to learn to speak English without an accent and this alone will mark them as first-generation Americans. Not Motl, however, who in a year or two will be indistinguishable from native-born New Yorkers his age. Already he is shooting marbles in the street; before long it will be stickball, handball, and off-the-stoop. He will become a Yankee, Dodger, or Giant fan; will finish P.S. 75 or 147 and go to Seward or Stuyvesant High; will spend long summer days at Coney Island. If he was nine in 1907, he may be sent to fight in World War I. He will be a young man during Prohibition; he will still be young when the Depression comes along. Too old to serve in World War II, he will be in his mid-fifties when he hears his first rock ’n’ roll and in his mid-sixties when John F. Kennedy is shot.

It is a bit of a shock to think of him this way. It is a shock to realize that his memories of Kasrilevke will become few and fuzzy; that although he will not forget his Yiddish, he will rarely or never speak it once his mother dies. In fact, had Sholem Aleichem lived to continue Motl’s story, he would have been confronted by a dilemma, because Motl will soon stop thinking in Yiddish. Would it have been feasible, from a literary point of view, to have him continue narrating in it? What psychological sense would this have made?

The rapid encroachment of English on Yiddish is a central theme in Part II of Motl. Put to comic effect there, it is nevertheless a reliable gauge of the speed with which Americanization is taking place. By contrast, one of the salient things about the book’s second half is how small a role Jewish tradition plays in it. Even in Part I, tradition fades increasingly into the background after Peysi the cantor’s death; although Motl grudgingly goes to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer, it is not clear how long he keeps this up, and once the family is on the road, the only religious rituals we hear of are a single accidental prayer quorum in London and the Yom Kippur service aboard the Prince Albert. Yet in America there is not even that much. Though Elye, it would seem, still observes the basics of Judaism and says his morning prayers before going to work, only his mother attends synagogue services, and the cuffs Elye gives Motl for smoking on the Sabbath — an act strictly prohibited by Jewish law — are less noteworthy than Motl’s reaction to them. “It seems that if Peysi the cantor’s son is caught smawkink on the Sabbath, you’re allowed to beat him to death,” Motl declares, not with defiance or guilt (that we last see aboard the Prince Albert, when he hopes God doesn’t know he is dreaming of food on Yom Kippur), but with the precocious amusement of one who no longer understands how such things could matter to anyone. If Motl — who once told us in Kasrilevke, in one of his few expressions of visceral Jewishness, of his hatred for pigs — has not already eaten his first New York ham sandwich, can we doubt that this is only a matter of time?

Will he one day marry out of his people — something that, to his family and even to himself, is still unimaginable in 1907? Perhaps not, since the years when he is most likely to marry will be ones of low intermarriage rates for American Jews. If he does raise Jewish children, however, this will be strictly sociologically determined. Internally, there is nothing we can detect in him — no inelasticity of self, no allegiance to his father’s memory — to keep him within the Jewish fold.

This is why Motl, the Cantor’s Son is not so cloudlessly sunny a work after all — or rather, why its sunshine is that of the summer that ends three times in the book: with the departure from Kasrilevke, with the embarkation from London, and with the final breaking off of the narrative. Though his two stays in New York barely added up to two years, Sholem Aleichem was quick to intuit the full enormity of the transformation that Jews in America were about to undergo. He was not oblivious to the sweatshops, the tenements, or the eastern European atmosphere of neighborhoods like the Jewish Lower East Side; these things are featured in Motl, too. But more than most Jewish writers and intellectuals of his time, with their view of America’s immigrant Jewish community as either another chapter in the repetitive cycle of Jewish history or part of a worldwide struggle against an oppressive capitalist order, he understood that America was something radically new: a truly gebentsht land for its Jews, who in return for its blessings would gladly relinquish the rich ethnic particularity that all his writing was about.

Motl is the happy ending of the eastern European Jewish tragedy, the rise after which there is no longer any fall. But he is also the end of Sholem Aleichem’s world, his face lifted to the kiss that will kill it benignly at the same time that it is being murdered brutally in Europe. Even had Sholem Aleichem kept writing about him, Motl would have outstripped his creator, venturing into realms that Sholem Aleichem did not know and could not have followed him in without holding him back. Sholem Aleichem died before he could lose him, just as Peysi the cantor did.