Secondly, there is the widespread use in Yiddish of Hebrew, not in the form of quotations, as with Tevye, but of idioms that have become rooted in popular speech, commonly transplanted there from religious texts and prayers. These occupy an ambivalent position: on the one hand, they are understood and used even by uneducated speakers, yet on the other, their Hebrew etymology continues to be recognized and their sacral origins are not obscured, so that they often produce ironic or comic effects. For example, when the arsonist who narrates “Burned Out” relates his neighbors’ suspicions of him, he does not say that they accuse him of “setting fire” to his house and store, but rather of “making boyrey me’oyrey ho’eysh.” Literally these Hebrew words mean “He Who creates the light of fire,” but they belong to a blessing (“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who creates the light of fire”) that is said every week in the havdalah, the ritual of ending the Sabbath on Saturday night, part of which involves lighting a candle (an act forbidden on the Sabbath itself) and holding one’s hand up to the flame. What can the translator do with such untranslatabilities, which are not uncommon in Yiddish, and especially not in a comic Yiddish like Sholem Aleichem’s? Shut his eyes and hope to think of something! And in this case I did, because suddenly I remembered a snatch of a comic ditty that I knew as a boy in New York about a Jew who burns down his store for the “inshurinks,” just like the narrator of “Burned Out.” It was sung in a Yiddish accent to the tune of the Zionist anthem Hatikvah, and one stanza of it went:
And so “to make borey me’oyrey ho’eysh” became “to give the match a scratch”—not an ideal solution perhaps, but certainly a passable one. One does the best one can. Sometimes it’s a matter of luck.
I have been translating fiction for many years, but from Hebrew, not from Yiddish, and this volume is the first full-scale Yiddish translation I have attempted. I wish, therefore, to express my deepest thanks to the editor of this series, Ruth Wisse, both for trusting and encouraging me to undertake this translation and for going over it with a fine-tooth comb. She was the safety net above which I felt free to be as acrobatic as I liked, knowing I would always be caught if I fell. This book is hers too.
I also wish to thank Michael Stern of Washington, D.C., for kindly letting me use an unpublished paper tracing the sources of Tevye’s Hebrew quotations, thus sparing me much arduous spadework; and my sister, Miriam Halkin Och, of Haifa University Library, for her generous help in obtaining bibliographical materials.
HILLEL HALKIN
Tevye the Dairyman
TEVYE STRIKES IT RICH
If you’re meant to strike it rich, Pan Sholem Aleichem, you may as well stay home with your slippers on, because good luck will find you there too. The more it blows the better it goes, as King David says in his Psalms — and believe me, neither brains nor brawn has anything to do with it. And vice versa: if it’s not in the cards you can run back and forth till you’re blue in the face, it will do as much good as last winter’s snow. How does the saying go? Flogging a dead horse won’t make it run any faster. A man slaves, works himself to the bone, is ready to lie down and die — it shouldn’t happen to the worst enemy of the Jews. Suddenly, don’t ask me how or why, it rains gold on him from all sides. In a word, revakh vehatsoloh ya’amoyd layehudim, just like it says in the Bible! That’s too long a verse to translate, but the general gist of it is that as long as a Jew lives and breathes in this world and hasn’t more than one leg in the grave, he musn’t lose faith. Take it from my own experience — that is, from how the good Lord helped set me up in my present line of business. After all, if I sell butter and cheese and such stuff, do you think that’s because my grandmother’s grandmother was a milkman? But if I’m going to tell you the whole story, it’s worth hearing from beginning to end. If you don’t mind, then, I’ll sit myself down here beside you and let my horse chew on some grass. He’s only human too, don’t you think, or why else would God have made him a horse?
Well, to make a long story short, it happened early one summer, around Shavuos time. But why should I lie to you? It might have been a week or two before Shavuos too, unless it was several weeks after. What I’m trying to tell you is that it took place exactly a dog’s age ago, nine or ten years to the day, if not a bit more or less. I was the same man then that I am now, only not at all like me; that is, I was Tevye then too, but not the Tevye you’re looking at. How does the saying go? It’s still the same lady, she’s just not so shady. Meaning that in those days — it should never happen to you! — I was such a miserable beggar that rags were too good for me. Believe me, I’m no millionaire today either. If from now until autumn the two of us earned a tenth of what it would take to make me half as rich as Brodsky, we wouldn’t be doing half badly. Still, compared to what I was then, I’ve become a real tycoon. I’ve got my own horse and wagon; I’ve got two cows that give milk, bless them, and a third cow waiting to calve; forgive me for boasting, but we’re swimming in cheese, cream, and butter. Not that we don’t work for it, mind you; you won’t find any slackers at my place. My wife milks the cows; the girls carry the cans and churn butter; and I, as you see, go to the market every morning and from there to all the summer dachas in Boiberik. I stop to chat with this person, with that one; there isn’t a rich Jew I don’t know there. When you talk with such people, you know, you begin to feel that you’re someone yourself and not such a one-armed tailor any more. And I’m not even talking about Sabbaths. On Sabbaths, I tell you, I’m king, I have all the time in the world. Why, I can even pick up a Jewish book then if I want: the Bible, Psalms, Rashi, Targum, Perek, you name it … I tell you, if you could only see me then, you’d say, “He’s really some fine fellow, that Tevye!”