Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

It has been commonly remarked that while in most humor the self, be it individual or collective, laughs at that which is unlike it and with which it does not identify, thereby proclaiming its own superiority, in Jewish humor it laughs at itself — the explanation for this presumably being that among a people with so long a history of persecution, the most pressing task of humor has been to neutralize the hostility of the outside world, first by internalizing it (“Why should I care what the world thinks of me, when I think even less of myself?”) and then by detonating it through a joke (“Nevertheless, the world doesn’t know what it’s talking about, because in fact I am much cleverer than it is — the proof being that it has no idea how funny I am, and I do!”). There is doubtless much truth in this, provided one realizes that the type of humor in question is not historically very Jewish at all and first makes its appearance in Jewish literature in the course of the nineteenth century, especially in the second half. Before that, Jews reacted to hatred and oppression in a variety of ways — with defiance, with scorn, with anger, with bitterness, with vengefulness, with lamentation, with (and perhaps here the seeds of modern Jewish humor were first sown) copious self-accusation — but never, as far as can be determined from the literary sources, with laughter directed at themselves. This is strictly a latter-day method of coping (one prompted perhaps by the loss of the religious faith that had given meaning to Jewish tribulations in the past), and Sholem Aleichem is one of its great developers and practitioners.

The fact that the inner dialectic of such humor (which, despite its defensive function, can easily undermine the ego from within) became in the hands of Sholem Aleichem a therapeutic force of the first order is one of his most extraordinary achievements. It is a matter of record that the Jews of his time who read his work, or heard him read it himself at the many public performances that he gave, not only laughed until their ribs ached at his unsparing portrayals of their perversity, ingenuity, anxiety, tenacity, mendacity, humanity, unplumbable pain, and invincible hopefulness, they emerged feeling immeasurably better about themselves and their fate as Jews. His appearance in a Russian shtetl on one of his tours was a festive event: banquets were given in his honor, lecture halls were filled to overflowing, pleas for favorite stories were shouted at him from the audience, encores were demanded endlessly, crowds accompanied him to the railroad station to get a last glimpse of him before he went. Besides being a sensitive performer — contemporary accounts describe him as reading his stories aloud with great restraint and simplicity, never overacting or burlesquing them — he clearly touched his listeners in a place where nothing else, except perhaps their ancient prayers and rituals, was able to. He gave them a feeling of transcendence.

This feeling, as has been stated, had nothing to do with the sense of being “above it all,” with that comforting assurance given us by a great deal of comic literature that life is ultimately so silly a business that there is no point in taking it too seriously. Quite the opposite: Sholem Aleichem’s humor demanded of its readers that they take life seriously indeed — nor, in any case, with pogroms and hunger often at the door, were they in any position not to. His comedy did not lift them above the suffering world that they were part of; it lifted them together with it. The laughter his work evoked was not that of contempt, or of embarrassment, or of relief, or even of sympathy, but rather of identification and acceptance. “You who have been through all this,” it said, “and who know that such are our lives and that no amount of self-delusion can make them less so — you who have experienced fear, and humiliation, and despair, and defeat, and are aware that there is more yet to come — you to whom all this has happened and who still have been able to laugh — you, my friends, need no consolation, because you have already prevailed.” Those who rose at the end of such an evening to give him a standing ovation were also paying tribute to themselves.

2

Readers of Tevye the Dairyman who are familiar with the play or movie Fiddler on the Roof will notice that, in more ways than one, there is scant resemblance between Sholem Aleichem’s novel and the charming musical based on it. (Indeed, this is true even of the musical’s name, which does not come from the work of Sholem Aleichem at all but from the art of Marc Chagall with its recurrent motif of a sad-gay Jewish fiddler playing upon the rooftops of a Russian village.) To begin with, there is the tone: unlike Fiddler which, whether sad or gay, keeps within the range of the safely sentimental, Tevye has a giddy energy, a recklessness of language and emotion, a dizzy oscillation of wildly funny and wrenchingly painful scenes that come one on top of another without letup. In addition, the dramatic plot of Fiddler on the Roof is culled from just four of the eight Tevye episodes, the third, fourth, fifth, and eighth, so that Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7 have no bearing on it. Lastly, in Fiddler Tevye has only three daughters, Tsaytl, Hodl, and Chava, whereas in Tevye … but how many daughters Tevye has in Tevye is a question we will come to in a moment. Suffice it to say first that, quite apart from the pointlessness of comparing two such different treatments simply because one derives from the other, similar departures from the text of Tevye (except for its being set to music) were made in 1914 by Sholem Aleichem himself for a dramatized version of the book that had a long stage life of its own. In fact, his cannibalization of the novel was even more extreme than the musical’s: essentially it utilized only Chapters 5 and 8, and Tevye’s daughters were reduced to two, Tsaytl and Chava, the plot revolving entirely around Chava and her marriage to and ultimate break-up with Chvedka, the Ukrainian villager, leaving Tsaytl in a mere supporting role. In sentimentality, too, Sholem Aleichem’s play, written as it clearly was with one eye on the box office of the highly commercial Yiddish theater, is every bit the equal of Fiddler on the Roof, which is without a doubt the more stage-worthy of the two.

But how many daughters does the original Tevye have? As Professor Khone Shmeruk has shown in an absorbing study, the uncertain answer to this question casts considerable light on the composition of the book as a whole. In its opening episode, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” which first appeared in 1894 and was revised in 1897, the number of Tevye’s daughters is given as seven. In Chapter 2, “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune,” and Chapter 3, “Today’s Children,” which is about Tsaytl, Tevye’s oldest daughter (both were published in 1899), no count is given at all. In “Hodl” and “Chava” (1904 and 1905) we again read of seven girls — yet in Chapter 6, “Shprintze” (1907), there are only six, the two youngest of whom are Beilke and Teibl, while in Chapters 7 and 8 (1909 and 1914) Teibl has vanished and only Beilke remains. What can be concluded from this? Clearly, it would seem, that Sholem Aleichem planned Tevye in several stages, each representing a modification of his previous conception. Indeed, the first episode, which was based on his acquaintance with an actual milkman whom he befriended one summer in the resort town of Boyarka near Kiev (the “Boiberik” of the novel), was no doubt written as an independent story with little or no thought of a sequel, its figure of seven nameless daughters being no more than a way of saying “many.” Also probably meant to stand by itself was the second episode, in which Tevye meets Menachem Mendl, who was already the comic hero of another, epistolary work of fiction that Sholem Aleichem was working on at the time. By the third, or at the latest, fourth chapter, on the other hand, Sholem Aleichem had evidently decided to write a series about Tevye’s daughters, which meant producing seven more stories, one for each of them; yet in Chapter 6, either tiring of the subject or feeling he was running out of material, he reduced their number to six, and in Chapter 7, he cut it again to five. This chapter, in fact, was evidently intended to conclude the Tevye cycle with Tevye’s departure for Palestine, since in 1911, with Sholem Aleichem’s authorization, it was printed together with the first six episodes as a book called Tevye the Dairyman—the first time such a title was used for the series as a whole. The eighth and last episode, added several years later, was apparently written as an afterthought (one motive, Shmeruk conjectures, being the desire to return Chava to the bosom of her family). Having written it, however, Sholem Aleichem must have planned at least one further installment, because he did not give this story, “Lekh-Lekho,” a coda-like ending, as he did Chapter 7, and only subsequently sought to make up for the omission by adding a brief fragment that was published shortly before his death.[1]

1

This fragment, which was given the tongue-twisting Hebrew name of Vekhalaklakoys, after the verse in Psalms 35:6, Yehi darkom khoyshekh vekhalaklakoys, “Let their path be dark and slippery,” was written in 1914, the same year as “Lekh-Lekho,” but not published until two years later. Though it seems to have been begun as a genuine sequel to “Lekh-Lekho,” that is, as a ninth episode of Tevye, it is less than a third of the average length of the other stories, repeats much of the material in Chapter 8 without adding anything essentially new, and has a rather tired quality that contrasts with the sparkle of the rest of the book. Still, one cannot call it unfinished; on the contrary, it contains precisely the “finale” that Chapter 8 lacks. In the absence of explanatory biographical material, of which there appears to be none, one can only speculate what this fragment represents. My own guess is as follows: while Sholem Aleichem indeed intended to write a full-length sequel to “Lekh-Lekho” and began it immediately after finishing the latter, he soon, whether because of failing health or because he realized that the book had reached its natural conclusion and had nowhere else to go, gave it up — though not before hastening to write a proper end for it, his main concern being that Tevye should have one. Unhappy with the results, however, he refrained from publishing this, possibly hoping to revise and expand it; yet ultimately, seeing this was not to be, he consented to its publication in the days before his death. Subsequently, in all the Yiddish editions of Tevye printed after Sholem Aleichem’s death, the Vekhalaklakoys fragment has appeared as its last chapter.

As the translator of Tevye, I was in a dilemma. On the one hand, Vekhalaklakoys was published by Sholem Aleichem himself in his lifetime, and without it Tevye has no real end; yet on the other hand, apart from its last page, not only does it add nothing to the remainder of the work, it qualitatively detracts from it. What was one to do? In the end I decided to follow the example of Frances Butwin’s 1948 English translation of Tevye and to omit most of the fragment some six pages of Yiddish text in all, retaining only the final coda, which I spliced on to the end of “Lekh-Lekho,” adding several lines of my own to make the transition smoother. Though taking such a liberty in translating a classic of world literature may seem presumptuous to some readers, I would like to think that Sholem Aleichem might have welcomed it. Besides always being open to criticism of his work, frequently revising it as a result, he encouraged his Russian and Hebrew translators, whom he personally helped and advised, to be extremely free in their renditions. Anyone comparing his Yiddish with the Hebrew translations by his son-in-law Y. D. Berkovits, for example, and especially with Berkovits’ translation of Tevye, in which Sholem Aleichem was an active collaborator, will be struck by the enormous differences between them. (Berkovits himself omitted the Vekhalaklahoys fragment entirely in his complete Hebrew edition of the novel, which he ended with “Lekh-Lekho,” but this was apparently his own decision, made after Sholem Aleichem’s death.) There will no doubt come a time for variorum editions of Tevye in which the full text of Vekhalaklakoys can appear alongside whatever ending the translator cares to give the book.

Apart from this fragment, I have departed (as did Berkovits) from the standard Yiddish text of Tevye in one other place. When the first episode of the book, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” was published in 1894, it was accompanied by a brief preface, purporting to be a letter written by Tevye to Sholem Aleichem, the literary purpose of which was to introduce Tevye to the reader. Though this preface was later republished as part of the novel as a whole, it was clearly written for “Tevye Strikes It Rich” alone, makes no reference to any of the stories that come after it, and cannot possibly be construed as applying to them. I have therefore omitted it.