Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories Read online

  THE LIBRARY OF YIDDISH CLASSICS IS SPONSORED BY THE FUND FOR THE TRANSLATION OF JEWISH LITERATURE

  We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the late M. H. Blinken and the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal in supporting the translation of this volume.

  Serie, editor: Ruth R. Wisse

  Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories

  by Sholem Aleichem

  Translated and with an Introduction by Hillel Halkin

  The I. L. Peretz Reader

  Edited and with an Introduction by Ruth R. Wisse

  The Dybbuk and Other Writings

  by S. Ansky

  Edited and with an Introduction by David G. Roskies

  Translations by Golda Werman

  Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler:

  Fishke the Lame and Benjamin the Third

  by S. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher Sforim)

  Edited by Dan Miron and Ken Frieden

  Introduction by Dan Miron

  Translations by Ted Gorelick and Hillel Halkin

  Translation copyright © 1987 by Schocken Books Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Yiddish as Tevye der Milkhiker and Ayznban geshikhtes: Ksovim fun a komivoyazher. Translation first published by Schocken Books Inc. in 1987. Translated with the permission of the family of Sholem Aleichem.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916.

  Tevye the dairyman and The railroad stories.

  (Library of Yiddish Classics)

  Translation of Tevye der milkhiker and Ayznban geshikhtes: Ksovim fun a komivoyazher.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79524-3

  I. Halkin, Hillel, 1939- II. Sholem Aleichem, 1859-1916.

  Ayznban geshikhtes: Ksovim fun a komivoyazher. English. 1987. III.

  Title. IV. Title: Railroad stories. V. Series.

  PJ5129.R2T4518 1987 839’.0933 86-24835

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Hillel Halkin

  Tevye the Dairyman

  Tevye Strikes It Rich

  Tevye Blows a Small Fortune

  Today’s Children

  Hodl

  Chava

  Shprintze

  Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel

  Lekh-Lekho

  The Railroad Stories

  To the Reader

  Competitors

  The Happiest Man in All Kodny

  Baranovich Station

  Eighteen from Pereshchepena

  The Man from Buenos Aires

  Elul

  The Slowpoke Express

  The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah

  The Wedding that Came without Its Band

  The Tallis Koton

  A Game of Sixty-Six

  High School

  The Automatic Exemption

  It Doesn’t Pay to Be Good

  Burned Out

  Hard Luck

  Fated for Misfortune

  Go Climb a Tree If You Don’t Like It

  The Tenth Man

  Third Class

  Glossary and Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  A little over a century ago, in 1883, an aspiring writer of comic talents named Sholem Rabinovich, who was then serving as a “crown rabbi,” a state-appointed clerical functionary in a small Jewish community in the Ukraine, published a satirical account of local politics in the St. Petersburg Yiddishe Folksblat and playfully signed it “Sholem Aleichem”—that is to say, “Hello There!” It was not his first alias. He already had, and would continue to assemble, a precocious collection of pseudonyms, including such curiosities as “Solomon Bikherfresser” (Solomon Bookeater), “Baron Pipernoter” (Baron Ogre), “Terakhs an Eynikl” (Terach’s Grandson), and “Der Yiddisher Gazlen” (The Robber Jew). Compared with these titles, however, which had at best a slapstick humor, the ancient Hebrew salutation first employed in the Folksblat (its Arabic cognate of salaam aleykum can be heard today throughout the Middle East) was a prescient choice. Meaning literally “peace be upon you,” the phrase is used in Yiddish not as an everyday greeting but as a more emphatic one that is reserved for either old acquaintances long unmet or new ones just introduced; thus, besides encoding in the form of a pun Rabinovich’s own name of “Sholem,” it pithily anticipated the career of an author who, over the next three decades, was to come and go in the Yiddish press from one newspaper and magazine to another, delighting an ever-growing audience with his unpredictable appearances before vanishing again until the next time. Gradually he used the new pen name more and more. It did not replace its rivals all at once, but by 1894, the year in which the first chapter of what is possibly the greatest of all Jewish novels, Tevye the Dairyman, appeared in the pages of the Warsaw yearbook Der Hoyzfraynt, it had become an exclusive trademark recognized by Yiddish readers everywhere. Eventually his own friends and intimates took to calling him by it too. Whereas Sholem Aleichem had once been Sholem Rabinovich, Sholem Rabinovich was now Sholem Aleichem, the private man subsumed in the public identity of the world’s most famous Yiddish writer.

  Yet if comedy seems to imply a sufficient degree of well-being to make laughter possible, the debut of Sholem Aleichem as a comic Jewish writer did not come at an auspicious time. Indeed, coinciding as it did with the drastic deterioration in the Jewish situation in Russia that began in 1881 with the assassination of Alexander II and the bloody pogroms that followed, it could hardly have come at a worse one. Today, it is true, when modern Jewish history is read backwards in the monstrous light of the Holocaust, it is difficult to be as shocked as contemporaries were by the plight of Russian Jewry in the last decades of the Czarist Empire, during which the number of Jews murdered by Christian mob violence did not exceed several hundred. But in the context of its own time and place, the era of 1881–1917 in Russia was an exceedingly black period, the most savage experienced by Jews anywhere since the terrible massacres of Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks in the Ukraine in 1648–1649. Moreover, not only were the pogroms that took place under Alexander III and his successor, Nicholas II, actually incited and approved by the Russian government, they were part of an official policy of anti-Semitism calculated to render life so intolerable for the country’s Jewish inhabitants that, in the notorious words of Alexander Ill’s adviser Constantine Pobyedonostzev, a third of them would be forced to emigrate, a third to convert, and a third to perish from hunger. One has to go back to the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion of 1492 to find a previous instance of a European government setting out on a deliberate course of first terrorizing and then eliminating its Jewish population.

  Such were the times that Sholem Aleichem wrote about—and that, remarkably for a humorist, he wrote about without either ridiculing or rose-tinting, neither saying to his reader, “Laugh and be above it,” nor telling him, “Come, it’s not as bad as you think; let me show you the brighter side.” On the contrary: it was consistently his method, for all the near-manic exuberance of his prose, to confront the reader with reality in its full harshness, laughter being for him the explosive with which he systematically mined all escape routes away from the truth. Despite the exaggeration that is an ingredient of all humor, he had a reportorial passion for fact; more than one of his stories actually came from reading the morning newspaper. In the absence of other sources, one could infer much of the history and sociology of the Russian Jewry of his
time from his work alone. And because, before one can fully appreciate this work’s universal dimensions (of which he himself was well aware) one must read it as the specific anatomy of Russian Jewish existence that it was, a few more words about the latter may be helpful.

  Russia did not develop a Jewish problem; it swallowed one whole. Unlike other European countries, whose Jewish populations were built up in medieval times by a slow process of migration, often initially encouraged by rulers wishing to benefit from Jewish commercial skills and contacts, the Russian state, which had traditionally barred Jews entirely, suddenly acquired large numbers of them, and without any desire to do so, by virtue of the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, and the revisions of them made by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Overnight, as it were, the Jewish communities of eastern and central Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine found themselves on annexed Russian soil—beyond whose boundaries, however, the Czarist regime in St. Petersburg had no intention of letting them spread. And so by the end of the eighteenth century, there had come into being the human enclosure of the Pale of Settlement, that vast ghetto of western and southwestern Russia to which millions of Jews were confined by a jumble of confusing laws. Although it ran roughly along the lines of the new territories, the Pale as an entity was never clearly defined; its exact borders kept shifting as different parts of it were declared in or out of bounds according to the whims of bureaucrats, the outward pressure of the Jews bottled up inside it, and the counterpressure of anti-Jewish officials and Russian merchants fearing Jewish competition. Thus, for instance, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, the “Yehupetz” of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction and the city in which he lived for many years, was first opened to Jews (1794), then barred to them (1835), then put back on limits for temporary visits only (1862), then gradually reopened to Jewish residence by special permit, which depended on the petitioner’s profession and the connections he happened to have. Even more filled with reversals was the history of Jewish residential rights in the Pale’s rural villages, as opposed to its cities and towns. Originally left to the discretion of the local nobility in 1797, rural residence for Jews was denied in 1804, temporarily restored in 1807, redenied that same year, restored again in 1808, partially revoked once more in 1823, and so back and forth until 1910, when a final wave of rural expulsions began. Not all the restrictions on the books, of course, were always put into practice; yet even when they were not, the ever-present anxiety that they might be was enough to make a nightmare of the lives of great numbers of Jews who, generally for reasons of economic opportunity, were domiciled illegally.

  Confinement to the Pale of Settlement, however, was not the worst of Russian Jewry’s problems. Far more onerous was the fact that within the Pale itself, where most Jews lived in grinding poverty, they were discriminated against at every turn by an imperial administration that, lacking Pobyedonostzev’s inclusive vision, could never quite make up its mind whether it wished to starve them or assimilate them, and so alternated between the most oppressive features of both approaches. Jews were excluded from local councils and trade guilds, even in towns where they formed a majority of the inhabitants. They were made to pay special and frequently humiliating taxes—a head tax, a property tax, a tax on the slaughter of kosher meat, a tax on Sabbath candles, a tax on the right to wear their traditional clothes. They were barred at different times and places from a wide range of occupations—law, agriculture, tavern keeping, the production and sale of liquor, the retailing of manufactured articles, the employment of their wives as market vendors. They were harassed in the education of their children, now forced to send them to Russianizing schools and now confronted with a system of quotas that made a Russian schooling almost impossible. And they were subjected to especially harsh draft laws, being inducted into the army in higher percentages and for longer terms of service than other sectors of the population. This last affliction reached a horrendous extreme in the reign of Nicholas I, who decreed in 1827 that an annual number of Jewish boys aged twelve and up should be taken to the army for premilitary training until they turned eighteen, at which time they were to be drafted for twenty-five years. These “cantonists,” as the unfortunate children were called, rarely saw their homes again, and until its abolition by Alexander II in 1856, the institution of juvenile conscription struck terror into the hearts of Jewish families. Extortionate bribery, child snatching, and the physical mutilation of one’s sons were some of the measures employed to ensure that the boy taken to the army was not one’s own.

  Under Alexander II, whose liberalizing tendencies were most prominently expressed by his emancipation of the Russian serfs, the condition of the Jews improved too; some of the discriminatory legislation against them was relaxed, and a more thorough removal of the rest was contemplated. Yet even before Alexander’s assassination in 1881 by a bomb-throwing revolutionary, further progress had become mired in a welter of indecisive commissions of inquiry, and with the succession of his son, Alexander III, the anti-Jewish outlook of former years was revived with fresh vigor. There was now, moreover, a new factor that made this policy more brutal than ever: the desire to blame the Jews for the growing revolutionary movement, thus simultaneously discrediting the revolutionaries by painting them as Jewish conspirators, and deflecting the grievances of the Russian peasantry and working class from the government to the Jews. For the first time, government persecution of the Jews ceased to be a simple matter of social and economic containment and became a political tool. An idea of the cynical cruelty with which this tool was wielded can be gained even from an abbreviated chronology of the rash of anti-Semitic decrees and outbreaks that followed in the next several years:

  1881/ Government-incited pogroms in Yelisavetograd, Kiev, and elsewhere in the Ukraine, as well as in Warsaw; the government officially blames them on Jewish economic exploitation of the masses, which have been driven to exact their just revenge.

  1882/ Jews are again forbidden to settle in any of the rural sections of the Pale of Settlement (that is, in ninety percent of its area) or to buy property there. Jews already living in the villages are made subject to expulsion if they do not own their homes, if they move from village to village, or if they are absent from the village they live in for even a few days.

  1883/ Pogroms in Rostov-on-Don; thousands of Jews living illegally in St. Petersburg are rounded up by the police and expelled.

  1884/ Pogrom in Nizhni-Novgorod.

  1887/ All high schools and universities within the Pale of Settlement (where Jews, though roughly a tenth of the inhabitants, form a majority of the literate population) are limited to a Jewish quota of ten percent of their student bodies.

  1890/ Numerous towns in the Pale are reclassified as villages, from which Jews are therefore expelled; Jews are disqualified throughout the Pale of Settlement from voting for deputies in local elections.

  1891/ Twenty thousand Jews are expelled from Moscow.

  1894/ Jews are forbidden to change their names to non-Jewish ones; Jewish identity passes are marked with the word “Jew.”

  1899–1900/ More pogroms in the Ukraine; in Vilna a Jew is put on trial on the atavistic charge of attempting to murder a Christian girl in order to bake Passover matsoh from her blood. (This medieval “blood libel” was to be repeated in 1911 in the more famous case of Mendel Beilis, which attracted worldwide attention.)

  1903/ The worst pogrom yet in Kishinev; forty-five Jews killed, eighty-six severely wounded, fifteen hundred Jewish houses and stores looted and demolished. Pogrom in Homel; when Jews try for the first time to defend themselves with arms, thirty-six are indicted for attacking Christians.

  1904/ Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war; Jews are called up in disproportionate numbers; the number of Jewish soldiers sent to the front is also disproportionately large.

  Even the popular-backed Revolution of 1905, which broke out in the aftermath of Russia’s defeat by Japan and led Nicholas II to grant a short-lived liberal constitution th
at aroused, among other things, extravagant hopes of a new age for Russia’s Jews, only ended in the further shedding of Jewish blood: the ink on the constitutional manifesto had hardly dried when gangs of counterrevolutionary thugs known as “the Black Hundreds,” organized with the complicity of the Czarist police, attacked Jewish neighborhoods all over Russia under the cover of nationalist slogans holding the Jews responsible for the country’s troubles and accusing them of subverting the authority of the Czar in order to seize power themselves. The worst of these pogroms took place in Odessa, where over three hundred Jews were killed, thousands injured, and tens of thousands left homeless. Another that occurred in Kiev was witnessed by Sholem Aleichem himself from the window of the hotel in which he had taken refuge with his family. Soon afterward he left Russia, never to return again except for brief visits until his death in New York in 1916.

  In taking his departure, of course, Sholem Aleichem was joining a flood of Jews heading westward; it is estimated that between 1881 and 1914, when World War I shut the gates of emigration, nearly three million Jews left the Russian Empire, mostly for the United States. This mass flight, however, only partially relieved congestion within the Pale itself, both because of a high birthrate and because economic pressures and the rural expulsions led to an internal migration of Jews to the crowded quarters of the larger towns, where mass proletarization took place. Despairing of a future under the Czarist regime, many young Jews turned to the revolutionary movement. If at the time of Alexander II’s assassination the specter of Jewish insurrectionism had been largely a red herring, by the first decade of the twentieth century it was an unassailable fact. Jews were active in large numbers in the two major underground parties, the Social Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, and in 1897 they formed a clandestine Marxist organization of their own, the League of Jewish Workingmen, or “Bund.” Jewish youth that was not politically active was becoming modernized too, so that a yawning gap developed between an older generation that still clung to the traditional ways and a younger one that was rapidly forsaking them. Russian began to displace Yiddish in daily speech (it is an astounding symptom of the times that Sholem Aleichem himself spoke Russian to his wife and children!) and the medieval culture of Orthodox Judaism that had remained intact for centuries was in the process of crumbling. Everywhere, battered from without and eroded from within, Jewish life was in a state of flux, disarray, decomposition.