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

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

  Sholem Aleichem

  Translated and with an Introduction by Hillel Halkin

  Yale University Press

  New Haven and London

  For Lucy S. Dawidowicz

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl

  Londons: The Odessa Exchange

  Stocks & Bonds: The Yehupetz Exchange

  Millions: Traders, Agents, and Speculators

  An Honorable Profession: Menakhem-Mendl Becomes a Writer

  It’s No Go: Menakhem-Mendl the Matchmaker

  Always a Loser: Menakhem-Mendl the Insurance Agent

  Motl, the Cantor’s Son

  Part One

  THE CALF AND I

  LUCKY ME—I’M AN ORPHAN!

  WHAT WILL BECOME OF ME?

  MY BROTHER ELYE GETS MARRIED

  I LAND A SWELL JOB

  SWIMMING IN CHICKEN FAT

  MY BROTHER ELYE’S SOFT DRINK

  WE FLOOD THE WORLD WITH INK

  OUR INK BUSINESS COMES TO A SAD END

  THE STREET THAT SNEEZED

  OUR FRIEND PINYE

  WE’RE OFF TO AMERICA!

  RUNNING THE BORDER

  WE’RE IN BRODY!

  THE LEMBERG COMMITTEE

  WITH THE EMIGRANTS

  GOD IS A FATHER AND VIENNA IS A TOWN

  THE WONDERS OF ANTWERP

  THE GANG’S ALL HERE

  THE GANG BREAKS UP

  SO LONG, ANTWERP!

  LONDON, YOU SHOULD BURN!

  Part Two

  CONGRATULATIONS! WE’RE IN AMERICA!

  CROSSING THE RED SEA

  IN DETENTION

  AN OCEAN OF TEARS

  ON SOLID GROUND

  THE STRITS OF NEW YORK

  THE GANG AT WORK

  WE LOOK FOR A DZHAHB

  WORKING IN A SHAHP

  WE’RE ON STREIK!

  KASRILEVKE IN NEW YORK

  MAKING A LIVING

  GOD’S CURE

  WE’RE KEHLEHKTEHZ!

  WE GO INTO BIZNIS

  HALLAW, HOMEBOY!

  THE BIZNIS GROWS

  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 Loyef
f ’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 Sh
olem 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.