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

  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 Bes
sarabia, 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.10

  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.