Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son Read online

  But why should Tevye tell Sholem Aleichem his story? What, under the changing circumstances, could be the purpose of the telling? It could be quasi commercial: Tevye’s story is something valuable that Sholem Aleichem might want to buy, or as he delicately puts it, “It’s worth your while, I swear, to listen to the entire story from beginning to end.” Sholem Aleichem, in his turn, could pay Tevye back with money or advertisement, or even more desirable, he could pay Tevye by listening to his stories, not only because they are fresh merchandise, grist for an author’s mill, but also because as a writer Sholem Aleichem cannot fail to be charmed by them and thus offer Tevye his needed self-exposure.

  This need for self-exposure explains, more than anything else, Tevye’s motivation for bonding with the literary persona, a bond that becomes on both sides progressively stronger, more emotionally charged, and more complex. Sholem Aleichem initially presents Tevye as a type, a jolly character, one of the many that he makes fun of and regales his readers with, but he stops doing so by the second tale, moving ever-larger parts of his mental being into alignment with Tevye’s interiority. As the Hebrew writer J. H. Brenner aptly put it, Sholem Aleichem becomes “Tevye’s bard,” even his “stenographer de gracia dei,”5 taking dictation and adding to his protagonist’s flow of speech the amenities of felicitous écriture.

  This symbiosis between two such different entities—a traditional, half-educated, provincial dairyman and the literary persona of a modern writer—may seem strange, but it actually is inevitable, at least as far as Tevye and his needs are concerned. Tevye understands instinctively that only an artist, perhaps a storyteller like himself, can serve as his confessor. What other figure of intellectual or moral authority could he turn to? A rabbi or a Chasidic saint would regard the way he has brought up his daughters as scandalous, for it contradicts the basic tenets of both the Halacha and the tradition. No God-fearing person would permit his unmarried daughters to become friendly with young men of questionable morals, including a Gentile—what can he expect for such a sin other than a terrible retribution? By the same token, blaming God for the consequences of one’s behavior amounts to the worst kind of blasphemy: Tevye should prostrate himself before God and dedicate the rest of his life to repentance—such would probably be the reaction of a traditional sage. Nor could Tevye expect a more positive reaction from a modern secularist or humanist, who would damn him for being passive, unable to fend for himself and protect his family; for evading his moral responsibilities; for shifting the burden of his failings onto an irrelevant God; for being deeply prejudiced against women; for being spiritually swaddled and mummified within an irrelevant textual cocoon; and so on. A moralist would point with derision to his craving for riches achieved through no effort of his own. A socialist would decry his respect for money, power, and social status. A Jewish scholar would laugh at his scholarly pretensions and pronounce him a fake, an ignoramus. In short, everybody but a Sholem Aleichem would regard him as blameworthy. Only a writer can accept him, even look up to him as towering above nondescript humanity through his inspired loquacity and riveting storytelling.

  Besides, nobody but Sholem Aleichem would want to listen to Tevye. Even the people who surround him, almost without exception, are sick and tired of him, abhor his incessant talking, and stop listening at the first biblical verse or midrashic gloss. This is why he falls headlong in love with whoever does not immediately recoil from his discourse—like the young revolutionary Fefferl, whom he brings home and who will marry Tevye’s most beloved daughter, Hodl. Tevye will do almost anything for whoever will listen to him. So much more so for Sholem Aleichem, who savors every word he utters, understands the subversive irrelevance of his quotations, and appreciates the wit of his mistranslations. (Of course, almost all of Tevye’s mistakes are intentional and subversive, undermining, for the fun of it, the sacred sources to which he professes loyalty.) Such a listener is to him a heaven-sent boon.

  But what is Tevye to Sholem Aleichem? For one thing, Sholem Aleichem does what any writer worth his salt would do: he sticks by his informant, the one who delivers first-rate stories. Sholem Aleichem also identifies with Tevye, with his pain and needs—he is himself a flawed person who seeks redemption in art, having squandered his in-laws’ estate and doomed a large family to a life of permanent financial difficulty. Most important, the persona Sholem Aleichem, as an artist and a thinker (who cogitates through narration, characters, and situations), accepts the impotence of the protagonists, their passivity, and their ability to hold on to life only through sheer endurance, inertia, and garrulity. These are to him the people who experience the human condition authentically. Suspending judgment, eschewing ideological fiats, and allowing his protagonists to advocate for themselves, Sholem Aleichem embraces the kind of people other writers satirize. He is never offended by their lies or self-delusions, which are to him as precious as any truth, being, under the circumstances, the only truths they can afford. Never demanding from them heroics of any kind, he suffers them to bombard their own consciousness and that of everybody around them with words. He accepts their bavardage as their talisman, their sole means of avoiding mental breakdown, and he makes brilliant artistic use of it—nowhere more brilliantly than in Tevye der milkhiker, where he first discovers this winning formula.

  And what about us, the readers? We, too, in our capacity as consumers of the aesthetic, embrace Tevye, suspending our judgment and abiding by artistic rather than moral or practical criteria. Were we to live with a Tevye-like person, we would reject him as impossible. Had he tried, as he must, to impress us with his stories and clever quibbling, we would flee him as a pest. Who would want to listen to a Tevye? Fortunately, we do not have to endure Tevye in real life. That’s why we can love and look up to him—he is safely ensconced in a book. The same loquacity that in real life would turn us off acquires in the book the enticing quality of flowing honey, of which we cannot have enough. We are even willing to be hoodwinked by Tevye and say and write rather unwise things about the qualities he does not possess, for most of us still refuse to see where the greatness of Sholem Aleichem’s chief creation lies.

  In Tevye der milkhiker Sholem Aleichem wrote the most audacious critique of the heroic humanist ethos that dominated modern, secular, and particularly nationalist Jewish culture—and that he himself, as a run-of-the-mill Jewish intellectual (and Zionist) of the turn of the nineteenth century, swore by in his many moments of mediocrity. But once he emerged as the genial artist who blazed paths into a new kind of Jewish culture, he started undermining this ethos, burrowing underneath it. Modern secular Jewish culture reprimanded traditional Jews; criticized them for being weak, passive, unrealistic, and tardy; and urged them both by positive exhortation and by biting satirical jabs to wake up, seize history by its horns, and replace texts and words with deeds and actions. Sholem Aleichem, however, in his moments of true greatness embraced passivity, weakness, wordiness, inertia, and minority—everything that almost everybody else rejected. In depth, originality, and authenticity, his acceptance of Jewish passivity was equal to that of S. J. Agnon and was surpassed only by that of Franz Kafka. In fact, the best introduction to Tevye der milkhiker can be found not in the misguided interpretations of the work as the epitome of Jewish spiritual fortitude, but rather in Agnon’s stories about passive Jews and even more in Kafka’s haunting explorations of Jewish weakness, texts such as Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” “The Burrow,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” Where Sholem Aleichem approximated the depth of Kafka’s parables, there the modern Jewish literary imagination celebrated, by exercising a negative capability, its greatest triumphs.

  THE BLESSINGS OF ORPHANHOOD

  Motl Peyse dem khazns (Motl the Cantor’s Son) is one of the two major works that Sholem Aleichem wrote in the last decade of his life (1906-16), the other being his exquisite Railway Stories (1909-10). Working throughout this hectic decade on many large-scale projects—long, panoramic novels, a multivolume auto
biography—he nevertheless broke new ground and approximated the artistic level of his earlier masterpieces in these two somewhat less ambitious works. Conceived and started in 1906, during the author’s disappointing—indeed, humiliating—stay in the United States, Motl was written intermittently in 1907 (the “European” part) and then in 1915-16 (the unfinished “American” part). It represents a revolutionary breakthrough and is perhaps the most subversive and unconventional of Sholem Aleichem’s extended fictions, although cloaked in the innocent comic narration of a lively child protagonist.

  Initially the Motl tales were not perceived as innovative, either thematically or technically. On the contrary, at a time when novelty in Yiddish fiction meant individualism, these stories seemed to move in an opposite direction, toward collectivism (as a further treatment of the shtetl theme, which contemporary Yiddish fiction had already sucked dry) and social tragicomedy. In Motl Sholem Aleichem seemed to be projecting through a comic perspective—that of a child who hardly grasped what was taking place before his eyes—a dark panorama of eastern European Jewish traditional society as it succumbed to unstoppable historical forces. The author, it seemed, was up to his usual tricks.

  But Motl was innovative neither in its social content nor in its method of narration. The two interconnected themes of Motl—the rapid disintegration of traditional eastern European shtetl society due to economic dysfunction, cultural irrelevance, and sheer physical vulnerability, and the resulting mass emigration to the West, which at the time assumed the dimensions of a veritable Völkerwanderung—were among the most prominent in Yiddish fiction of the time. That the author chose to present this theme through the perspective of the shtetl’s middle class and its culture agents (the so-called kli-koydesh, or holy vessels: rabbis, ritual slaughterers, cantors), rather than that of the poorer and less educated members of the community, was also reflective of the era. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was mainly the poorer members of traditional Jewish society who were affected by the decline of shtetl life, but as conditions worsened at the beginning of the twentieth, even the more stable and culturally entrenched members found reason to emigrate. As for themes of proletarianization; industrial exploitation; loss of human dignity (through numbing, underpaid labor, prostitution, labor-caused sickness, penury, and devastation); and the advent of Jewish trade unionism, socialist and anarchist agitation, and the like, which were to be treated in the “American” part of the story, they too were hardly new; this entire complex had been explored for almost two decades by both the poets and fiction writers of the so-called American Yiddish “shop” literature, from the first wave of eastern European Jewish influx into the United States.

  Nor was there much novelty in child narrators. Sholem Aleichem, among many others, had repeatedly employed them since the publication in 1886 of his short story “Dos messerl” (The Penknife). In the tradition of Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Mark Twain, he focused on children as the most vulnerable and oppressed, but also the most rebellious, members of the traditional Jewish community. He saw in the lives of Jewish children, exposed to the traditional educational system, the clash between the “natural” man, still relatively untamed, and the broken-in, “socialized” Jew. In the many stories he wrote about children, instinctual, libidinal, and aesthetic urges are pitted against a harsh and restrictive social and educational order, whose members, embittered by weakness, poverty, and harassment, scapegoat those who are even weaker than themselves. Encounters between children and adults offered many opportunities for comic, even hilarious narration. They would usually make for stories constructed as episodes replete with pranks—the satisfying of sinful appetites and wishes—but ending with a comic catastrophe, which started children in the process of internalizing the norms of their civilization and the limitations of the world they lived in. The same structural principle controls many of the Motl stories, rendering them stories of socialization and growth, albeit under the special circumstances of emigration and acculturation. In this way some critics saw Motl as father of the man. He would become, one said, a latter-day Tevye .6

  The narration of the Motl tales seems to follow the rules set in Sholem Aleichem’s earlier stories narrated by children. In most if not all of those tales of childish crime and punishment, the narrators are the children-culprits themselves. Since the mind of a child, not to mention a child’s linguistic abilities, cannot articulate all the insights that the stories are supposed to convey, the child narrator—in Motl as well as other stories narrated by children—is actually a kind of hybrid, in which the voices of a child and an adult complement each other. The attentive reader of Motl will detect this on the first page of the first episode, in the description of the child and his “friend,” the calf Meni, expressing their “dankbarkeyt tsu der natur” (gratitude to nature) through a wild dance and a “singing,” which is “a song without words, without notes, with no motifs, a kind of a nature-song of a waterfall, of racing waves.” Obviously, while the child and the calf are dancing and shrieking and bellowing, it is an adult narrator, well versed in the conventions of romantic hyperbole, who does much of the telling.

  This artificial arrangement extends to the incredible subtitle of the Motl cycle: “ksovim fun a yingl a yosem,” writings of an orphan boy. How could a mere nine-year-old boy with no education produce ksovim, literary works? The implausibility of the subtitle has the effect of drawing attention to the author’s role, and of undermining the status of Motl as a realistic, three-dimensional fictional character. (None of Sholem Aleichem’s child protagonists would ever attain the realistic solidity and subtlety of Tevye.) The author aimed to create a child narrator who could nevertheless convey adult truth.

  Motl is trusted with an extraordinary artistic mission: to say a truth about the crisis of eastern European Jewry in the first decade of the twentieth century that nobody else would dare to say, a truth that could be reported only by someone as innocent and guileless as a child—as in Hans Christian Andersen’s satirical parable of the child who pronounces the king naked. Motl is put forward to say, in his childish way, that the demise of the traditional eastern European Jewish civilization is not only unavoidable but also welcome; that it is high time for the shtetl culture to leave the historical stage for something else, no matter how primitive and crass, as long as it is alive and healthy; that being an orphan is, under certain circumstances, preferable to being burdened with a moribund ancestry.

  As a fictional character, Motl is what Deleuze and Guattari, in their discourse on minor literature, refer to as agencement, an arrangement of traits and narrative inflections that convey an attitude rather than the reality of a specific fictionalized human being. The function that he is to fulfill demands a Peter Pan-like narrator, and therefore, while the locations and social environments that Motl observes and describes are in constant flux, he himself remains static, a fixture, his character immune to the process of aging and to being reconditioned by drastically changing life situations. This sameness subtly influences the presentation of the story’s plot, to the extent that it is determined by chronology. In fact, all the indications of time progression and linear sequential chronology in the story are blurry and indeterminate. As much as Motl’s age at the beginning is unclear (the author wavered on whether he should be presented as a five-year-old or a nine-year-old), his age at the end, left unfinished because of the author’s death, is even more ambiguous. How many months or years elapse between Motl’s family’s departure from Kasrilevke and their arrival in America? Six months? A year and a half? A few years? And how many months or years separate their arrival in America from their rise into the lower middle class as the owners of a newspaper and candy kiosk in New York? Nowhere in the story do we find firm chronological ground on which to base our calculations. The Jewish holidays, which in many Hebrew and Yiddish stories provide the key to chronology, are of little help here. Their significance is merely symbolic: Pentecost (as the story begins) stands in for the springtime recurrence of growth
and instinctual vitality (and not for the reception of the Torah by Moses on Mount Sinai), and Yom Kippur (at the start of part 2) represents the crisis of the passage from the Old World to the New. Nature and its seasons play an even smaller role in the articulation of the story’s time sequence. Mysteriously, there is no winter at all in Motl, as if cold weather, snow, and winter storms were unknown in Ukraine, western Europe, and North America. Just one autumnal sea storm is allowed, breaking up what seems an eternal summer. As much as the story necessitates a fixed, unchanging, and unchangeable observer-narrator, it also seems to require a continually bright, warm season. The heat complements Motl, allowing him to be himself—nimble, energetic, and bright, unencumbered by heavy clothes, never seeking the warmth of hearth and home, always Puck-like, ready to walk, to run, almost to fly.

  Motl’s personality consists of both “hot” and “cold” components. On the one hand, he flows with everything that is vibrant: appetites, vitality, effervescence, motility, optimism, lust for life, and freedom. On the other hand, he is a keen, unemotional, unflinching observer. The “hot” component informs the escapades he reports, his total rejection of the stasis of the shtetl, and his fervent identification with traveling—and the staccato rhythms of his short sentences. The “cold” component inheres in the devastating caricatures he draws of almost all the characters in the story, including those nearest and dearest to him, such as his widowed mother. The very emotional scene of his mother, about to start on the voyage to America, taking leave of her good neighbor Pessi displays how coldly observant he is: “Suddenly everyone is kissing, and crying and howling, worse than Tisha B’Av,” the official day of mourning for the destruction of the two Jerusalemite temples. His red-eyed mother falls, as if in a swoon, into the big arms of the overweight Pessi, “whose double chin swings, and big tears as big as peas roll over her cheeks.” Far from being attuned to the emotional states of the characters he portrays, Motl focuses on whatever is discordant and inviting ridicule, such as Pessi’s shiny, fat cheeks. This is consistent with his passion for drawing cartoons that emphasize all kinds of unseemly metonymies: his mother’s red eyes (highlighting her role as the Niobe of the story or mother Rachel bewailing the fate of her exiled children—everybody grows tired of her lachrymosity); his brother Elye’s fledgling beard, which sprouts not from his chin but from his throat (exploding his brother’s posture of virility and manly self-importance); Elye’s wife Bruche’s large, coarse, unfeminine legs and feet (indicating who in his brother’s family wears the trousers).