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.
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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 bos
om 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.*
Can a work of fiction begun with no overall plan, written in installments over a twenty-year period, and ending more than once, be called (as it has been here) a novel at all? There are critics whose answer is no. The noted Sholem Aleichem scholar Dan Miron, for instance, has written that the structure of Tevye is more “mythic” than novelistic, each of its episodes consisting of a pattern of rise, fall, and recovery that can repeat itself endlessly; Sholem Aleichem, Miron argues, could have brought Tevye to a close after its seventh chapter or gone on to write a tenth and eleventh—in terms of the book’s form and thematic contents, it would hardly have mattered. But though it certainly is true that each episode of Tevye can be read as a story in itself (which is undoubtedly how some of its original readers, not all of whom were familiar with what came before, did read it), and true too that each shares basic patterns with the others, it is equally clear that each builds on the previous installments and that there is a definite development from one chapter to the next. Indeed, if what perhaps most characterizes the novel as a literary form is the flow of time in it, the fact that more than in any other artistic medium we see human beings exposed to time, shaped by time, worn by time, then Tevye is a novel par excellence, perhaps the only one ever written in real time, that is, according to a scale on which time for the author and time for his characters are absolutely equivalent. Sholem Aleichem and Tevye age together: a year in the life of one is a year in the life of the other, and twenty years in the life of one is twenty years in the life of the other. Even as Sholem Aleichem sits at his desk writing down Tevye’s stories, Tevye continues to grow older by the amount of time that writing takes.
It is in part this aspect of Tevye that makes him so real a character, for despite the great misfortunes that befall him and his extraordinary resilience in confronting them, the years affect him much as they do most men: slowly, subtly, almost imperceptibly in the course of any one of the book’s episodes—in which, as in the short story generally, time is not a significant factor—but enormously when regarded over the whole span of them. Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste la même chose is only one side of Tevye and of us all; le plus ça reste la même chose, le plus ça change is the other. He is, as Miron says, always Tevye; but who, meeting him in 1894 and again in 1914, would not be shocked by the difference—and not only because of the gray hairs? Tevye has changed internally—and with these changes, the novel’s three internal levels of meaning all reach a climax too. Let us consider them.
The first of these is the story of Tevye and his family as a paradigm of the fate of Russian Jewry. It is a measure of Sholem Aleichem’s great artistry that Tevye, Golde, and their daughters—and with what a bare minimum of strokes these last are sketched!—are all wonderfully alive and individualized human beings who never strike us as being anything but themselves. Yet this should not obscure the perception that they are also, like most of the other characters in the book, representative types of Russian Jewish life who, taken together, tell the tale of its destruction. Indeed, each of Tevye’s daughters falls in love with and/or marries a man who can be said to embody a distinct historical force or mood, and if Tevye himself is the very incarnation of the traditional culture of the shtetl, then beginning with the novel’s second chapter, every one of its episodes illustrates another phase of this culture’s helpless disintegration. In “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune,” for example, we see in the person of Menachem Mendl the economic collapse of a community that has been driven by the unnatural conditions imposed on it to seek its livelihood in the most pathetic kinds of nonproductive speculation. In “Today’s Children” we read of that undermining of parental authority which, though still relatively mild in Tsaytl’s case, will eventually bring Tevye’s world crashing down on him. “Hodl” deals with the defection of Jewish youth to the revolutionary movement, and “Chava” with its loss to intermarriage. Shprintze’s suicide is the outcome of a situation that at first resembles Tsaytl’s and her other sisters’, i.e., she has fallen in love with a young man whom Tevye originally disapproves of as a match for her—but precisely because of this parallel, the difference between Tsaytl’s and Motl’s behavior, on the one hand, and Shprintze’s and Ahronchik’s, on the other, shows how dramatically the lines of communication between generations have broken down in the space of a few years. In Beilke’s story, “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel,” we meet yet another new Jewish type, the contractor Podhotzur, a vulgar nouveau-riche assimilationist ruthlessly intent on climbing the social and economic ladder of a society making the transition from rural feudalism to urban capitalism. And finally, in “Lekh-Lekho,” what is left of Tevye’s life literally falls apart: expelled from the village in which he and his ancestors have lived since time immemorial, he is forced to become a homeless wanderer. Coming in the final chapter of the novel, this expulsion is the ultimate concretization of the ruin of an entire world.
In all this, Tevye’s role is essentially passive; he schemes, he fantasizes, he makes a great fuss over things (although less so as the years go by and he grows more aware of his powerlessness)—yet each time the events, like his own unruly horse, simply run away with him, leaving him aghast and uncomprehending. And yet, as the Yiddish critic Y. Y. Trunk has perceptively observed, what makes him a genuinely tragic figure and not just the comic victim of a world beyond his control is that in every case it is he himself who brings about his downfall—a theme that comprises the second level of the book, that encompassing the relationships in Tevye’s family, especially between him and his daughters. With his wife Golde, all in all, Tevye’s relations are simple: they might be defined as those of a harmonious conjugal antagonism, a common enough modus vivendi among East European Jews that is composed on Tevye’s side of equal parts genial misogyny and husbandly loyalty to hearth and home. This misogyny, however, runs only skin-deep, because, despite his protestations to the contrary (it is when he protests, in fact, that he most reveals his true feelings, a more direct expression of affection not being in his vocabulary), Tevye clearly loves his daughters to distraction. Nor does he just adore them; he admires and respects them with that unconventionally unsnobbish openness, that basic inclination to judge everyone on, and only on, his merits, which, beneath his facade of patriarchal autocracy and middle-class pretensions, is one of his most endearing traits. It is just this openness and capacity for love, however, that prove his undoing, for without his quite grasping the fact, these are the qualities that, absorbed from him by his daughters, make them act as they do in the face of his own apprehensions and objections. As is so often the case with parents and children, Tevye’s daughters are much more like him than he is willing to admit; they are, in fact, the actors-out of the fantasies and values that he has transmitted to them. Does Tsaytl, disappointing her father, refuse to marry the rich Layzer Wolf and choose the poor Motl Komzoyl instead? But Tevye cannot stand Layzer Wolf, he truly likes Motl, and he himself has told Sholem Aleichem: “Money is a lot of baloney … what matters is for a man to be a man!” Is Tevye devastated because Hodl has linked her life with the young revolutionary, Pertchik? But besides having brought Pertchik into his home (for which, it is true, he blames himself—he just does not go beyond this), who if not Tevye has sat on his front stoop imagining what it would be like to trade places with the rich Jews of Yehupetz, living in their dachas while they bring him milk and cheese each day! Has Chava done the unthinkable, married a goy? Why, Tevye himself has wondered in the solitude of the forest, “What does being a Jew or not a Jew matter?” It is Tevye who in his fondness for Ahronchik has introduced him to Shprintze, and Tevye who, in his anger at Beilke for selling her soul to marry wealth, forgets that this is exactly the arrang
ement that he planned for Tsaytl long ago. Tevye knows that Beilke has sacrificed herself for his sake—yet it does not occur to him that she has done so because of the vision of magical riches that he himself has handed down to her.
In short, whether he is simply a natural democrat, or whether, staunchly traditional Jew though he is, he has unknowingly been affected by the liberal winds blowing in Russia, Tevye has fathered the daughters of his deepest dreams. Trunk puts it well when he writes of the man and his children, “Though consciously they have different outlooks on life, unconsciously they share the same sense of it.” It is only in the novel’s penultimate chapter, the story of Beilke, however, that Tevye achieves a belated insight concerning this fact, for then, seeing Beilke’s unhappiness in her stultifyingly opulent surroundings and recalling the vivacious child who lived with him in semipoverty, he articulates at last what at heart he has always known, namely, that all that really matters in life is human love, warmth, and intelligence, thus realizing the pitifulness of his one great conscious obsession: to have a rich daughter. Fate, he tragically learns, not only mocks a man by withholding his desires, but also—and sometimes most of all—by granting them. And like any tragic hero’s, Tevye’s fate, as Trunk reminds us, is his character.
Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories Page 2