Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

“The devil take you!” I say. “Did you have to take all day to tell me that? Are you Pertchik the cigarette maker’s boy, then?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m Pertchik the cigarette maker’s boy.”

  “And you’re truly a student?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m truly a student.”

  “And what exactly do you live on?” I ask.

  “I live,” he says, “on what I eat.”

  “Good for you!” I say. “Two and two is four, four and four is eight, and ate and ate and had a tummy ache. But tell me, my fine friend, what exactly is it that you eat?”

  “Whatever I’m given,” he says.

  “Well, at least you’re not choosy,” I say. “If there’s food, you eat, and if there isn’t, you bite your lip and go to bed hungry. I suppose it’s worth all that to be a student. After all, why shouldn’t you be like the rich Jews of Yehupetz? Kulom ahuvim, kulom brurim, as it says …”

  Sometimes I like to cite a verse or a prayer. Do you think that Pertchik took it lying down? “Those Jews,” he says, “will never live to see the day when I’ll be like them. I’ll see them all in hell first!”

  “Why, bless my soul if you don’t seem to have something against them,” I say. “I hope they haven’t gone and put a lien on your father’s estate.”

  “It’s their estates,” he says, “that will be yours, and mine, and everyone’s some day.”

  “You know what?” I say. “I’d leave that sort of talk to your worst enemies. I can see one thing, though—and that’s that with a tongue like yours, you’re in no danger of getting lost in the shuffle. If you’re free tonight, why don’t you drop over? We can chat a bit, and have some supper while we’re at it …”

  You can be sure I didn’t have to repeat the invitation. My young man made sure to turn up at dinnertime sharp, just when the borscht was on the table and the knishes were sizzling in the pan. “You’ve timed it perfectly,” I said. “If you’d like to wash your hands and say the Lord’s blessing, go ahead, and if not—that’s fine with me too, I’m not God’s policeman. No one’s going to whip me in the next world for your sins in this one.”

  Well, we ate and we talked—in fact, we talked on and on, because something about the little fellow appealed to me. I’m damned if I know what it was, but it did. You see, I’ve always liked a man I can have a Jewish word with; here a verse from the Bible, there a line from the Talmud, even a bit of philosophy or what-have-you; I can’t help being who I am … And from then on the boy began dropping in regularly. As soon as he finished the private lessons that he gave for a living each day, he would come to us to rest up and have something to eat. (Mind you, I wouldn’t wish such a living on anyone, because in the most generous of cases, I assure you, our local squires pay eighteen kopecks an hour to have their sons taught, for which they expect their letters to be addressed, their telegrams corrected, and their errands run in the bargain. And why not? Doesn’t it say bekhoyl levovkho uvekhoyl nafshekho—if you expect to eat, expect to pay the bill too!) The boy could count himself lucky to take his meals with us and tutor my girls in return for them. An eye for an eye, as it says—one good turn deserves another. Before we knew it, he had all but moved in with us; whenever he arrived, someone would run to bring him a glass of milk, and my wife made sure he always had a clean shirt and two whole socks, one for each of his feet. It was then that we started calling him Peppercorn. He really did seem like one of the family, because at bottom, you know, he was a decent sort, a simple, down-to-earth boy who would have shared all his worldly possessions with us, just as we shared ours with him, if only he had had any …

  The one thing I didn’t like about him was his habit of disappearing now and then. Suddenly he would vanish—vehayeled eynenu, Peppercorn was nowhere to be found. “Where have you been, my wanderbird?” I would ask him when he came back. Peppercorn kept silent as a fish, though. I don’t know about you, but secretive people annoy me. Even God, when He created the world, did it out loud, or else how would we know all about it? But I will say this for Peppercorn: when he opened his mouth, it erupted like a volcano. You wouldn’t have believed the things that came out of it then, such wild, crazy ideas, everything backwards and upside down with its feet sticking up in the air. A rich Jew, for instance—that’s how warped his mind was!—wasn’t worth a row of beans to him, but a beggar was a big deal, and a workingman—why, a workingman was king, he was God’s gift to the world—the reason being, I gathered, that he worked.

  “Still,” I would say, “when it comes to livelihoods, you can’t compare work to making money.”

  That would get him so mad that he’d go all out to convince me that money was the root of all evil. All the monkey business in the world, he said, was due to it and nothing honest could ever come of it. And he would give me ten thousand proofs and demonstrations that stuck to me like a radish to a wall. “Stop talking like a madman,” I would say. “I suppose it’s dishonest of my cow to give milk and of my horse to pull my wagon for me?” I had some idiot question like that for every idiot statement that he made; trust Tevye not to let him get away with anything. If only Tevye hadn’t trusted Peppercorn!… And he wasn’t embarrassed to speak his mind, either. One evening, for instance, as we were sitting on the front stoop of my house and philosophizing away, he says to me, “You know what, Reb Tevye? You have some wonderful daughters.”

  “You don’t say!” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. They have a wonderful father to take after.”

  “Especially your second eldest,” he says. “What a head she has! She’s perfection itself.”

  “So what else is new?” I say. “The apple fell close to the tree.” Between you and me, though, my heart swelled with pleasure. Show me the father who doesn’t like to hear his kids praised! Was I a prophet that I should have known what a crazy love affair would come of it? Listen and I’ll tell you all about it.

  In a word, vayehi erev vayehi voyker—one afternoon as I was making my rounds of the Boiberik dachas, someone hailed me in the street. I looked around to see who it was—why, it’s Efrayim the Matchmaker! Efrayim the Matchmaker, you should know, is a Jew who makes matches. “Begging your pardon, Reb Tevye,” he says, “but I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “With pleasure,” I say, reining in my horse. “I hope it’s a good one.”

  “Reb Tevye, you have a daughter,” he says.

  “I have seven, God bless them,” I say.

  “I know you do,” he says. “So do I.”

  “In that case,” I say, “we have fourteen between the two of us.”

  “All joking aside,” he says, “what I want to talk to you about is this: being as you know a matchmaker, I have a match for you—and not just any match either, but something really exclusive, extraprime and superfine!”

  “Perhaps you can tell me,” I say, “what’s hiding under the label, because if it’s a tailor, a shoemaker, or a schoolteacher, he can save himself the trouble and so can I. Revakh vehatsoloh ya’amoyd layehudim mimokoym akher—thank you very kindly but I’ll look for a son-in-law elsewhere. It says in the Talmud that—”

  “Good Lord, Reb Tevye,” he says, “are you starting in on the Talmud again? Before a body can talk with you, he has to spend a year boning up. The whole world is nothing but a page of Talmud to you. If I were you, I’d listen to the offer I’m about to make you, because it’s going to take your breath away.”

  And with that he delivers himself of an after-dinner speech about the young man’s credentials. What can I tell you? Champagne and caviar! In the first place, he comes from the best of families, not from the hoi polloi—and that, I want you to know, is what matters most to me, because although we have all kinds in my family, akudim nekudim uvrudim—well-off folk, working folk, even some pretty common folk—I’m far from a nobody myself … Secondly, Efrayim tells me, his man can parse a verse with the best of them, he knows how to read the small print—and that’s no trifle with me either, because I’
d sooner eat a buttered pig than sit down to a meal with an illiterate. A Jew who can’t read a Jewish book is a hundred times worse than a sinner. I don’t give a hoot if you go to synagogue or not; I don’t even care if you stand on your head and point your toes at the sky; as long as you can match me quote for quote and line for line, you’re a man after my own heart, that’s just the way Tevye is … And finally, says Efrayim, the fellow is rolling in money; why, he rides about in a droshky pulled by a pair of horses who leave a trail of smoke wherever they go—and that, I thought, is certainly no crime either. Any way you look at it, it’s an improvement on being poor. How does the Talmud put it? Yo’oh aniyuso leyisro’eyl, not even God likes a beggar. And the proof of it is that if He liked them, He wouldn’t make them beg …

  “Is that all?” I say. “I’m waiting to hear more.”

  “More?” he says. “What more can you want? He’s crazy in love, he’s dying to have you. That is, I don’t mean you, Reb Tevye, I mean your daughter Hodl. He says he wants a beauty …”

  “Does he now?” I say. “He should only deserve to have her. But just who is this hotshot of yours? A bachelor? A widower? A divorcé? Or the Devil’s own helper?”

  “He’s a young bachelor,” he says. “That is, he’s not so young as all that, but a bachelor he certainly is.”

  “And what might his God-given name be?” I ask.

  That, though, was something I couldn’t get out of him for the life of me. “Run your daughter down to Boiberik,” Efrayim says, “and I’ll be glad to tell you.”

  “Run my daughter down to Boiberik?” I say. “Do you think she’s a horse being brought to a fair?”

  Well, a matchmaker, as you know, can talk a wall into marrying a hole in the ground; we agreed that after the Sabbath I would run my daughter down to Boiberik. I can’t tell you what sweet dreams that gave me. I imagined Hodl trailing smoke in a droshky, and the whole world burning up too, but with envy—and not just for the droshky and the horses, but for all the good I would do once I was the father of a rich woman. Why, I’d become a real philanthropist, giving this beggar twenty-five rubles, that one fifty, that one over there an even hundred; I’d let everyone know that a poor man is a human being too … That’s just what I thought as I traveled home that evening. “Giddyap,” I told my horse, giving him a taste of the whip. “If you want your oats tonight, you’d better dance a little faster, because im eyn kemakh eyn Toyroh, by me there’s no something for nothing.”

  In a word, there I was talking to him in Horsish when who do I see slipping out of the forest but a young couple, a boy and a girl, deep in talk and walking so close that they’re practically hugging. Who can that be in the middle of nowhere, I wondered, squinting into the setting sun at them. Why, I could have sworn it was Peppercorn! But who was the schlimazel out with at this hour? I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked again: who was the female? My God, I said to myself, can that be Hodl? Yes, it’s her, all right, or else I’m not a Jew … so these are the grammar lessons he’s been giving her! Ah, Tevye, I thought, are you ever a jackass—and I stopped my horse and called out to them, “A good evening to you both! What’s the latest war news from Japan? I hope it isn’t too nosy of me to ask what you’re doing here, because if you happen to be looking for pie in the sky, it’s already been eaten by Brodsky …”

  In short, I gave them such a hearty greeting that the two of them were left speechless, loy bashomayim veloy ba’orets, neither here nor there, embarrassed and blushing all over. For a moment they just stood there, staring down at the ground. Then they looked up at me, so that now we were staring at each other.

  “Well,” I said, half in anger, half in jest, “you’re looking at me as though you hadn’t seen me in a donkey’s years. I can assure you that I’m the same Tevye as always, not a hair more or less of me.”

  “Papa,” says my daughter Hodl to me, blushing even brighter. “You can wish us a mazel tov.”

  “I can?” I say. “Then mazel tov, you should live to be one hundred and twenty! Only what might I be congratulating you for? Have you found a buried treasure in the forest or been rescued from some great danger?”

  “You can wish us a mazel tov,” says Peppercorn, “because we’re engaged to be married.”

  “You’re engaged to be what?” I say. “What are you talking about?”

  “To be married,” he says. “Isn’t that a custom you’re familiar with? It means that I’ll be her husband and she’ll be my wife.”

  That’s just what he said to me, Peppercorn did, looking me straight in the eye. So I looked him straight back and said, “Excuse me, but when was the engagement party? It’s rather odd that you forgot to invite me to it, because if she’ll be your wife, I just might be your father-in-law.” I may have seemed to be making a joke of it, but the worms were eating my heart. Say what you will, though, Tevye is no woman; Tevye hears it out to the end. “I’m afraid I still don’t get it,” I said. “Whoever heard of a match without a matchmaker, without even a betrothal?”

  “What do we need a matchmaker for?” says Peppercorn. “We’re as good as married already.”

  “Oh, you are?” I say. “Will wonders never cease! And why have you kept it such a secret until now?”

  “What was there to shout about?” he says. “We wouldn’t have told you now either, but seeing as we’re about to be parted, we decided to make it official.”

  That was already too much for me. Bo’u mayim ad nefesh, as it says: I felt cut to the quick. That he should tell me they were as good as married already—somehow I could still put up with that, how does the verse go? Ohavti es adoyni, es ishti: he loves her, she loves him, it’s been known to happen before. But make it official? What kind of Chinese was that?

  Well, even my young man must have seen how befuddled I was, because he turned to me and said: “You see, it’s like this, Reb Tevye. I’m about to leave these parts.”

  “When?”

  “Any day now.”

  “And just where,” I asked, “are you off to?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he says. “It’s confidential.”

  Would you believe it? Confidential: put that in your pipe and smoke it! Along comes a black little ragamuffin of a Peppercorn and informs me all in one breath that he’s my son-in-law, and that he’s making it official, and that he’s going away, and that where is confidential! It made my gorge rise. “Look here,” I said to him, “I understand that a secret is a secret—in fact, you’re one big secret to me … But just tell me one thing, brother: you pride yourself on your honesty, you’re so full of humanity that it’s coming out of your ears—how can you marry a daughter of mine and run out on her the same day? You call that honest? You call that human? I suppose I should count myself lucky that you haven’t robbed me and burned my house too.”

  “Papa!” says Hodl to me. “You don’t know how happy it makes us to finally tell you the truth. It’s such a load off our minds. Come, let me give you a kiss.” And before I know it she grabs me from one side, he grabs me from the other, and we all begin to kiss so hard that pretty soon they’re kissing each other. A scene from the theater, I tell you! “Don’t you think that’s enough for a while?” I finally managed to say. “It’s time we had a practical talk.”

  “About what?” they ask.

  “Oh,” I say, “about dowries, trousseaus, wedding costs, everything from soup to nuts …”

  “But we don’t want any soup or nuts,” they say.

  “What do you want, then?” I ask.

  “An official wedding,” they say. Did you ever hear of such a thing in your life?

  Well, I don’t want to bore you. All my arguments did as much good as last winter’s snow. We had an official wedding. Take my word, it wasn’t the wedding that Tevye deserved, but what doesn’t pass for a wedding these days? A funeral would have been jollier. And to make matters worse, I have a wife, as you know, who can be a royal pain. Day in and day out she kept after me: how could I ever per
mit such a higgledy-piggledy, such a slapdash affair? Go try explaining to a woman that time is of the essence! There was nothing for it but to smooth things over with a tiny little fib about a childless old aunt of Peppercorn’s in Yehupetz, oodles of money, a huge inheritance that would be his one bright day in the middle of the night—anything to take the heat off me …

  That same day, a few hours after the splendid wedding, I harnessed my horse to the wagon and the three of us, myself, my daughter, and my heir-in-law, piled into it and drove to Boiberik. As I sat there stealing a glance at them, I thought, how clever it is of God to run His world according to the latest fashions! And the weird types He puts in it! Why, right next to me was a freshly married couple, still wet behind the ears, so to speak, one of them setting out for the Devil knows where and the other not shedding a tear for him, not even one for the record—but Tevye was no woman, Tevye would wait and see … At the station were a few youngsters, born-and-bred Kasrilevkites to judge by the state of their boots, who had come to say goodbye. One, wearing his shirt down over his pants and looking more like a Russian than a Jew, stood whispering with my wanderbird. I do believe, Tevye, I told myself, that you’ve married into a gang of horse thieves, or purse snatchers, or housebreakers, or at the very least, highway murderers …

  On the way back from Boiberik I couldn’t restrain myself any longer, and I told my Hodl what I thought of them. She laughed and tried explaining to me that they were the best, the finest, the most honorable young people in the world, and that they lived their whole lives for others, never giving a fig for their own skins. “For example,” she says, “that one with the shirt hanging out: he comes from a rich home in Yehupetz—but not only won’t he take a penny from his parents, he refuses even to talk to them.”

  “Is that a fact?” I say. “I do declare, honorable is hardly the word! Why, with that shirt and long hair, all he needs is a half-empty bottle of vodka to look the perfect gentleman.”

  Did she get it? Not my Hodl! Eyn Esther magedes—see no evil, hear no evil. Each time I took a dig at her Peppercorn’s friends, back she came at me with capital, the working class, pie in the sky. “What do I care about your working class,” I said, “if it’s such a military secret? There’s an old saying, you know, that if you scratch a secret, you’ll find a thief. Tell me the truth, now: where is Peppercorn going and why is he going there?”