Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

  “What do you mean, nothing?” I ask.

  “We were just talking,” she says.

  “Since when are you and he on such talking terms?” I ask.

  “Oh,” she says, “we’ve known each other for a while.”

  “Congratulations!” I say. “You’ve found yourself a fine friend.”

  “Do you know him, then?” she says. “Do you know who he is?”

  “Not exactly,” I say, “because I haven’t read up on his family tree yet, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing what a blue blood he is. In fact, if his father isn’t a drunk, he may even be a swineherd or a handyman.”

  Do you know what my Chava says to me? “I have no idea who his father is. I’m only interested in individuals. And Chvedka is no ordinary person, that I’m sure of.”

  “Well, then,” I say, “what sort of person is he? Perhaps you could enlighten me.”

  “Even if I told you,” she says, “you wouldn’t understand. Chvedka is a second Gorky.”

  “A second Gorky?” I say. “And who, pray tell, was the first?”

  “Gorky,” she says, “is only just about the most important man alive.”

  “Is he?” I say. “And just where does he live, this Mr. Important of yours? What’s his act and what makes him such a big deal?”

  “Gorky,” she says, “is a literary figure, a famous author. That means he writes books. He’s a rare, dear soul, even if he comes from a simple home and never had a day’s schooling in his life. Whatever he knows, he taught himself. Here, this is his picture …”

  And she takes out a little photograph from her pocket and shows it to me.

  “This tsaddik is your Rabbi Gorky?” I say, “I could swear I’ve seen him somewhere before. You can search me, though, if I remember whether he was toting sacks at the train station or hauling logs in the forest …”

  “And is it so shameful,” says my Chava, “for a man to work with his own two hands? Whose hands do you work with? Whose hands do we all?”

  “Of course,” I answer. “You’re quite right. It even says as much in the Bible: yegia kapekho ki toykheyl—if you don’t work yourself to the bone, no one will throw you one, either … But what’s all that got to do with Chvedka? I’d feel better if you and he were friendlier at a distance. Don’t forget meyayin boso ule’on atoh hoyleykh—just think of who you are and who he is.”

  “God,” says my Chava, “created us all equal.”

  “So He did,” I say. “He created man in His likeness. But you had better remember that not every likeness is alike. Ish kematnas yodoy, as the Bible says …”

  “It’s beyond belief,” she says, “how you have a verse from the Bible for everything! Maybe you also have one that explains why human beings have to be divided into Jews and Christians, masters and slaves, beggars and millionaires …”

  “Why, bless my soul,” I say, “if you don’t seem to think, my daughter, that the millennium has arrived.” And I tried explaining to her that the way things are now is the way they’ve been since Day One.

  “But why are they that way?” she asks.

  “Because that’s how God made them,” I say.

  “Well, why did He make them like that?”

  “Look here,” I say, “if you’re going to ask why, why, why all the time, we’ll just keep going around in circles.”

  “But what did God give us brains for if we’re not supposed to use them?” she asks.

  “You know,” I say, “we Jews have an old custom that when a hen begins to crow like a rooster, off to the slaughterer she goes. That’s why we say in the morning prayer, hanoyseyn lasekhvi binoh—not only did God give us brains, He gave some of us more of them than others.”

  “When will the two of you stop yackety-yacking already?” calls my Golde from inside the house. “The borscht has been on the table for an hour and you’re still out there singing Sabbath hymns.”

  “Well, well, well,” I say, “strike up the band! Our rabbis weren’t kidding about shivoh dvorim bagoylem—anyone can be a nincompoop, but being a woman helps. Here we are talking about the universe and all you can think of is your borscht.”

  “You know what?” says my Golde. “Better my borscht without the universe than the universe without my borscht.”

  “Mazel tov,” I say, “a philosopher is born before our eyes! It’s enough my daughters all think they’re a mental notch above the angels without you deciding to join them by flying head first up the chimney …”

  “As long as you’re on the subject of flying,” she says, “why don’t you go fly a kite!”

  I ask you, is that any way to talk to a hungry man?

  Well, let’s leave the princess in her castle and get back to the young prince—I mean to the old priest, God rot his soul! As I was driving home near our village with my empty milk cans one evening, who should ride by in his iron buggy, that combed beard of his blowing in the wind, but His Eminence in person. Damn your eyes, I think, it’s just my luck to run into you!

  “Good evening there!” he says to me. “Didn’t you recognize me?”

  “They say that’s a sign you’re about to come into money,” I said to him, tipping my hat and making as if to drive on.

  “Hold on a minute, Tevel,” he says. “What’s the hurry? I’d like a word or two with you.”

  “If it’s a good word, why not?” I say. “Otherwise let’s make it some other time.”

  “What other time did you have in mind?” he says.

  “How about the day the Messiah comes?” I say.

  “But he already has come,” says the priest.

  “I believe,” I say, “that I’ve heard that opinion from you before. So tell me, Father, what else is new?”

  “That’s just what I wanted to see you about,” he says. “I’d like to speak to you privately about your daughter Chava.”

  That made my heart skip a beat! What business of his was my daughter? “My daughters,” I said to him, “don’t need to be spoken for. They’re quite capable of speaking for themselves.”

  “But this isn’t a matter that can be left up to her,” he says. “It involves others too. I’m talking about something of great importance. Her whole life depends on it.”

  “What makes you such a party to her life?” I say. “I should think she had a father to be that, may he live to a ripe old age …”

  “So she does,” he says. “You’re certainly her father. But you don’t see what’s been happening to her. Your daughter is reaching out toward a new life, and you either don’t understand her or else don’t want to understand.”

  “Whether I do or don’t understand her or want to is a story in itself,” I say. “But what does it have to do with you, Father?”

  “It has a great deal to do with me,” he says, “because she’s in my charge right now.”

  “She’s in your what?” I say.

  “My custody,” he says, looking right at me and running a hand through that fine, flowing beard of his.

  I must have jumped a foot in the air. “What?” I said. “My child in your custody? By what right?” I was beside myself, but he only smiled at me, cool as a cucumber, and said, “Now don’t go losing your temper, Tevel. Let’s talk this over calmly. You know I have nothing against you, God forbid, even if you are a Jew. You know I think a great deal of you Jews. It just pains me to see how stubbornly you refuse to realize that we Christians have your good in mind.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about my good,” I say, “because instead of telling me what you just did, Father, it would have been kinder to poison me or put a bullet in my head. If you’re really such a good friend of mine, do me one favor: leave my daughter alone!”

  “Don’t talk like a fool,” he says to me. “No harm will come to your daughter. In fact, this is the happiest moment of her life. She’s about to be married—and to a young man any girl would envy her for.”

  “My best wishes,” I say, pretending to smile, though I’m burning
up like hellfire inside. “And just who, if you don’t mind my asking, might this young man of hers be?”

  “You probably know him,” he says. “He’s a fine, upstanding fellow, and educated too, entirely self-taught. He’s in love with your daughter and wants to marry her. The only problem is, he’s not a Jew.”

  Chvedka! I thought, feeling hot and cold flashes all over. It was all I could do not to fall right out of my wagon. I’d be hanged if I was going to show it, though, so I grabbed my horse’s reins, gave him a lash of the whip, and holakh Moyshe-Mordekhai—away I went without so much as a by-your-leave.

  I came home—the house was a wreck. My daughters were sprawled out on the beds, crying into the pillows, and my wife Golde looked like death warmed over. I began searching all over for Chava. Where could she be?

  But Chava wasn’t anywhere, and I saw I could save myself the trouble of asking about her. I tell you, I knew then what it must feel like to turn over in the grave! I had such a fire in my bones without knowing what to do with it that I could have punched myself in the nose—instead of which I went about shouting at my daughters and taking it out on my wife. I couldn’t sit still for a minute. When I went out to the stable to feed the horse and saw he had slipped a foot through the slats of his stall, I took a stick and began to skin him alive. “I’ll put the torch to you next, you moron, you!” I screamed. “You’ll never see a bag of oats again in your life! If you’re looking for trouble, you’ll get it: blood, darkness, death—all the ten plagues of Egypt!”

  After a while, though, it occurred to me that I was flaying a poor dumb beast who had never hurt a fly. I threw him some hay, promised him the sun would rise again in the morning, and went back inside, where I laid my aching body down while my head … but I tell you, I thought my head would burst from trying so hard to figure things out! Ma pishi uma khatosi—was I really the world’s greatest sinner, that I deserved to be its most-punished Jew? God in heaven, mah onu umeh khayeynu—who am I that You don’t forget me even for a second, that You can’t invent a new calamity, a new catastrophe, a new disaster, without first trying it out on me?

  There I lay as though on a bed of hot coals when I heard my wife Golde let out a groan that could have torn your heart in two. “Golde,” I said, “are you sleeping?”

  “No,” she says. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “We’re ruined, that’s all. Maybe you have some idea what we should do?”

  “God help us all if you have to ask me for ideas,” she says. “All I know is that she rose this morning a healthy, normal child, dressed herself, and then suddenly burst out crying and began to hug and kiss me without telling me why. I thought she had gone mad. ‘Chava,’ I asked, ‘what’s wrong?’ She didn’t say a word except to tell me she was going out to the cows—and that was the last I saw of her. I waited an hour, I waited two, I waited three … where could she have gone? She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. So I called the girls and told them, ‘Listen, I want you to run over to the priest’s and—’ ”

  “But how, Golde,” I interrupted, “did you guess she was at the priest’s?”

  “How did I guess she was at the priest’s?” she says. “So help me God! Do you think I’m not a mother? Do you think I don’t have eyes in my head?”

  “If you have eyes and you’re a mother,” I say, “what made you keep so quiet? Why didn’t you say something to me?”

  “What could I have said?” she says. “You’re never home. And even if I had said it, would you have heard it? All you ever do when you’re told anything is spout some verse from the Bible. You Bible a person half to death and think you’ve solved the problem.”

  That’s just what she said, my Golde, as she lay there crying in the dark … and I thought, in a way she’s right, because what can a woman really know? It broke my heart to hear her sighing and snuffling away, though, so I said, “Look here, Golde. You’re angry at me for always quoting the Bible, but I have to quote it one more time. It says kerakheym ?v al bonim—as a father loves his own child. Why doesn’t it also say kerakheym eym al bonim—as a mother loves her own child, too? Because a mother isn’t a father. A father speaks to his children differently. Just you wait: tomorrow, God willing, I’m going to have a talk with her.”

  “If only you would!” she says. “And with him too. He’s not a bad sort for a priest. He has human feelings. If you throw yourself at his feet, he may pity you.”

  “What?” I say. “I should go down on my knees before a priest? Are you crazy or are you crazy? Al tiftakh peh lasoton—just suppose my enemies got wind of it …”

  “What did I tell you?” she says. “There you go again!”

  We spent the whole night talking like that. As soon as the cock crowed, I rose and said my prayers, took down my whip from the wall, and drove straight to the priest’s. A woman may be only a woman, but where else should I have gone—to hell in a bucket?

  In short, I drove into his yard and had a fine good morning said to me by his dogs, who set about straightening my caftan for me and sniffing my Jewish feet to see if they were edible. It’s a good thing I had my whip with me to remind them that Scripture says, “And against the Children of Israel not a dog stuck out its tongue” … The racket we made brought the priest and his wife running from their house. It was all they could do to break up the party and get me safely indoors, where they received me like an honored guest and put the samovar up for tea. But tea, I told them, could wait; first I had something to talk to the priest about. He didn’t have to guess what that was; with a wink he signaled his wife to leave the room—and as soon as the door shut behind her, I came straight to the point without shilly-shallying. The first thing I wanted to know was, did he or did he not believe in God? Next I asked him, did he have any idea what it felt like for a father to be parted from a child he loved? Then I insisted on his telling me where he drew the line between right and wrong. And finally, I demanded to know, with no ifs or buts, what he thought of a man who barged uninvited into another man’s house and turned it upside down—the benches, the tables, the beds, everything …

  You can be sure he wasn’t prepared for all that. “Tevel,” he said, “how does a clever fellow like you expect to ask so many questions at once and get answers to them all in one breath? Be patient and I’ll deal with each one of them.”

  “Oh no you won’t, Father dear,” I said. “You won’t deal with any of them. And do you know why not? Because I already know all your answers by heart. I want you to tell me one thing: is there or is there not any chance of my getting my daughter back?”

  “But what are you saying?” he says. “Your daughter isn’t going anywhere. And nothing bad will happen to her. Far from it!”

  “Yes,” I say. “I already know all that. You have only her good in mind. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I want to know where my daughter is and whether I can get to see her.”

  “Ask me anything but that,” he says to me.

  “That’s spoken like a man at last,” I say, “short and sweet! You should only be well, Father—and may God pay you back with lots of interest for what you’ve done.”

  I came home to find my Golde in bed, cried dry and curled up like a ball of black yarn. “Get up, woman,” I said to her. “Take off your shoes and let’s begin the seven days of mourning as we’re supposed to. Hashem nosan vehashem lokakh, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away—we’re not the first and we won’t be the last. Let’s just pretend there was never any Chava to begin with, or that she’s gone off like Hodl to the far ends of the earth where we’ll never see her again … God is merciful, He knows what He’s doing …”

  Though I meant every word of it, I had a lump like a bone in my throat. Mind you, Tevye is no woman; Tevye doesn’t break down and cry. Still, that’s easier said than done when you have to live with the shame of it … and just try not breaking down yourself when you’ve lost your own daughter, and a jewel like Chava at that, who always had a special place in my and
her mother’s heart, more than any of her sisters. Don’t ask me why that was. Maybe it had to do with her being a sickly child who came down with every illness in the book; why, the times we sat up all night with her, trying to snatch her from the very jaws of death, watching her fight for her life like a trampled little bird—but if God only wills it, He can even resurrect you from the grave, and loy omus ki ekhyeh, if your number hasn’t come up yet, there’s no reason to say die … And maybe it also had to do with her always having been such a good, dependable child who loved her parents body and soul. How then, you ask, could she have gone and done such a thing? Well, to begin with, it was just our rotten luck; I don’t know about you, but I believe in fate. And then too, someone must have put a hex on her. You can laugh all you want at me, but (though I’m not such a yokel as to believe in haunts, spooks, ghosts, and all that hocus-pocus) witchcraft, I tell you, is a fact—because how do you explain all this if it isn’t? And when you hear what happened next, you’ll be as sure of it as I am …

  In a word, our rabbis meant it when they said, be’al korkhekho atoh khai—a man must never say the jig is up with him. There’s no wound in the world that time doesn’t heal and no misfortune that can’t be gotten over. I don’t mean to say you forget such things, but what good does it do to remember them? And odom kiveheymoh nidmeh—if you want to eat, you can’t stop slaving like a donkey. We took ourselves in hand, my wife, my girls, and I, went back to work, and oylom keminhogoy noyheyg—life went its merry way. I made it clear to them all that I never wanted to hear of Chava again. There simply was no such person.

  And then one day, having built up a fresh stock of merchandise, I set out for my customers in Boiberik. I received a hero’s welcome when I got there. “What’s new with a Jew, Reb Tevye? Where have you been all this time?” “What should be new?” I said. “The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’m still the same sap I always was. A cow just died on me, that’s all.”

  Well, everyone had to know, of course, which cow it was, and what it had cost, and how many cows I had left. “What is it with you, Reb Tevye,” they asked, “that all the miracles happen to you?” They laughed and made a big joke of it, the way rich people do with us poor devils, especially if they’ve just had a good meal, and are feeling full and cozy, and the sun is shining outside, and it’s time for a little snooze. Not that Tevye begrudges anyone a bit of fun at his expense. Why, they can croak, every last one of them, before they’ll know what I’m feeling!…