Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

  I tell you, it was like a bad dream! I looked at my Beilke, waiting for her to say something, to bat an eyelash at least. But she just stood there stock-still, not a drop of blood in her cheeks, glancing back and forth from her husband to me without so much as a word. I stared at her without saying one either, so that there we both were with our tongues stuck to the roofs of our mouths. My head was spinning, pounding away as though I had been breathing coal gas. What can be wrong with me, I wondered; if it’s the cigar I smoked, he’s been smoking one himself, and talking nonstop in the bargain, though his eyelids keep drooping as if he were itching to snooze. “You take the express train to Odessa,” he says to me, “and from there a ship sails to Jaffa. The best time to go is right now, because later there are winds … and snow, and … and storms … and … and …” He was so sleepy he could barely get the words out, but he didn’t stop jabbering for a second. “Just don’t forget to notify us when you’re ready to leave … We’ll come to say goodbye at the station … Who knows when we’ll meet again …” And he yawns in my face, gets up from his chair, and says to my Beilke, “And now, my sweet, you spend some time with your father while I go lie down for a while …”

  I swear, I thought, that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said; now at last I can get it all off my chest. And I turned to my Beilke to let out what had been building up in me all day—but before I could even begin, she threw her arms around me and started to cry. Did I say cry? My daughters, bless them, are all the same; for a while they manage to put on a brave face, but sooner or later every one of them gushes like a geyser. Take my second oldest, Hodl, for example; at the very last minute, just as she’s setting out for Siberia with her Peppercorn, she breaks down and bawls like a baby! Only there’s really no comparison, because when it comes to crying, Hodl can’t hold a candle to Beilke.

  I’ll tell you the honest truth: I myself am no weeping willow. The last good cry I remember having, in fact, was when I found my poor Golde dead on the floor, and before that, when my Hodl left me standing in the station, all alone like a fool with my horse. There may have been a few other times when my eyes were a wee bit wet, but that’s all; on the whole, it’s not like me to blubber. But Beilke’s tears threw me so that I couldn’t hold my own in any longer, let alone say a cross word to her. I’m not a man who needs things spelled out for me: my name is Tevye. And I knew why she was crying: it was for kheyt shekhotosi lefonekho, for the sin of not listening to a father—so that instead of letting her have what she deserved and giving that Hodderputz hell, I tried cheering her up with some story or other, as only Tevye can do. She listened to me, did my Beilke, and said, “No, Papa, that’s not why I’m crying. I’m not blaming myself or anyone. It just breaks my heart to know that you’re going away because of me, and that there’s not a thing I can do about it.”

  “There, there,” I told her. “You’re talking like a little girl. Have you forgotten that God is still in His heaven and your father is still a young man? Why, it’s child’s play for me to travel to Palestine and back again, just like it says in the Bible: vayisu vayakhanu—and the Children of Israel knew not if they were coming or going …”

  Yet the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I thought, Tevye, that’s a big fat lie! You’re off to the Land of Israel for good—it’s bye-bye Tevye forever … She must have read my mind, too, for she said to me, “Please, Papa. It’s no use trying to comfort me as you would a child with some fairy tale that ends happily ever after—although if you like fairy tales, I can tell you one myself. I’m warning you, though, Papa, that this fairy tale is a sad one.”

  That’s just what she said, my Beilke; Tevye’s daughters don’t mince words. And with that she began to tell me a story, a case history, a tale from the Arabian Nights, about how her Podhotzur was a self-made man who had pulled himself up from the bottom rung by his own bootstraps and now only wanted to hobnob with all the Brodskys of the world … Money, she said, was no object to him; he gave it away by the barrelful; only money, it seemed, was not enough, one needed a pedigree too—and Podhotzur was determined to prove that he wasn’t just some rich upstart but the last of a long line of famous Podhotzurs and the son of a wealthy contractor himself. “And that,” says my Beilke, “is though he knows that I know that his father was a fiddler at weddings. Worse yet, he goes about telling everyone that his father-in-law is a millionaire too …”

  “Who, me?” I say. “Well, I always thought that someday I would get to be one.”

  “I can’t tell you how I blush, Papa,” she says, “when he introduces me to his friends with the most outrageous lies about my distinguished father, and all my uncles, and my whole family—and I have to sit there and put up with it, because he’s eccentric that way.”

  “By you,” I say, “he’s eccentric. By me he’s a charlatan and a fraud.”

  “But he’s not, Papa,” says my Beilke. “You don’t know him. He’s not such a bad man as you think. He’s just unpredictable. He has a big heart and he’s generous. If you catch him in the right mood, it’s enough to make a long face for him to give you the shirt off his back. And I’m not even talking about myself—for me the sky’s the limit! You mustn’t think I have no influence with him. Why, not long ago I made him promise to do all he could to free Hodl and her husband from Siberia. He swore to me that money wouldn’t stand in his way. His one condition was that they go to Japan when Peppercorn gets out.”

  “Why to Japan?” I asked. “Why not to India, or to Mesopotamia, or to Timbuktu?”

  “Because,” she says, “he has businesses there. He has businesses everywhere. He spends more on telegrams in a single day than it would cost us to live on for a year. But what good does all that do me if I can’t be myself?”

  “The rabbis,” I said, “put that very well. Im eyn ani li mi li—if you can’t be yourself, don’t expect me to be.”

  And I tried to make a joke of it with a quote thrown in here and there, though my heart bled for my daughter to see what unhappiness money had bought her. “Your sister Hodl,” I said, “would never have gotten into such a—”

  “I already told you, Papa,” said my Beilke, interrupting me, “not to compare me to Hodl. Hodl lived in the Age of Hodl and Beilke lives in the Age of Beilke. The distance between the two is as great as from here to Japan.”

  I ask you, is that Japanese or not?

  Well, I see you’re getting off at the next station, Pani. Just give me two more minutes. I left my lucky youngest daughter’s house with a bellyful of her sorrows, a shattered, a devastated man; flung my cigar, which had only given me a headache, on the ground; and yelled at it, “You should go straight to hell, you and your father and all your uncles!”

  “Whose uncles did you say, Reb Tevye?” I heard a voice ask behind me. I turned around—why, it’s Efrayim the Matchmaker, the Devil take him and keep him!

  “Well, well, a fellow Jew!” I say. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “Visiting my daughter,” I say.

  “And how is she?” he asks.

  “How should she be?” I say. “Not everyone has luck like hers.”

  “I can see you’re happy with my merchandise,” he says.

  “Happy,” I say, “is not the word. You should only be as happy yourself.”

  “Thank you for your kind wishes,” he says. “Perhaps you’d like to add a small remittance to them.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” I say, “that you never were paid your matchmaker’s fee?”

  “That Podhotzur of yours,” he says, “should only be worth as much as he paid me.”

  “You mean he short-changed you?” I ask.

  “Not at all,” he says. “What he gave me just wasn’t enough.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s not a kopeck left of it.”

  “How come?”

  “I married off a daughter myself.”

  “Mazel tov!” I say.
“May God grant you pleasure from her.”

  “A fine lot of pleasure He’s already granted me,” he says. “I wound up with a gangster for a son-in-law. He beat my daughter black and blue and ran away with all her money to America.”

  “But why didn’t you stop him?” I say.

  “Why, what could I have done?” he asks.

  “Well,” I say, “you might have salted him away in a pickle barrel.”

  “I see you’re in a gay mood today, Reb Tevye,” says Efrayim.

  “It would be a fit punishment for God,” I say, “if He had to feel half as gay as I do.”

  “Is that so?” he says. “And here I was thinking how lucky you were to be a rich Jew. Well then, how about a pinch of snuff to cheer you up?”

  I took the snuff, said goodbye to the matchmaker, drove home to my village, and began to sell all the worldly goods I had accumulated over the years. Mind you, that’s easier said than done. Every pot and pan, the silliest little item, cost me a year of my life; if it didn’t remind me of my poor Golde, it reminded me of my daughters, may they live. The cruelest blow of all, though, was getting rid of my horse. I felt like a traitor to him. You see, we had suffered together for so many years, slaved together, been through so much together—and here I was, putting him on the block! In the end I sold him to a water carrier, because dealing with coachmen was too aggravating. You should have heard the guff I had to take from them. “God help us, Reb Tevye,” they said to me, “do you call that thing a horse?”

  “And what does it look like to you,” I say, “a chandelier?”

  “Not at all,” they say. “A chandelier doesn’t have four legs. In fact, for a horse we’d give him ninety-nine out of a hundred.”

  “You would?” I say.

  “Yes,” they say. “He’ll live to be a hundred and he’s already ninety-nine. His lips are gray, there’s not a tooth in his mouth, and his ribs shake like an old woman’s on a cold winter night.”

  That’s coachmen’s talk, in case you didn’t know. I swear to you that my nag understood every word of it, just like it says in the Bible: veyoda shor koyneyhu—even a dumb beast knows when it’s been put up for sale. And the proof of it was that when I slapped the water carrier on the back to congratulate him, my horse turned his old head to me and gave me a silent stare that said, “Zeh khelki mikoyl amoli—is this how you thank me for all I’ve done for you?” I took one last look at his new owner leading him away and beginning none too gently to teach him his new trade, and I thought as I stood there all alone, God Almighty, how cleverly You run this world of Yours: here You create a horse and here You create a Tevye, and one fate is enough for them both! The only difference is that a man has a mouth and can grumble till he’s hoarse, while a horse can’t grumble till he’s man. That’s why he’s only a horse.

  You see the tears in my eyes, Pan Sholem Aleichem, and you must be thinking, how Tevye misses his horse! But what makes you think it’s just my horse? I miss everything, there’s not one thing it doesn’t grieve me to think of. I miss my horse, I miss my village, I miss its elder, I miss its policeman, I miss the dachas of Boiberik, I miss the rich Jews of Yehupetz, I even miss Efrayim the Matchmaker, may the cholera carry him off! When you get right down to it, he’s nothing but a miserably poor Jew himself who’s out to make a living like the rest of us. Don’t ask me what I’ll do in the Land of Israel if I get there safely, God willing, but I do know one thing for sure, and that’s that right off I plan to visit Mother Rachel in her grave. I’ll pray there for the daughters I’ll probably never see again, and I’ll think of him, too—I mean Efrayim the Matchmaker—and of you, and of Jews everywhere. Here, let’s shake on that! Be well, and have a good trip, and give my very best to any of our friends you may happen to meet on your way.

  (1909)

  LEKH-LEKHO

  Greetings, Pan Sholem Aleichem, greetings to you and yours! I’ve been looking for you everywhere, because I have some fresh goods for you. Where have you been? Why haven’t I seen you? I’ve been told you were traveling all over the world, to all kinds of far places, each of the hundred-and-seven-and-twenty lands of King Ahasuerus … But am I imagining it, or are you really giving me a strange look? You seem to be trying to make up your mind if it’s me or not. It’s me, Pan Sholem Aleichem, it’s me—your old friend Tevye in person, Tevye the Dairyman! That is, I’m still Tevye, though I’m not a dairyman any more; I’m just a plain everyday Jew, and an old one too, as you can see, though to go by my age, no older than it says in the Haggadah: harey ani keven shivim shonoh—why, I’m not even pushing seventy yet … So why, you ask, all the white hair? Believe me, my dear friend, I didn’t grow it for fun. It’s partly from my own private sorrows—God forgive me for putting myself first!—and partly from those of Jews everywhere. What times we live in! What a miserable time to be a Jew!… I can see, though, that you’re itching to ask me something. I suppose it’s because you remember having said goodbye to me as I was leaving for the Land of Israel. You must be thinking that I’m back from there, and you can’t wait to hear news of the Wailing Wall, Mother Rachel’s Tomb, and all those other places. Well, let me assure you that if you’ve got the time for me, I’ve got the news for you. In fact, if you listen to me carefully, with a real shmo’eyni, as Father Abraham says, you’ll soon say yourself that God’s in His heaven, man is a jackass, and all is right with the world.

  In a word, what Bible reading are you up to in the synagogue this week, the first chapter of Leviticus? Well, I’m a bit behind, because I’m still back in the third chapter of Genesis. That’s the chapter of Lekh-Lekho, you know, where God shows Abraham the door. Lekh-lekho—get thee out, Tevye—meyartsekho—from your land—umimoyladitkho—and from the village you were born in and lived in your whole life—el ha’orets asher arekko—to wherever your legs will carry you … And when did it occur to the powers-that-be to tell me that? Not a minute before I’m so old, weak, and lonely that I’m a real al tashlikheynu le’eys ziknoh, as it says in the Rosh Hashanah prayer … Only I’m getting ahead of myself, because I was telling you about my trip and what’s new in the Land of Israel. Well, what should be new there, my dear friend? It’s a land flowing with milk and honey—if you don’t believe me, you can read up on it in the Bible. There’s only one thing the matter with it, which is that it’s there and I’m here … and not only am I still here in Russia, I’m still a schlimazel in Russia, and a schlimazel I’ll be till I die! Just think of it: there I was with one foot practically in the Holy Land already—I had only to buy a ticket, board a ship, and heigh-ho!—when what does the good Lord decide to do? It shouldn’t happen to you or to anyone, but one night my son-in-law, Motl Komzoyl, the tailor from Anatevka, gets it into his head to go to bed well and wake up dead in the morning. I don’t mean to say he was the picture of health before that. He was a workingman, after all, who spent day and night al hatoyroh ve’al ha’avoydoh, patching pants with his needle and thread. Well, the long and short of it was that he came down with the dry cough, and coughed and coughed until he coughed his lungs out. Nothing helped him one bit, not the doctors with their medicines, or the quacks with their snake oils, or the goat’s milk, or the chocolate with honey. He was a fine young man; a bit simple perhaps, without any learning, but also without any guile; and was he ever crazy about my Tsaytl! He lived his whole life for her and her children, and he would have done anything for me, too …

  In a word, vayomos Moysheh—Motl passed on and left me with a pretty kettle of fish to fry. How could I even think of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when I had a house full of little pilgrims myself? You can’t just let your widowed daughter and all her orphans go hungry—although on the other hand, I was about as much use to them as a sack full of holes. I couldn’t bring Tsaytl’s husband back to life for her, or restore the children’s father from the dead; I was a mere mortal myself, and an old one at that, who wanted only to rest his weary bones and feel for once that he was a human being and not a donkey. I had had eno
ugh of this workaday, dog-eat-dog world; it was high time to start thinking of the next one. And besides, I had already held a clearance sale of everything I owned; my horse, as you know, was given his walking papers, and every one of my cows was sold too, except, that is, for two little calves, who needed their victuals if anything was to come of them … and now, all of a sudden, here I was running an orphanage in my old age, the father of a house full of children! And do you think that was all? Don’t jump to any hasty conclusions. The real music hasn’t begun yet, because it never rains in Tevye’s life but it pours, like that time a cow of mine died and another cow thought it such a grand notion that the next day she went and died too … Well, that’s how God chose to make this world of His, and that’s how it always will be. Why spit into the wind?

  In short, I told you how my youngest daughter Beilke struck it rich by landing that fat cat of a Podhotzur who made a pile as a war contractor. He heard of her from Efrayim the Matchmaker, damn his soul, fell for her head over heels, and went down so hard on his knees to ask me for her hand that he nearly split his shins. And he took her without a penny’s dowry, and rained pearls and diamonds on her too—you’d normally call that a stroke of good luck, wouldn’t you? Well, all that luck, let me tell you, went right down the drain in the end—and what a drain it was, God save us all from such a filthy mess! When He decides to give the wheel of fortune a spin so that the butter side is down, it’s like reciting the hallel prayer: you can’t say mekimi, “He who raiseth the lowly,” without adding mi’ofor dal, “from the dirt”—and bang, that’s just where you find yourself, right smack on your bottom again! Oh, God likes to play games with us, He does. He’s got a favorite He plays with Tevye called Oylim Veyordim, which means in plain language Upsy-Daisy—now you’re up, and now you’re pushing daisies … which is exactly what happened to that contractor. Perhaps you remember my telling you about his seventeen servants and his little mansion with its mirrors, clocks, and toys. La-di-da! You may also remember my asking my Beilke—begging her, in fact—to make sure he bought the house outright and registered it in her name. Well, she listened to me the way a dead man listens in the grave. What does a father know about such things? Nothing times nothing, of course! And do you know what happened in the end? Exactly what you’d wish on your worst enemy! He not only went so broke that he had to sell every last clock and mirror, even the pearls and diamonds he bought my Beilke, he had to run for dear life from his creditors too, and light out for never-never land—I mean for America, where else do all the hard-luck cases go? And don’t think they had it easy there, either. They ran out of what little money was left, and when the larder was empty they had to go to work—and I do mean work, the worst sort of slave labor, just like we Jews did in Egypt, both him and her! Lately, she writes, things are looking up, thank God; they’re both making socks in a sweatshop and doing well; which means in American that they’re breaking their backs to keep the wolf from the door … although the lucky thing is, she writes, that there are only two of them, they haven’t any little mouths to feed. What doesn’t go by the name of luck these days! I ask you, doesn’t his great-aunt’s grand-uncle deserve to break a leg?… No, I don’t mean that Podhotzur, I mean Efrayim the Matchmaker, for palming off such a match on me and getting us all into this pickle! Would it have been such a tragedy if my Beilke had married a workingman like my Tsaytl or a tutor like my Hodl? Not that they’re sitting on top of the world themselves … one is a widow and the other is in Outer Nowhere … but these things come from God, a man can’t do anything about them. Would you like to know something? The most sensible one of us all was my Golde. She saw what was coming and decided to clear out of this ridiculous world in time, because she knew it was a thousand times better to be breakfasted on by the worms than to go through what her Tevye has gone through with his daughters. Well, you know what our rabbis said: be’al korkhekho atoh khai—no one asks you if you want to live or not, and neither would you, if only you minded your own business …