Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

  “Give what you can, children! All donations are welcome. Darovanomu konyu vzuby nye smotryat—that means, according to Rashi, that we won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Folks began rummaging through their pockets and purses, and all sorts of coins, both silver and copper, were soon clinking in the cap. There was even a Christian there, a Russian with high boots and a silver chain around his neck, who yawned, crossed himself, and gave something too. In the whole car one passenger alone refused to part with a kopeck—and that, of all people, was the very same individual who had taken up the cudgel for Jewish livings, an intellectual-looking young man with pasty cheeks, a pointy yellow beard, and gold pince-nez on his nose. You could see he was one of those types with rich parents and in-laws who travel third class to economize.

  “Young fellow,” said the Jew with the blue glasses and big nose, “let’s have something for the hat.”

  “I’m not giving,” said our intellectual.

  “Why not?”

  “Because. It’s a matter of principle with me.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because vedno pana po kholavakh—that means, according to Rashi, that you can tell a rotten apple by its peel.”

  The young man flared up so that he almost lost his pince-nez. “You’re an ignoramus!” he squeaked furiously at the man with the blue glasses. “You’re a cheeky, insolent, impudent, impertinent illiterate!”

  “Thank God I’m all of that and not a two-legged animal that oinks,” answered the man with the big nose in a surprisingly good-natured tone of voice before turning to the puffy-eyed woman and saying, “There, there, Auntie, don’t you think you’ve cried enough? You’ll ruin your pretty eyes if you don’t stop. Here, hold out your hands and I’ll fill them with a bit of spare change.”

  A strange woman if ever there was one! You might have thought that, seeing all the cash, she would have thanked him from the bottom of her heart. In fact she did nothing of the sort. Instead of thanks, a volley of oaths spewed forth from her. She was a veritable fountain of them.

  “It’s all his fault. I hope he breaks his neck! I pray to God he breaks every bone in his body! He’s to blame for everything—I only wish, dear Father in heaven, that everything happens to him! He shouldn’t live to cross his own threshold! He should die a hundred times from a fire, from a fever, from an earthquake, from a plague, from an ill wind that carries him away! He should croak! He should burst! He should dry up like a puddle! He should swell like a dead fish!”

  Good Lord, where did one person get so many curses from? It was a lucky thing that the man with the blue glasses interrupted her and said:

  “That’s enough of your kind wishes, my good woman. Why don’t you tell us why the conductors had it in for you?”

  The woman looked at him with her puffy eyes.

  “I only hope he gets a stroke! He was afraid I’d take his customers away, so he tried pushing ahead of me, so I elbowed him out of the way, so he grabbed my basket from behind, so I started to scream, so a policeman came along and winked to the conductors, so they threw both our baskets in the mud. God turn his blood to mud! I swear to you, may I hope to die if I’ve ever been bothered before or had a hair harmed on my head in all the years I’ve been working this line. Do you know why that is? It’s not from the milk of human kindness, believe me. He should only get a box in the ear for each free roll and hard-boiled egg I’ve handed out in that station! Everyone, from top to bottom, has to get his share of the pie. I hope to God they get all of it some day: one of them consumption, another a fever, another the cholera! The chief conductor takes what he wants, and the other conductors help themselves too to a roll, or an egg, or an orange. What can I tell you? Would you believe that even the stoker, a pox on his head, thinks he has a bite coming? I wish his ears were bitten off! He keeps threatening to rat on me to the policeman unless I give him something to eat. If only he knew, may the gout get his bones, that the policeman gets a cut too. Every Sunday I slip him a bagful of oranges to buy him off for the week. And don’t think he doesn’t choose the biggest, the sweetest, the juiciest fruit …”

  “Auntie,” said the man with the blue glasses, interrupting her again, “judging by the volume of business you do, you must be making a mint.”

  “What are you talking about?” the woman shot back as though her honor were impugned. “I barely manage to meet the overhead. I’ve been taking such a skinning that I’m at starvation’s door.”

  “Then what do you go on for?”

  “What do you want me to do, steal for a living? I have five children at home, may he get five ulcers in his stomach, and I’m a sick woman too, he should only, dear God, lie sick in the poor-house until the end of next year! Just look how he’s killed the business, buried it in the ground—it’s a pity he wasn’t buried with it. And what a good business it was, too. I couldn’t have asked for a better one.”

  “A good business?”

  “As good as gold! Why, I was raking it in.”

  “But, Auntie, didn’t you just tell me you were starving?”

  “That’s because fifty percent goes to the conductors and the Stationmaster and the policeman every Sunday. Do you take me for a gold mine? A buried treasure? A bank robber?”

  The man with the blue glasses and the fleshy nose was getting exasperated. “Auntie!” he said. “You’re making me dizzy!”

  “I’m making you? My troubles are making you—they should only make a corpse out of him! I hope to God he’s ruined just as he ruined me! Why, he was nothing but a tailor, a needle pusher; he didn’t earn enough to buy the water to boil his kasha in. It made him green with envy to see how well I was doing, the eyes should fall out of his head, and that I brought home enough to eat, he should only be eaten by worms, and that I was supporting five orphaned children with my basket, may he swallow a basket of salt that turns to rocks in his belly! That’s when he went, I hope he goes and drops dead, and bought a basket too, may I soon buy the shrouds for his funeral! ‘What do you call this?’ I asked him. ‘A basket,’ he says. ‘And just what do you intend to do with it?’ I asked him. ‘The same thing that you do,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked him. ‘What I’m talking about,’ he says, ‘is that I have five children who have to eat too, and who aren’t going to be fed by you …’ What do you say to that? And ever since then, as you’ve seen for yourselves, he follows me around with his basket, may he be followed by the Angel of Death, and takes away my customers, I wish he’d be taken by the Devil, and steals the bread from my mouth—oh, dear sweet God, You should knock the teeth out of his!”

  That gave the man with the blue glasses an idea that had in fact occurred to the rest of us. “But why do you both have to work the same train?”

  The woman gave him a puffy-eyed stare. “What should we do, then?”

  “Split up. The line is big enough for both of you.”

  “You mean leave him?”

  “Leave who?”

  “My second husband.”

  “What second husband?”

  The pockmarked red face turned even redder.

  “What do you mean, what second husband? The schlimazel we’re talking about. A black day it was that I married him!”

  We nearly fell out of our seats.

  “That man you’re competing with is your second husband?”

  “Who did you think he was, my first? Eh! If only my first, God bless him, were still alive …”

  So she said, the basket woman, in a singsong voice, and started to tell us about her first husband. But who was listening? Everyone was talking, everyone was joking, everyone was making wisecracks, and everyone was laughing till his sides split …

  Maybe you know what was so funny?

  (1909)

  THE HAPPIEST MAN IN ALL KODNY

  The best time to travel by train is … shall I tell you? In autumn, right after Sukkos.

  It’s neither to
o hot nor too cold then, and you needn’t look out all the time at a gray sky sobbing on a gloomy, sulking earth. And if it does rain and the drops strike the window and trickle down the steamy pane like tears, you can sit like a lord in the third-class car with a few other privileged souls like yourself and watch a distant wagon as it labors in the mud. On it, covered with a sack and folded nearly into three, huddles one of God’s creatures who takes out all his misery on another of God’s creatures, a poor horse, while you thank the good Lord that you’re in human company with a solid roof over your head. I don’t know about you, but autumn after Sukkos is my favorite time to travel.

  The first thing I look for is a seat. If I’ve managed to find one, and better yet, if it’s by a window on the right, I tell you, I’m king. I can take out my tobacco pouch, light up as many cigarettes as I please, and look around to see who my fellow passengers are and which of them I can talk a bit of business with. Usually, I’m sorry to say, they’re packed together like herring in a barrel. Everywhere there are beards, noses, hats, stomachs, faces. But a man worth knowing behind the face? Sometimes there isn’t even one … Yet wait a minute: look at that queer fellow sitting by himself in the corner—there’s something special about him. I have a good eye for such types. Show me a hundred ordinary men and I’ll pick out the one oddball right away.

  At first glance, that is, the person in question was a perfectly unremarkable-looking individual of a type that’s a dime a dozen, what we call where I come from a “three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days-a-year Jew.” The one strange thing about him was his clothes: his coat was not exactly a coat, the frock beneath it was not exactly a frock, the hat on his head was not exactly a hat, the skullcap under it was not exactly a skullcap, and the umbrella he held in his hand was not exactly an umbrella, although it was not exactly a broomstick either. A most unusual getup.

  What struck me most about him, though, was not what he was wearing but rather the animation with which, unable to sit still for a minute, he took in his surroundings on all sides—and above all, the jolly, lively, radiant expression on his blissful face. Either, I thought, his winning number has come up in a lottery, or else he’s made a good match for his daughter, or else he’s just enrolled a son in the Russian high school that the boy had the luck to get into. A minute didn’t pass without his jumping from his seat, peering out the window, saying out loud to himself, “Are we there? No, not yet,” and sitting down again a bit nearer to me than before, a jolly, radiant, happy-looking fellow.

  At heart, you should know, I’m as averse as the next man to anyone prying into my business and making the who, what, and when of it his affair. I hold with the opinion that if a person has something to get off his chest, he doesn’t need to be prompted. And indeed this proved to be the case, because after the second station the lively Jew moved even closer to me, indeed, so close that his mouth was directly opposite my nose, and inquired:

  “And where might you be bound for?”

  I could easily tell from how he asked, and how he looked around him, and how he scratched himself beneath his hat that hearing my destination concerned him less than telling me his. And I, for my part, was willing to oblige, so that rather than answer his question I asked him one of my own:

  “And where might you be bound for?”

  That was all it took to set him off.

  “Me? For Kodny. Have you ever heard of Kodny? That’s where I’m from, it is. It isn’t far from here, just three stations away. That is, I get off at the third station after this one. From there it’s still an hour and a half by cart. That is, we call it an hour and a half, but it’s really a good two, in fact a little more, and that’s in the best of cases, if the road’s in good shape and there’s a private carriage to take you. I already telegraphed ahead for one. That is, I sent a cable that a carriage should be at the station. Do you think I did it for myself? Don’t get ideas about me! I don’t mind sharing pot-luck in a plain wagon with half a dozen other passengers, and if there’s none to be had, taking my umbrella in one hand and my things in the other and hiking into town on my two feet. Carriages, you understand, are a bit beyond my means. In fact, as far as business is concerned, it isn’t so golden that I couldn’t just as well stay home. What do you say to that, eh?”

  The fellow paused, let out a sigh, and began to speak again in a whisper right into my ear, though not before first looking all around him to see if anyone was listening.

  “I’m not traveling alone. I have a professor with me, I do. What am I doing with a professor? Well, it’s like this. Have you ever heard of Kashevarevke? There’s a village called that, Kashevarevke, and there’s a rich Jew who lives there, a man who made himself a pile. Maybe you’ve heard of him: Borodenko is the name, Itzikl Borodenko. What do you say to a name like that, eh? It’s a goy’s name, not a Jew’s. You know what, though? You can have a goy’s name and you can have a Jew’s, it’s not the name you have that counts, it’s the money. And Borodenko has lots of it, to put it mildly. The word in Kodny is that he’s worth half a million—and if you were to press me on that, I’d own up to the other half too. The fact is that he is, you should pardon the expression, such a so-and-so that he may even be sitting on two million. You be the judge, because, though I’ve never seen you before in my life, I can tell, I can, that you’re a man who gets about more than I do. Tell me the truth, then: have you ever heard the name Borodenko mentioned in the same breath with the slightest act of generosity—a contribution to charity, something done for one’s fellow Jews, anything? If there ever was such a thing, the news still hasn’t reached Kodny. Well, I’m not God’s bookkeeper and it’s easy to be free with someone else’s bank account. It’s just that I’m not talking philanthropy; I’m talking humanity, that’s what I’m talking. If God has been good enough to let you afford a home visit by a professor of medicine, what harm would it do you if someone else were to benefit too? No one’s asking for your money, only for a good word—why be a wild man about it? Listen to a lovely story.

  “It so happened that word reached us in Kodny (there’s nothing we Kodny Jews don’t know) that the daughter of this Itzikl Borodenko from Kashevarevke, God spare us, was ill. And what do you think was the matter with her? A lot of nothing, a love affair! She had fallen for some Russian and tried poisoning herself when he jilted her. (There’s nothing we Kodny Jews don’t know!) All this happened just yesterday, mind you. Right away they ran to bring a professor, the biggest there is. What’s a professor more or less to a man like Borodenko? Well, that set me to thinking. The professor wasn’t going to stay there forever; today or tomorrow he would go home; and when he did he’d have to pass through our station—that is, close to Kodny. Why shouldn’t he stop to change trains there and pay us—I mean me—a quick call? You see, I have a sick child at home, it shouldn’t happen to you. What exactly is wrong with him? All I can tell you is that it must be something internal. A cough, thank God, he doesn’t have. And as far as his heart is concerned, nothing hurts him there either. So what’s the problem? There’s not a drop of blood in his cheeks and he’s as weak as a fly. That’s because he doesn’t eat a thing. But not a thing. How can someone not eat anything, you ask? But he doesn’t, it’s a fact. Now and then he drinks a glass of milk, but only when he’s forced to. We have to get down on our knees and beg him, we do! He won’t even swallow a spoon of soup or a crumb of bread, let alone meat. Why, he can’t stand the sight of meat, it makes him turn his head away. He’s been like that ever since he spat up blood. That happened over the summer, pray God it doesn’t happen again. There was blood just once, but a lot of it. Since then, thank goodness, there’s been no more. I only hope it keeps up. You can’t imagine how weak he is, though. He can barely stand on his feet. And one other tiny little thing: the boy runs a fever, he’s burning up, he is, as though he had the smallpox! That’s been going on since late spring: a hundred and two, a hundred and three, nothing makes it go away. I’ve taken him to the doctors more times than I can count. But wh
at do our doctors know about anything? He needs to eat, he needs a change of air—that’s all they ever say. What do they expect me to do? Eating is something he won’t even hear about. And as for air, where am I supposed to find it? Air in Kodny? Ha ha, that’s a good one! It’s a nice little place, Kodny is. A nice Jewish community. We have, knock wood, a few Jews, we have a synagogue, we have a study house, we have a rabbi, we have everything. In fact, there are only two things that God forgot to give us: a chance to make a living and some air. Well, as far as a living goes, we’ve worked out a system: we all, the Lord be praised, manage to make one from each other. And air? For air we go to the manor grounds; you’ll find as much of it as you want there. Once, when Kodny belonged to the Poles, you couldn’t set foot in the manor. The Polish squires didn’t permit it. Or rather, not the squires themselves, but their dogs. Ever since the manor has been in Jewish hands, though, the dogs are gone and it’s a totally different place. Why, it’s a pleasure to visit! There are still squires there—big landlords, but at least they’re Jewish ones. They speak Yiddish the same as you and I do, and take an interest in Jewish things, and show a friendly face to a Jew. When it comes to Jews, I tell you, they’re no different from the rest of us! Not that you should think they’re such big saints. You don’t see them any more in our synagogue than you do in our bathhouse, and if breaking the Sabbath laws bothers them, they haven’t given any sign of it yet. Eating a chicken cooked in butter doesn’t frighten them either … and I’m not even talking about things like going beardless or hatless, because that’s nothing out of the ordinary these days: even in Kodny, thanks be to God, we have our share of young folks whose heads have only the hair on them. To tell you the truth, though, we can’t complain about our manor owners. Our Jewish squires don’t shirk their duties toward us. On the contrary, they’re as generous as can be. Comes every autumn, they send a hundred sacks of potatoes for the poor, and comes every winter, straw to burn in the oven. Every Passover they give money to the Matsoh Fund. Not long ago they even donated the bricks for a new synagogue. Why go on? They’re fine, considerate people, one couldn’t wish for more from them—if only that chicken weren’t cooked in butter, ai, that poor chicken!… Don’t get me wrong, though. God knows I don’t mean to criticize. Why should I have anything against them? Far from it! You won’t find them selling me short. Reb Alter (my name is Alter, it is) is tops in their book. Whenever they need anything in the way of things Jewish—a new calendar for the New Year, for example, or matsos for Passover, or a lulav and esrog for Sukkos—they send for me. And in my wife’s store (my wife has a store, she does) there are no better customers for salt and pepper and matches and whatnot. Those are our manor owners … while as for their children, the university students—why, there’s nothing they wouldn’t do for my son! In the summer, when they come home on vacation from St. Petersburg, they teach him whatever he asks them to, they spend whole days with him sitting over some book—and books, I want you to know, are all that boy lives and breathes for! He loves them more than his own father and mother, I’m sorry to say. What I mean is that books will be the death of him, they will. All his troubles began with them, even if my wife still insists that everything started with his call-up from the army. What’s she talking about, I ask you? He forgot all about that call-up long ago. Not that it matters: let it be the books, let it be the call-up—the fact remains that I have a sick boy at home, may we all be blessed with good health, who’s fading away before my very eyes. God in heaven make him well again …”