Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

“My goodness!”

  “I needed a little help, of course. That’s when I thought of my shopboy, a real whiz who knows Russian like the back of his hand. I stole the book from my daughter’s room one night and brought it to him. ‘Here, Berl,’ I said. ‘I want you to read this tonight and tell me tomorrow what it’s all about.’ I couldn’t wait for it to be morning. ‘All right, Berl,’ I said, grabbing him as soon as he showed up for work, ‘tell me what it says there.’ ‘Whew, that’s some book!’ he says, whistling through his teeth. ‘I didn’t sleep all night, I couldn’t put it down for a minute!’ ‘Is that a fact?’ I say. ‘In that case, suppose you let me in on it …’

  “Well, my Berl starts describing the book—what can I tell you? Nothing has anything to do with anything! Listen to a schlock story. ‘Once upon a time,’ he says, ‘there’s this goy named Sanine who likes to get drunk and eat pickles … And he has a sister, Sanine does, called Lida, who’s wild about a doctor, even though she’s pregnant by an officer … And there’s also a student named Yuri, who’s crazy in love with a young teacher called Krasavitsa, who goes sailing one night—guess with who?—no, not with the student!—with that boozer, I mean Sanine …’

  “ ‘And that’s all?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Not so fast!’ he says. ‘I’m not done yet. There’s another teacher named Ivan, and he comes along with Sanine to see Krasavitsa take a skinny-dip …’

  “ ‘Good for him,’ I say. ‘But what’s the upshot of it all?’

  “ ‘The upshot,’ he says, ‘is that the boozer, this Sanine, is some stud, and even when he comes home to his own sister, Lida …’

  “ ‘Feh,’ I say, ‘you should be ashamed of yourself! I’ve had enough of that drunk. Just tell me how it ends. What’s the punch line?’

  “ ‘The punch line,’ he says, ‘is that the officer puts a bullet in his head, and so does the student, and Krasavitsa takes poison, and this Jew, Soloveichik—he’s part of it also—goes and hangs himself.’

  “ ‘I wish you’d hanged yourself with him!’ I say.

  “ ‘Who, me?’ he says. ‘What did I do?’

  “ ‘Not you,’ I said. ‘I meant the artsy pasha.’

  “That’s what I told my Berl, though I was really thinking of that damned little creep from Navaredok. Don’t think I wasn’t itching to have it out with him!”

  “Well?”

  “ ‘Tell me,’ I said to him, ‘where did you ever come up with such a schlock story?’ ‘What schlock story?’ he says, turning his gold glasses on me. ‘The one about that drunk called Sanine,’ I say. ‘Sanine is no drunk,’ he says. ‘Then what is he?’ I say. ‘He’s a hero,’ he says. ‘What makes him a hero,’ I say, ‘his eating sour pickles, drinking vodka from a teacup, and carrying on like a studhorse?’ That got under his skin, that creep from Navaredok. He took off his glasses, gave me a look with those red, browless eyes of his, and said, ‘You may have heard the music, Pa, but you sure can’t carry the tune. Sanine lives a free, natural life. Sanine says and does what he wants!’

  “And off he goes into a long harangue about the dickens only knows what, freedom and love and love and freedom, waving his hands in the air and sticking out that pigeon breast of his as though he were preaching hellfire. I stood there looking at him and thinking: God in heaven, would you believe a scrawny little twerp like this talking about love?! Suppose I took him by the scruff of his neck and gave him such a shaking that he’d have to pick his teeth up off the floor? Only then I thought, what’s the matter with you? So the boy is a bubblehead, so what? Would you rather he had bombs on the brain?… Go be a prophet and guess that there are worse things than bombs and that because of that schlock story, I would lose my only daughter, and see my wife go nearly mad with grief, and suffer such shame and heartache that I had to sell my business and move to another town! I can’t believe it’s been two years already …

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you exactly what happened and how it all came about. It started with the peasant riots. We had a good scare in our town when they broke out, because we were afraid pogroms would come next. By some miracle, though, everything turned out for the best. How was that? A regiment of soldiers was sent from the provincial capital, and not only did they restore such order that it was a pleasure, they were a windfall for the whole town. What could be better for business than an entire regiment complete with officers, and adjutants, and quartermasters, and barber-surgeons, and camp followers?”

  “That’s for sure!”

  “Go be a prophet and guess that the cantor’s daughter would fall in love with an officer and announce that she was going to baptize herself and marry him! That put the town into a panic. Not to worry, though: the cantor’s daughter wasn’t baptized and she didn’t marry the officer, because by then the peasant riots were over and he was so involved in decamping with his regiment that he forgot all about saying goodbye to her … Except that she couldn’t forget about him. Imagine her poor father and mother! It was no joke what they went through. The whole town was in an uproar, wherever you went no one talked about anything else. There were even some bigmouths who spread the word that the cantor’s wife had sent for the midwife and went about asking the cantor who he planned to name the child for … although to tell you the truth, it’s perfectly possible that the whole thing was a figment of their imagination. You know how people in a small town like to gossip …”

  “Don’t they!”

  “I felt so sorry for the two of them, the cantor and his wife, that it broke my heart, because when you get right down to it, what fault was it of theirs? I had a daughter of my own, though, and don’t think I didn’t put my foot down and tell her once and for all, ‘Whatever was, was, but from now on you’re not friends with that girl any longer!’ When I lay down the law, I expect to be obeyed; she may have been an only child, but respect for a father comes first. Go guess that she would go on seeing the girl secretly without anyone knowing about it! When did I find out? When it was already too late …”

  From behind me came the sound of someone half coughing and half groaning in sleep. The Jew telling the story fell silent for a few moments, then resumed his tale in a lower tone than before.

  “It happened at the beginning of Elul. I remember it as though it were yesterday. You should have heard our cantor lead the midnight prayer: why, the way he wept could have moved a stone to tears! No one, but no one, knew what he was feeling as well as I did—believe me, being the father of today’s children is no great joy … It was already light out when we finished, so I went home, grabbed a bite to eat, took the keys, went to the marketplace, opened the business, and waited for the shopboy to come. I waited half an hour. I waited an hour. Still no shopboy. Finally he appeared. ‘Berl,’ I said, ‘why so late?’ ‘I was at the cantor’s house,’ he says. ‘What on earth were you doing at the cantor’s?’ I asked. ‘What!’ he says, ‘Haven’t you heard what happened to Chaika?’ (That was the cantor’s daughter.) ‘No,’ I said, ‘what happened?’ ‘You won’t believe this,’ he says, ‘but she went and poisoned herself!’ ”

  “Dear me!”

  “As soon as I heard that, I ran right home. My first thought was, what will Etke say? (My daughter’s name was Etke.) ‘Where’s Etke?’ I asked my wife. ‘She’s still sleeping,’ she says. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘You won’t believe this,’ I say, ‘but Chaika poisoned herself.’ The words weren’t out of my mouth when my wife grabs her head in her hands and screams: ‘Oh, my God! Oh, dear God! Oh, God help her!’ ‘Who? What?’ I said. ‘You won’t believe this,’ she says, ‘but Etke spent at least two hours with her just last night.’ ‘Etke with Chaika?’ I say. ‘What are you talking about? How can that be?’ ‘Don’t ask me that now!’ she says. ‘I had to give in to her. She begged me not to tell you that she was seeing her every day. Oh, God! If only this were all a bad dream …’ And she turns around, my wife, runs into Etke’s room, and collapses there on the floor. I ran in after her, straight to the bed. ‘
Etke! Etke!’ I called. What Etke? Who was I calling? She was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead. In her own bed. There was a bottle on the table with a note beside it, written in her own hand—not in Russian, but in Yiddish. It was a thing of beauty, her Yiddish! ‘Dear, darling Papa and Mama,’ she wrote. ‘Please forgive me for causing you such grief and shame. A hundred times I beg your forgiveness. We promised each other, Chaika and I, that we would die a single death, because we can’t live without each other. I know, my dearest ones, that I’m doing a terrible thing to you. I’ve gone through all kinds of torment. But my fate is my fate, and I must go to meet it … I have only one request of you, my dears—that you bury me in a grave next to Chaika’s. Be well, and please, please forget you ever had a daughter named Etke …’ Did you hear that? We should forget we had a daughter named Etke …”

  There was a sound of stirring behind me, followed by a yawn or a groan and the hoarse, sleep-constricted voice of a woman calling:

  “Avreml?… Avreml!…”

  “Gitke, are you up? How did you sleep? Would you like a hot drink? There’s a station coming up soon. Where’s the thermos? Where did you put the tea and sugar?”

  (1909)

  THE SLOWPOKE EXPRESS

  Would you like to know what the best train of all is? The best, the quietest, and the most restful? It’s the Slowpoke Express.

  That’s what the Jews of Bohopoli call the narrow-gauge local that connects several towns in their district: Bohopoli, Heysen, Teplik, Nemirov, Khashchevate, and a few other such blessed places that are far from the beaten track indeed.

  According to the Bohopolians, who have a reputation for being jokesters, the Slowpoke Express is no ordinary train. In the first place, you needn’t ever worry about missing it: whenever you arrive at the station, it’s still there. Secondly, they say, where else can you find a train on which you never have to fight for a seat—on which, in fact, you can travel for miles all by yourself, stretched out at full length on a bench like a lord and sleeping as much as you please? And they happen to be right on both counts. I’ve been riding the Slowpoke Express for several weeks now, and I’m still practically in the same place. I tell you, it’s magic! Don’t think I’m complaining, either. Far from it. I couldn’t be more satisfied, because I’ve seen so many fine sights and heard so many fine tales that I don’t know when I’ll ever get the chance to jot them all down in my journal.

  First, though, let me tell you how this railway came to be built. That’s a story in itself.

  When word arrived from St. Petersburg that a line was going to be laid (Witte was the minister in charge then), the Jews refused to believe it. What did Teplik, or Golte, or Heysen, need a railroad for? Hadn’t they gotten along famously without one until now? And the biggest sceptics were the Bohopolians, who received the news, as was their custom, with a spate of jokes. “Do you see this?” they said, holding up the palms of their hands. “We’ll have a railroad the day hair grows here.” After a while, however, when an engineer arrived with a team of surveyors, the Jews ate their words and the Bohopolians hid their hands in their pockets. (One good thing about the Bohopoli Jews is that they don’t take it to heart when they’re wrong. “Even a calendar,” they say, “sometimes has the wrong date on it.”) Soon the engineer was besieged with documents, references, letters of recommendation, requests for favors—in short, with applications for jobs. A Jew, unfortunately, has to make a living, and it was common knowledge among the good burghers of Teplik, Bershed, Heysen, and Bohopoli that building a railroad was the way to get rich quick. Why, just look at Poliakov in Moscow …

  There wasn’t a Jewish businessman—not just those who dealt in lumber and stone, but wheat and grain merchants too—who didn’t try to go to work for the railroad. Overnight the whole district blossomed with contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors. “Our Poliakovs,” the Bohopolians called them, already busily calculating how they too might get their share of the loot.

  In a word, the outbreak of railroad fever spared no one. Even in ordinary times it’s hard not to crave an easy ruble, and who can resist becoming a Poliakov quicker than it takes to say one’s bedtime prayers?

  Indeed, so I was told, the competition among the contractors, the subcontractors, and the sub-subcontractors was so fierce that the contracts had to be raffled off. Whoever was smiled upon by fortune and the chief engineer received one, and whoever didn’t had to make do with what could be gleaned from those who did. They were sure to part with something, because the losers had a way of hinting that the road leading to St. Petersburg and the hearts of its officials was open to the general public too … To make a long story short, our Jews pawned their wives’ pearls and their Sabbath suits to go into the railroad business and ended up by losing every penny and warning their children and grandchildren never to go near a railroad again.

  Nevertheless, the one thing had nothing to do with the other. Our Jews, the poor devils, may have been taken to the cleaner’s, but a train to travel on they had. And even though, as the reader now knows, the Bohopolians christened it the Slowpoke Express, they can’t stop singing its praises and telling its wonders to the world.

  For example, they make much of the fact that since the Slowpoke is a slowpoke, there’s no danger of the accidents that occur on other lines. The slower the safer, they say—and the Slowpoke is as slow as can be, indeed, a little too slow for comfort. The wits of Bohopoli, who have a tendency to exaggerate, even claim that a local resident once set out on the Slowpoke for his grandson’s circumcision in Khashchevate and arrived just in time for the bar mitzvah. And they tell another story about a young man from Nemirov and a young lady from Bershed who arranged to be introduced at a station midway between them; by the time they got there, however, the young lady was toothless and the young man was as gray as a rainy day, and so the match was called off …

  If you ask me, though, I can do without the Bohopolian jokesters and their tall tales. When I myself state a fact, it’s either something that I’ve seen with my own eyes or that I’ve heard from a reliable source like a businessman.

  For instance, I have it on good faith from a merchant in Heysen that several years ago, at Hoshana Rabbah time, the Slowpoke was indeed involved in an accident, a veritable catastrophe that sowed panic up and down the line and set the whole district by the ears. The incident was caused by a Jew and—of all people—a Russian priest. I intend to relate it to you in the next story exactly as it was told me by the merchant. I like to pass on items that I’ve heard from others. You’ll see for yourselves when you read it that it’s the gospel truth, because a merchant from Heysen could never make up such a thing.

  (1909)

  THE MIRACLE OF HOSHANA RABBAH

  “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah—that’s what we called the great train accident that took place toward the end of Sukkos. The whole thing happened, don’t you know, right in Heysen. That is, not in Heysen itself but a few stops away, in a place called Sobolivke.”

  With these words a businessman from Heysen, a most companionable fellow, began his jovial account of the catastrophe that befell the narrow-gauge train called the Slowpoke Express, which I described in the last chapter. And since we were on the Slowpoke ourselves—where, being the only passengers in our car, we had all the time and space in the world—he sprawled out as comfortably as if he were in his own living room and gave his narrative talents free rein, turning each polished phrase carefully and grinning with pleasure at his own story while stroking his ample belly with one hand.

  “So this is already your second week on our Slowpoke! I suppose you must have noticed, then, that it has a temperament of its own and that once it pulls into a station, it sometimes forgets to pull out. According to the schedule, of course, it mustn’t stay a minute longer than it’s supposed to. In Zatkevitz, for instance, that’s an hour and fifty-eight minutes, and in Sobolivke, which is the place I was telling you about, it’s exactly an hour and thirty-tw
o. Bless its sweet little soul, though, if it doesn’t stop for over two hours in each, and sometimes for over three! It all depends how long it takes to tank up. Do you know how the Slowpoke’s crew tanks up? The locomotive is uncoupled and everyone—the motorman, the conductors, and the stokers—goes off with the Stationmaster, the policeman, and the telegraph operator to see how many bottles of beer he can drink.

  “And what do the passengers do while the crew is tanking up? That’s something you’ve seen for yourself too: they go stir-crazy, they begin to climb the walls. Some of them just sit there and yawn, some curl up in a corner and grab forty winks, and some walk up and down the platform with their hands behind their backs, humming a little tune.

  “Well, it just happened to happen during tank-up time in Sobolivke. One Hoshana Rabbah morning, a Jew was standing by the unhooked locomotive with his hands behind his back—and not even a passenger, don’t you know, but a local citizen who had come to have a look-see. How else does a well-off Jew in Sobolivke pass the time on Hoshana Rabbah? He’s already waved his palm branch and said his prayers in the synagogue, gone home, and eaten an early dinner. It’s only half a holiday, but the next day is a whole one, and there’s really nothing much for him to do. What’s left but to take his walking stick and go off to meet the train at the station?

  “ ‘Meeting the train,’ you have to understand, is a local institution. When the train is due in, a Jew moseys down to the station to have a look at it. Just what does he hope to see that’s so exciting—another Jew like himself from Teplik? Or a Jewess from Obodivke? Or a priest from Golovonyevsk? Jewish pleasures! But it was the custom to go, so go this Jew did. And in those days, don’t you know, the railroad was new; we weren’t used to the Slowpoke yet and we were all still curious about it. Take it this way or that, or any way you like, there by the unhooked locomotive with his walking stick stood a Jew from Sobolivke one Hoshana Rabbah morning, half a holiday it was and half a workday, having himself a look-see.