Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

  “That was the approach I took with her. Did you ever try talking to a wall? ‘All right,’ she says, ‘it’s just as well. He can skip the first year of junior high school.’ ‘What does that mean?’ I say. ‘It means,’ she says, ‘that he’ll go straight into the second year.’ Well, the second year of junior high school is the second year of junior high school—but with a head you can search all of Russia for, who was I to worry if he hadn’t gotten into the first year? Listen to what happened, though: when the chips were down, the boy pulled a two again. Not in mathematics; this time the bad news was something else. His spelling left a bit to be desired. That is, he knew how to spell, he just sometimes left out a few letters. As a matter of fact, he didn’t even leave them out, he just put them in the wrong places. I was crushed: how would the boy ever go with me to the fair in Poltava or Lodz if his spelling wasn’t letter-perfect? But if you think the wife didn’t turn the world upside down, you have another guess coming. Off she ran to the director to convince him that the boy really could do it; just give him a chance to take the exams over again! I’m afraid she made about as much of an impression as last winter’s snow. The boy had gotten a two and something else called a two-minus—go sue!

  “Well, the wife made some scene. How could they refuse to retest him? ‘Look,’ I said to her, ‘that’s the way it is. What do you want me to do, kill myself? He’s not the first Jew and he won’t be the last …’ That just made her so mad, though, that she gave me a royal tongue-lashing as only a woman can. To tell you the truth, I didn’t hold it against her. And my heart went out to the little fellow too, you couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Why, you’d think the sky had fallen in; everyone would be going around in blue blazers with silver buttons except him! ‘Stop being a little fool,’ I said to him. ‘Come to your senses! Was anyone ever born with a written guarantee that he’d get into high school? Someone has to stay home to mind the store, doesn’t he? Open admission is only in the army …’

  “That ticked the wife off but good; she really laid into me this time. ‘I suppose that’s your idea of being comforting,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you save your words of wisdom for yourself? You’d be a lot kinder if you went and got him another tutor, a real Russian who can teach him Russian grammar.’

  “Did you ever hear anything like it? The boy needed two whole private tutors; one tutor and one Hebrew teacher wasn’t enough for him! But when the dust had settled, she had her way again. When she wants it, she gets it …

  “Anyway, what can I tell you? We took a new grammar tutor—and not some measly Jew either, God forbid, but an honest-to-goodness goy. The first-year grammar exam, you should know, is tougher than nails. It’s no picnic, your Russian grammar; you have to mind your p’s and q’s. Just don’t ask me what kind of goy God sent us, though, because I’m ashamed to have to say. The damned anti-Semite took a year off my life! He made fun of us to our faces, he practically spat in them. For instance, when he had to pick a word for my son to practice ‘to eat’ on, all he could think of was ‘garlic’: ‘I eat garlic, you eat garlic, we eat garlic …’ He should only eat garlic in hell! If it hadn’t been for the wife, I would have grabbed him by the seat of his pants and thrown him and his Russian grammar through the window. That’s not how she saw it, though. Why take it personally? It was worth it, she said, just to get those p’s and q’s straight. Imagine, the boy had to go through that torture all winter—in fact, it was nearly summer before he was led to the slaughter again. This time, instead of two twos, he chalked up a four and a five. Glory be! Mazel tov, he’d done it! Or had he? Please to be patient, we wouldn’t know until August whether he’d gotten in or not. Why couldn’t we be told sooner? Go ask! Well, he wasn’t the first or last Jew who had to wait …

  “Comes August, I see my wife’s on pins and needles. She makes the rounds of the director, the inspector, the inspector, the director. ‘Why are you running around like a chicken without a head?’ I ask. ‘What do you mean, why?’ she says. ‘What world do you live in? Haven’t you ever heard of the quota system?’ Wouldn’t you know she was right, too! The boy was turned down a third time. Would you like to know why? Because he didn’t have two fives. With two fives, they said, he might have made it. Might have made it—did you ever?! Well, I’ll spare you the details of what I had to put up with from the wife. But it was the boy I felt sorry for; he just laid his head on his pillow and cried and cried … The long and short of it was that we hired another tutor, a high school student himself, who was to coach him for the second year again—but this time by the intensive method, because your second year is no frolic; there’s not only mathematics and grammar, there’s geography, and penmanship, and the Devil only knows what. Not that I’d give two cents for the lot of it, to tell you the truth. A page of Talmud, if you ask me, takes more brains than all those subjects put together, and probably makes more sense too. But what could I do about it? He wasn’t the first or the last Jew …

  “Anyway, he began a new regime. Up in the morning—hit the books! Time out for prayers and breakfast—back to the books! All day long—stick to the books! In the middle of the night you could still hear him jabbering, ‘Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative’—I tell you, it gave me an earache! Eating and sleeping, it goes without saying, were out of the question. ‘To take a human being,’ I said, ‘and put him through all this for no good reason—why, I wouldn’t do it to a dog. It will make the boy sick in the end.’ ‘Why don’t you bite your tongue off!’ said my wife. Well, don’t think he didn’t go off to the wars and bring home a pair of straight fives! And why shouldn’t he have? You won’t find a head like his in all of Russia! All’s well that ends well, eh? Until the big day comes when all the names of the new students are posted on the wall of the school—all of them, that is, except my son’s. Was there ever a weeping and wailing! With a pair of straight fives, yet: why, it was cold-blooded murder! The wife ran here, the wife ran there, the wife ran everywhere. In fact, she ran herself ragged until she was told to stop wasting her time—or, to put it more bluntly, to beat it. That’s when she began to raise the roof at home. ‘You call yourself a father?’ she said. ‘Why, if you had a father’s heart you’d use your influence, you’d look for connections, you’d find some way to the director …’ There’s a woman who thinks on her feet for you, eh? ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘isn’t it enough for me to keep track of a thousand different dates and bills and order forms and memos and other headaches? Do you want me to ruin myself just because of your high school, which is coming out of my ears already?’ A man is only human, after all; push him too far and he explodes. Not that she didn’t have her way again. You see, when she wants it, she gets it …

  “Anyway, what can I tell you? I used my influence, I looked for some way to the director—and I took some stiff guff in the process, because everybody wanted to know what I was doing and everybody was right. ‘Reb Aharon,’ they all said to me, ‘you have a nice little business, knock wood, and an only son to take into it—why go looking for trouble?’ Go tell them you have a wife at home who has the high school bug so bad that it’s high school, high school, high school all day long! Still, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m no shrinking violet; with a bit of luck I found my way to the director. In fact, I walked right into Mr. High-and-Mighty’s office and laid it on the line—I can hold my own, praise God, with the best of them, the cat never got my tongue yet. ‘Chto vam ugodno?’ he asks me, offering me a seat. ‘Gospodin Direktor,’ I say, ‘my lyudi nye bogaty, no u nas,’ I say, ‘yest malenka sostoyanye i odin khoroshey, zametshatelene maltshik,’ I say, ‘katore,’ I say, ‘khotshet utshitsa. I ya,’ I say, ‘khotshu. Na moya zshena,’ I say, ‘otshen khotshet.’ ‘Chto vam ugodno?’ he asks again. So I move a little closer and repeat the whole spiel. ‘Look here, Professor,’ I say, ‘rich we’re not,’ I say, ‘but poor we’re not exactly either. And we have a boy at home,’ I say, ‘a fine youngster, who wants to go to school. And I want him to go too. And my wife,’
I say, ‘would give anything for him to go.’ I underlined that ‘anything’ to make sure he understood, but leave it to the dumb goy not to get it! ‘Tak chto-zhe vam ugodno?’ he asks for the third time, beginning to get good and annoyed. So I stick my hand in my pocket real slowly, and pull it out real slowly, and gave my little speech again real slowly too—only this time, while taking all day over the ‘anything,’ I put my hand into his … In a word—success at last! He finally got the point, took out his notebook, and asked me for my name, my son’s name, and the year we wanted to enroll him in. Now you’re talking, I thought—and out loud I said that the name was Katz, Aharon, and that the boy’s name was Moshe, though we all called him Moshke, and that the third year of junior high school would suit us just fine. He read it all back to me—Aharon Katz, Moshke Katz, the third year of junior high school—and told me to bring the boy for enrollment in January. How’s that for a change of tune, eh? A little grease helps turn the wheels, doesn’t it! The only problem was that January was still a long ways off. What could I do about it, though? If we had to wait, we’d wait. We weren’t the first or last Jews …

  “Well, comes January, the whole merry-go-round begins again. Between this, that, and the other thing, we’re told that there’s going to be a big meeting of the director, the inspector, and all the teachers, after which there will be an official announcement of who’s accepted and who’s not. When the day arrived there wasn’t a sign of the wife in the house; no hot meal on the table, no samovar, no tea, no nothing. Where was she? In the high school, of course. Or rather, not in it but in front of it, standing out in the cold by herself from early morning. The weather turned freezing, it began to snow, you couldn’t see past the tip of your nose—and there she was, still waiting for the meeting to be over. A scene from the opera! ‘For God’s sake,’ I wanted to tell her, ‘you know as well as I do that the man not only gave his word, he actually pocketed …’ Do you follow me? Just try talking to a woman, though! She waited an hour. She waited two. She waited three. She waited four. All the students had already gone home and she was still standing there. At last, when you’d have thought she couldn’t wait a minute longer, a door of the building opened and out stepped one of the teachers. She collared him at once and asked him if he knew what the meeting had decided. Indeed he did, he said: eighty-five new students were accepted—eighty-three Christians and two Jews. Who were the Jews? One was named Shepselsohn and one was named Katz. Well, as soon as the wife heard Katz she was off like a shot for home with the grand news. ‘Mazel tov! Thank You, thank You, dear God! Oh, thank You! They took him! They took him!…’ I tell you, she had tears in her eyes. I was pleased as punch myself, of course, but I wasn’t about to dance in the streets; that’s a woman’s way, not a man’s. ‘You don’t look any too thrilled by it,’ says the wife to me. ‘Just what makes you say that?’ I ask. ‘Why, you’re as cold as a fish!’ she says. ‘If only you knew how overjoyed your son was, you wouldn’t be sitting there like that; you’d already have gone to buy him his uniform, his cap, and his schoolbag, and you’d be planning a party in his honor.’ ‘What kind of a party?’ I ask. ‘What is this, his bar mitzvah? His engagement?’ I said it calmly enough, because I’m a man, not a woman, but it made her so mad that she stopped talking to me altogether—and a wife who won’t talk is a thousand times worse than a nag, since a nag at least has a human voice, while a deaf mute … try talking to the wall! To make a long story short, what do you think happened? She had her way again. Oh, when she wants it, she gets it …

  “Anyway, we had a party to which all our friends came, and the boy was decked out in a fancy uniform with silver buttons and a cap with a dingus on the top. I tell you, he could have passed for the chief of staff! But it really was a lifesaver for the poor little fellow, he looked like a different person. Why, his face was bright as sunshine! We all drank to his health and someone said to me:

  “ ‘He should only finish high school, and nail that sheepskin to the wall, and go right on for the next one!’

  “ ‘Well, now,’ I said, ‘that’s very kind of you, but don’t think his future depends on it. Let him stick it out for a couple of years, and then, with God’s help, we’ll marry him off and the rest will take care of itself …’

  “The wife just gave me a pitying smile when she heard that. ‘Would someone please tell him,’ she said to the guests, ‘that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s way behind the times.’

  “ ’Would someone tell her,” I answered, ‘that the times aren’t worth catching up with.’

  “ ‘Would someone tell him,’ she said, ‘that he’s nothing but an old f——!’

  “That brought the house down. ‘Me oh my, Reb Aharon,’ they said, ‘you’ve got a Cossack there, not a wife!’ Meanwhile the wine kept flowing and we all got so mellow that we started to dance. But I mean dance! The wife, my boy, and I were put in the middle of a circle and everyone cut the rug up around us until, before we knew it, it was dawn …

  “That same morning we brought him to the school. We arrived so early that the doors were still locked and there wasn’t a stray dog in sight. At last, thank God, the doors opened and we came in from the cold and revived. Pretty soon the place was full of youngsters, all with their schoolbags on their backs. There was enough talking and laughing and shouting and hallooing for a country fair. In the middle of it all I’m approached by a man with gold buttons—a teacher, it turns out, with a sheet of paper in his hand. Can he help me? Well, I pointed to my boy and said I had come to enroll him in the rabbi’s schoo—I mean in junior high school. ‘What year is he in?’ he asks me. ‘The third,’ I say. ‘He’s just been accepted.’ ‘And what’s his name?’ ‘It’s Katz,’ I say. ‘Moshe Katz, though we all call him Moshke.’ ‘Moshke Katz?’ says the teacher. ‘There’s no Moshke Katz in the Third Form. There is a Katz on the list, but his first name is Mordukh, not Moshke …’

  “ ‘Well, it’s a mistake,’ I say. ‘It’s Moshke, not Mordukh.’

  “ ‘It’s Mordukh,’ he says to me, waving the list in my face.

  “ ‘It’s Moshke!’

  “ ‘It’s Mordukh!’

  “Well, we Moshked and Mordukhed each other back and forth until the sad truth finally dawned on me; there had been a little error. Do you get the picture? The goy had mixed up the names; he had taken a Katz, all right, it just didn’t happen to be mine. There were, it appeared, more ways to skin a Katz than one …

  “What can I tell you? It would have broken your heart to see my boy’s face when he was told to take that dingus off his cap. No stood-up bride ever cried half so hard. He couldn’t stop for the life of him. ‘I hope you see what you’ve done now,’ I said to the wife. ‘Didn’t I tell you they’d crucify the boy? I pray to God he gets over it soon, because if not he’ll get an ulcer for sure.’

  “ ‘You can save the ulcers for your enemies,’ she says. ‘That child is going to high school! If he doesn’t get in this year, he’ll get in next; if he’s not accepted here, he will be somewhere else. We’ll stop trying over my dead body!’

  “How’s that for a quick comeback? And who do you think had his way in the end, me or her? Let’s not kid ourselves: when she wants it, she gets it …

  “Anyway, why drag it out? I went to the ends of the earth with that boy—there wasn’t a town with a high school that we didn’t try. And there wasn’t a town with a high school where he didn’t take the exams, and where he didn’t pass the exams, and where he didn’t pass them with flying colors—and where he wasn’t rejected. How come? Because of those crazy quotas. Believe me, I started to wonder if I wasn’t crazy too. What are you running from town to town for like an idiot? I asked myself. Who the Devil needs it? Supposing he does get in somewhere in the end—so what? Say what you will, though, no one likes to throw in the sponge. And I had become so mule-headed about it that it was an act of sheer mercy on God’s part to find me a commercial high school in Poland where they took a Jew for every Christia
n—that is, where the quota was fifty percent. There was just one little catch: the Jew had to bring his own Christian with him—and only if your Christian passed the exams and you were ready to treat him to tuition did you stand a fighting chance … In other words, instead of one millstone around my neck, there were two. Do you follow me? As if it weren’t enough to knock my brains out for my own boy, I now had someone else’s to worry about, because if Ivan doesn’t pass, Yankl can pack his bags too. In fact, that’s practically what happened. By the time I found the right Christian, a tailor’s boy named Kholyava, I was green in the gills—and when the chips were down, wouldn’t you know that he went and flunked flat on his face! And in ‘Christian Religion,’ of all things! Don’t think my own son didn’t have to take him in hand and coach him for the makeup. What, you ask, does my son know about Christianity? But with a head you won’t find in all of Russia, what’s there to wonder at?…

  “Well, with God’s help we made it to the great day: both of them were accepted. Home free at last, eh? Except that when I come to pay the registration fee, my goy doesn’t show! What seems to be the problem? The damn Russian would rather croak than see his son with so many Jews. What does he need my commercial high school for, he says, when a Christian boy like his own can get in anywhere he pleases? Go tell him he’s mistaken! ‘How can I help change your mind for you, Pani Kholyava?’ I ask him. ‘You can’t,’ he says. So I sat him down and had a little talk with him about all men being brothers, etcetera—I even took him to a tavern for a drink or two, which turned out to be nine or ten—I tell you, I managed to get a few gray hairs before I finally heard from the school that young Kholyava was enrolled there. Thank God, I thought, at last it’s over and done with!

  “Well, I came home that day to get a new shock. What was it this time? The wife had thought it over and decided that she couldn’t leave our precious one-and-only all by his lonesome in Poland. How could she ever look herself in the mirror if she did? ‘But what else can you do?’ I asked her. ‘What else can I do?’ she says. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? I’m going with him.’ ‘But who’ll look after the house?’ I ask. ‘The house,’ she says, ‘is only a house …’ Just what was I supposed to say to that? And don’t think she didn’t pick up and go with him, leaving me all by myself! Imagine, a whole house with no one in it but me—it shouldn’t happen to my worst enemies. My life went to pieces; the business went to the dogs; everything went to hell around me while we sat and wrote each other letters: ‘my dear wife,’ ‘my dear husband’—oh, it was a first-rate correspondence! ‘For God’s sake,’ I wrote her, ‘how long can I go on like this? I’m only human. A house without a woman is no house …’ It did as much good as last winter’s snow, of course. In the end it was she who had her way again. When she wants it, she damn well gets it …