Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

by Sholem Aleichem

  “But I had better get back to my Eisik, God rest him, who knocked over the samovar when he was little. Listen, just listen to this: who could have guessed that because the right reverend of Vorotolivke had forgotten to file a death certificate for my Eisik, I would find a letter in the mailbox one day telling him to please report for the draft? Talk about bolts from the blue! What did they want from my poor life? How could I bring my Eisik to the draft board when he was with the angels in heaven? That’s just what I told that government rabbi too; what, I asked him, what was I supposed to do now? ‘You have a problem,’ he says to me. ‘You don’t say!’ I say. ‘And just what do you think it might be?’ ‘Your problem,’ he says, ‘is that Itsik and Eisik happen to be the same name.’ ‘Oh, they do, do they?’ I say. ‘And how does a genius like you figure that?’ ‘Why, it’s very simple,’ he says. ‘Itsik is Yitzchok, and Yitzchok is Isaac, and Isaac is Eisik, so Eisik is Itsik.’ Elementary, no?

  “To make a long story short, why bother with a lot of ancient history? My Eisik was wanted by the draft board—it would make my life miserable until I produced him, that’s what it would do! At home the hysterics started all over again. Hysterics? The end of the world! In the first place, the mere mention of Eisik reopened my poor wife’s old wounds. ‘If only he could go to the army,’ she wept, ‘and not have to rot in the grave …’ And besides, she was scared to death that the draft board, God forbid, would reason the same as the rabbi—namely, that Itsik was Yitzchok, Yitzchok was Isaac, Isaac was Eisik, so Eisik was Itsik. Wouldn’t that be just dandy! The thought of it made her a nervous wreck, my daughter-in-law almost fainted. It was really no joke: an only son, with an automatic, a guaranteed, a one-hundred-percent lifetime exemption, three times before the draft board, three white cards to show for it—and he still wasn’t out of the woods …

  “Well, I took myself in hand, that’s what I did, and went to Yehupetz to see a good lawyer. And I brought my son with me to see a professor of medicine who could tell us if he had what it took or not, though I knew very well that he didn’t. (That is, it took what he had to have what it took not to have it!) With a legal and a medical opinion, I thought, I could finally sleep soundly at night … but do you know what I found out? I found out that those lawyers and doctors didn’t know which end was up. Whatever one said, another said the opposite; they couldn’t agree on a thing. It was enough to drive me out of my mind. Just listen to this.

  “The first lawyer we saw was a real pinhead, though you would never have guessed it from the size of his noodle, which had a bald spot big enough to fry an egg on. He was so brainy, that man, that he couldn’t even understand who was Itsik, who was Alter, who was Avrom-Yitzchok, and who was Eisik. I had to keep telling him that the first three were one boy, and that it was Eisik who knocked over the samovar in Vorotolivke, where I lived before moving to Mezritch, after I left Mazapevke. At last, when I thought he had finally gotten it, he asked, Just tell me one thing, though: which of them is the eldest—Itsik, Alter, or Avrom-Yitzchok?’

  “ ‘Try to concentrate,’ I said. ‘I’ve already told you fifteen times that Itsik, Avrom-Yitzchok, and Alter are all the same person, that’s who they are—that is, Itsik is really Avrom-Yitzchok, but his mother called him Alter for good luck. It was Eisik who knocked over the samovar in Vorotolivke, I mean before I moved to—’

  “ ‘Just tell me when,’ he says, ‘that is, in what year, Avrom-Alter—I mean Yitzchok-Eisik—was first asked to report for the draft.’

  “ ‘But you’re all bollixed up!’ I say. ‘You’re mixing kasha with borscht. I’ve never in my life met a Jew like you, with such a goy’s head on his shoulders. I’m telling you that Yitzchok, and Avrom-Yitzchok, and Itsik, and Alter are all the same person. The same, do you hear me? The same!’

  “ ‘All right, all right,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to shout. What are you shouting for?’

  “Would you believe it? He wants to know why I’m shouting …

  “Well, I said to the Devil with him, that’s what I did, and I went to see another lawyer. This one turned out to be a real logic chopper—in fact, he chopped it a little too fine. He listened to my story, stroked his forehead, waggled his thumb, and began to explain to me that there was a statute on the books that said that the authorities in Mezritch had no right to call the boy up in the first place, although on the other hand, there was another statute that said that since he was called up, the authorities in Vorotolivke could be requested to issue a waiver, which did not mean, however, that the authorities in Mezritch could not be required to waive the request, provided that in the meantime, of course, the authorities in Vorotolivke had not waived the right to have the waiver waived …

  “In short, he kept waiving me such waivers that I waved goodbye to him and went to see a third lawyer, that’s where I went. Some meatball he was too, a young fellow fresh out of law school, still wet behind the ears, so to speak! Not that he wasn’t quite charming, with a voice as clear as a bell—the problem was that it didn’t stop ringing. He must have been taking voice lessons, because he kept listening to himself talk as if it were on doctor’s orders. In fact, he was having such a fine time making speeches that I had to interrupt him and say, ‘That’s all very well, and I wouldn’t doubt it for a moment, but what good does your yatata do me? I want some advice from you, that’s what I want, about keeping my son out of the army …’

  “Well, that’s all a lot of ancient history. In the end I found an honest-to-god lawyer, a gentleman of the old school who knew exactly what the score was. He sat there listening with his eyes closed while I told him the whole story and when I was finished he said, ‘It that all? No more? Then go home and forget it, it’s all nonsense. The worst you can get is a three-hundred-ruble fine.’

  “ ‘Eh?’ I say. ‘That’s the worst? If only I had known that’s all they can stick me with! And here I was worried sick for my son, it’s my son I was worried for.’

  “ ‘What son?’ he asks.

  “ ‘What do you mean, what son?’ I say. ‘My Alter—I mean my Itsik!’

  “ ‘What had you so worried?’ he asks.

  “ ‘What do you mean, what?’ I say. ‘What happens if he’s called up again, then what?’

  “ ‘But he has a white card,’ he says.

  “ ‘He has three of them!’ I say.

  “ ‘Then what more do you want?’

  “ ‘What more do I want? I don’t want anything,’ I say. ‘I’m just afraid that since they’re looking for Eisik, and there is no Eisik, and Alter—I mean Itsik—is registered as Avrom-Yitzchok, and Yitzchok, according to that dodo of a rabbi, is Isaac, and Isaac is Eisik, they may try to claim that my Itsik—I mean my Avrom-Yitzchok—that is, my Alter—is really my Eisik!’

  “ ‘Well, what if they do?’ he says. ‘So much the better. If Itsik is Eisik, you won’t even have to pay the fine. Didn’t you say he had a white card?’

  “ ‘Three of them,’ I say. ‘But the white cards are Itsik’s, not Eisik’s.’

  “ ‘But didn’t you just tell me,’ he says, ‘that Itsik is Eisik?’

  “ ‘Who says that Itsik is Eisik?’

  “ ‘You just told me he was!’

  “ ‘I told you?’ I say. ‘How can I have told you such a thing when Itsik is Alter, and Eisik is who knocked over the samovar in Vorotolivke, that is, before I moved to Mezritch, I mean, after I left Mazapevke …’

  “Well, that’s when he lost his temper and said, ‘Stupaytye, vi nodoyedlive yevrei!’ Did you get that? He called me a nuisance, that’s what he did. Would you believe it? Me, a nuisance? Me?!!!”

  (1902)

  IT DOESN’T PAY TO BE GOOD

  “It doesn’t pay to be good,” said the quite proper Jew with the mole on his nose as he accepted the cigarette I offered him. “Do you hear me? It doesn’t pay. It was being too good, too much of a soft touch, that made me nourish a viper at home—in fact, two of them. Just listen to what I got myself into.

 
; “God wanted to see how good I could be, so He sent me a pair of orphans, a boy and a girl. Because He punished me with no children, I took two of them into my house. I cared for them, I gave them nothing but the best, I made human beings of them both—and how did they thank me for it? With a knife in the back!

  “First let me tell you about the girl. Where did I find a girl orphan? It happened like this. My wife had a younger sister named Perl who was, let me tell you, something special. It ran in the family—my wife is an attractive woman to this day. There were men dying to have Perl and keep her in clover just for her looks alone. And that’s not the half of it, either!

  “When my sister-in-law got married, we all thought she had hit the jackpot, that it was a stroke of good luck such as comes a woman’s way once in a blue moon. Her husband was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, the only heir of a rich father, and of a rich grandfather, and even of a rich, childless uncle—there was money wherever you looked. What a windfall! And that wasn’t the half of it, either. There was only one little hitch, which was that he had the Devil in him. I don’t mean to say that he wasn’t a fine fellow: there was nothing stupid or crass about him, and he was as friendly, as likable, as good company as they come. So what was the matter? The boy was a bum! (May he forgive me for being truthful—he’s in the other world now.) What do I mean by a bum? I mean he had a passion for cards. Why, passion isn’t the word for it: cards were his be-all and end-all, he would have walked a hundred miles for a hand of them! At first it was just a round of sixty-six, or, once a month on a long winter night, a harmless game of challenge or klabberjass among friends … except that he began to play more and more—and with all kinds of riffraff, the worst loafers, drifters, and grifters. Take it from me, once a man starts with cards there’s no telling where he’ll end up. Who even thinks then of praying three times a day, or wearing a hat on his head, or observing the Sabbath laws, or anything else that smacks of being a Jew? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my sister-in-law Perl was a strictly religious woman who couldn’t put up with her husband’s shenanigans. She took to bed for days on end, she cried such buckets over her fate that it actually made her ill. At first it was nothing serious, then it got worse and worse—until one day, I’m sorry to say, poor Perl passed away. And that’s not the half of it, either!

  “Perl died and left behind a child, a little girl of six or seven. Her husband was off somewhere in Odessa, the Devil only knew where; he had sunk so low that he had gambled away every cent of the family fortune—a hopeless derelict, that’s all that remained of him. For a while he was even rumored to be in jail. After that he mooched around here and there until he died of God only knows what and was buried in a potter’s field. That’s the family history in a nutshell. And so the poor little orphan, Rayzl was her name, ended up with us. I took the child in, you see, because I had none myself; God wouldn’t give me one of my own, so why not her? I only wanted to be good—the trouble is that being good gets you nowhere. In any other uncle’s house, an orphan girl like her would have grown up in the kitchen; she would have been put to work, made to serve tea, sent on all kinds of errands. I, though, treated her like my own child: I dressed her in clothes as good as my wife’s, I bought her the same shoes, I gave her the same food to eat. She even sat with us at the table like our own flesh and blood—why, flesh and blood isn’t the word for it. And that’s not the half of it, either!

  “When Rayzl grew older, I sent her off to a scrivener to learn to read and write. There’s no denying that she was a good, a hardworking, a well-behaved girl … and beautiful too, a real stunner! I really did love her like a daughter. But children, you know, grow like toadstools; before I knew it, the time came to think of a match for her. And on top of all that, my little niece had blossomed: she was as tall, as lovely, as striking as a rose. My wife had begun to lay away a few things for her—clothes, linens, blankets, pillows—and I myself had every intention of putting up a few hundred rubles for a dowry. We even began to discuss possible husbands. Who could an orphan girl whose father, may he forgive me, was not exactly a savory character and whose stepfather was no Rothschild hope to marry? We had to look for someone suitable who would be able to support her. Only, where would we ever find him? A young man of independent means was setting our sights too high, while I myself didn’t want an ordinary working boy—after all, the girl was almost our own, she was my wife’s sister’s daughter. It was a godsend that we came across a salesman, a young fellow in his twenties, who brought home a few rubles, and had put away a few rubles, and was worth a few rubles in the bargain. Well, I had a little talk with him—yes, he was interested, and how! My niece was just his cup of tea. Next I went to have a talk with her—if you can call what I had with her a talk … why, talking to a tree stump would be easier! What seemed to be the problem? Nothing; she just didn’t want him—she didn’t need him—she would thank me to leave her alone. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘if not him, then who else? The Baron de Hirsch’s grandson?’ If you’ve heard a tree stump talk, you’ll know what she answered me. She just gave me a silent stare. And that’s not the half of it, either!…

  “Here, though, I have to interrupt my story to tell you another one, which has to do with the first. That is, the first story and the second story make one story between them.

  “All in all I had only one brother, Moyshe-Hirshl, who was younger than I was. One day something happened (why does it always have to happen to me?) that shouldn’t happen to a soul. On a Friday morning in the bathhouse, when he meant to give himself a cold shower, he grabbed a bucket of boiling water by mistake and poured it over his head. He was scalded so badly that he died eight days later in terrible pain, leaving behind a wife and a six-year-old child, a small boy named Paysi. Before half a year had gone by, there was talk of the woman remarrying. That irked me so much that I went to her and said, ‘If you can’t wait to find another husband, I want you to let me have the child.’ At first she balked at the idea, she wouldn’t even think of it. Little by little, though, I got her to come around. She brought me the boy and went off to Poland to get married. In fact, I’ve heard she’s not doing badly there. Only that’s not the half of it, either!

  “Well, now I had, with God’s blessing, a son as well. I say I had a son because I actually adopted him and took out all the official papers. And a gifted boy he was, too—why, gifted isn’t the word for him! Of course, he was my nephew, it goes without saying that I’m prejudiced; take it from me, though, you won’t find another youngster like Paysi, I won’t say in the world, but certainly in our town, and in any other town in the district, and up and down the whole province, and maybe in a few more. You just name it. Reading? The tops! Writing? The tops! Arithmetic? The tops! How about French, you say? The boy spoke it like a Frenchman! How about music? You should have heard him play the violin! And good-looking … and with a way of putting things … and a personality … and … and … I tell you, gifted isn’t the word! And when you add the fact that I was ready to give him a wedding gift of a few thousand rubles, since he was my brother’s child and mine by adoption, that is, practically my own natural-born son, in other words, far from a nobody … you’d think he could have had his pick of brides, wouldn’t you? You can bet that he was offered the best, the finest matches available—and you can bet I didn’t jump at any of them. Why should I? You don’t give away a young man like that every day. And that’s not the half of it, either!

  “In short, I began getting offers from all over the world: from Kamenets, and from Yelisavet, and from Gomel, and from Lubin, and all the way from Mogilev, and from Berdichev, and Kaminka, and even Brody. They were throwing cash at my feet: ten thousand, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand, eighteen thousand—I didn’t know where to look first! But then I thought it over and decided: why go to the ends of the earth for someone you don’t even know? Better, as they say, the cobbler next door than a rabbi far away. And in fact there was a rich Jew in our town with an only daughter he was prepared to settle
quite a few thousands on, a lovely girl too, she was … and the man was all for it … why shouldn’t we call it a deal, could anyone tell me that? And especially since both matchmakers in town were working on it day and night, running back and forth between the two of us until their tongues were hanging out, because they were in a hurry, you understand, they had daughters of their own to marry off, and not such spring chickens at that. And that’s not the half of it, either!

  “Well, it was agreed that the two families should get together. Things aren’t what they used to be, though. Once, matches were made behind a child’s back; you came home from shaking hands with your in-laws, you wished the bride or groom a mazel tov, and that was that. But today it’s the fashion to talk to the children first; they even expect to be introduced and decide if they like each other. You’re not allowed to tell them anything—they’re supposed to make up their own minds. Well, and why not? So I took the lad aside and said to him, ‘Tell me, Paysikins, what do you think of So-and-So’s daughter?’ He turned as red as a beet and didn’t say a word. Aha, I thought, silence is golden; no news is good news, as they say. Why else would he have blushed like that? It could only be because he was too embarrassed to talk. And so it was decided that one evening the same week we would first pay a call on the bride’s family and then have them over to our place. What else remained to be done? Only to bake a honey cake and make dinner as usual. Except that wasn’t the half of it, either!

  “The day came, and no sooner had I risen that morning than I was handed a letter. By who? By a coachman who brought it. I took it, I opened it, I started to read it—and I saw black before my eyes! What did it say? Listen and I’ll tell you. It was from my Paysi, who asked me not to be angry that he and Rayzele—did you ever?!—had eloped without letting us know. I shouldn’t try to look for them, he wrote, because they were already far away. I tell you, I never! Once they were married, he wrote, they would, God willing, come home again … What do you say to a friendly note like that, eh? And I’m not even talking about my wife, who passed out three times, because the scandal was really hers: Rayzl, after all, was her niece, not mine. ‘Well,’ I said to her, ‘how do you like the bitch your sister whelped now?’ I took it all out on her, I gave it to her for all she was worth. And that’s not the half of it, either!