Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  The only domain where Tevye can be seen as “great” is that of narrative performance. What he inadvertently tells about himself as a husband and a father is far from appealing or morally acceptable. But the telling itself is nothing less than seductive, and the best proof is the critics’ (and readers’) love for Tevye, which blinds them to his many shortcomings. Tevye’s “greatness” belongs to the realm of the aesthetic rather than the moral or intellectual. The artistic brilliance of his tales emanates neither from his moral presence nor from the social background they unfold but rather from the narrative and rhetorical formula that is repeated from one tale to another, in which a loquacious Tevye endlessly talks to his ubiquitous interlocutor, Sholem Aleichem. Tevye der milkhiker, like many other creations of Sholem Aleichem’s, is above all a story of talking and listening and their complementary dynamics, of a nagging need for verbal self-exposure and the will to absorb what is told. Such verbal interaction rather than the tales’ content defines and prescribes the essence of Tevye’s reality, a rhetorical rather than a mimetic one. Whatever mimetic reality Tevye’s narrative conveys is, of course, interesting—indeed, it is riveting—but it is not half as real or fascinating as the talking itself, its meandering progression and changing rhythms.

  Tevye knows how to make the best of a good story and takes great pleasure in doing so. No matter how tragic or even personally humiliating his stories may be, we can count on him to tell them as effectively as he possibly can. His impotence in the face of life’s vicissitudes never contaminates its dexterous and clever narrative articulation. On the contrary, the impotence is counterbalanced, and to a certain extent overcome, by plenipotentiary narration. As good raconteurs often do, Tevye tells the truth but not necessarily the whole or the exact truth, for no genuine storyteller would allow the facts to undermine the dramatic effect of his story. If one succumbs to the charm and warmth of the narration or accepts its confessional tonality at face value, the little discrepancies strewn all over the stories will help in maintaining one’s vigilance. Tevye skillfully manipulates the rhetoric of sincerity, but he is not always in full control of it, and when he momentarily slips, we have our chance to glimpse through the cracks in his mask.

  Some discrepancies can be attributed to the fact that the tales were composed at different times and places.1 Others, by far more significant, cannot be explained away. For example: in “Shprintze,” the sixth and most tragic of the tales, Tevye tells of his daughter’s suicide by drowning after being seduced by a rich city boy (to whom she had been introduced by Tevye himself). Starting the woeful tale by describing how the strapping young man and his friends are invited by Tevye to his cottage, Tevye waxes lyrical about the beauty of the village in springtime, the magnificent canopy of the blue sky, and the pleasures of living in the lap of bountiful nature. (Even the cows, he says, smile as they chew their cuds in the meadow.) Yet he has told Sholem Aleichem often enough how distasteful is his life in the countryside and how fervently he wishes to move to a proper Jewish shtetl. “No,” he concludes, refuting an imaginary objection, “say what you will, I wouldn’t trade it for the best job in the town, I would not for the world swap places with you.”2 This, of course, does not hinder him from reverting a few pages later to his original pro-urban position. Once he starts fantasizing about his daughter marrying her affluent lover boy, he sees himself again in town, an important, well-to-do member of the community. What explains this blatant discrepancy? The inherent needs of the story itself. Tevye is about to tell a very painful tale, which he feels he has to organize aesthetically and morally around the binary oppositions of nature/civilization, innocence/moral irresponsibility, naïveté/cunning, village/city if it is to have its full impact. His daughter (and by inference himself as well) represents the virtues of nature, innocence, naïveté, and the village, whereas the seducing young man’s rich relatives stand for the corrupt civilization of city, money, and moral irresponsibility: Tevye and his daughter are the blameless rustic victims of heartless city predators. Ever the expert storyteller, Tevye knows that such a melodrama also minimizes, perhaps even obliterates, his own responsibility for orchestrating the disastrous meeting of the youngsters. (The boy’s uncle justifiably asks him what, as a reasonable man, he could have thought when he had brought the two together.)

  Clearly we are permitted to characterize Tevye as an unreliable narrator. He manipulates the truth because he needs to charm his listener and buy his sympathy as a way to avert, or at least soften, the harsh judgment that his listener would otherwise pass on him. Tevye knows he has much to account for. He has never taken good care of his family, and he has let trouble run its full course without doing anything to stop it. More often than not he brings trouble on himself, exhibiting a strange pattern of self-defeating, passive-aggressive behavior, the origins of which he cannot fully gauge. In his second tale Tevye loses his meager savings by bringing home a distant relative, the irresponsible and unrealistic stock-exchange speculator Menachem-Mendl (the protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s other chef d’oeuvres), and allows himself to be tempted by the charlatan’s wild promises of riches. How could he have made such a fool of himself, Tevye wonders, ascribing his silly behavior, as always, to God’s will: “If God wants to punish a person, he deprives him of his good sense.” This pattern reemerges in some of the other tales, and Tevye, unable to control it, keeps wondering, “What was at the root of this? Perhaps my innate gullibility, which makes me trust everybody?—But what am I to do, I ask you, if, in spite of everything, such is my nature?” Of course this behavior, which becomes progressively more self-destructive, is caused by more than sheer gullibility. Tevye never faces the fact that each of his mistakes corresponds to a need or desire of his: his craving for riches, the need for self-importance, his yearning for young men who either intellectually or even physically and erotically attract him, allowing him to fantasize about playing the role of father figure to them and unconsciously or semiconsciously transmitting to his daughters, who are very much attuned to their father’s secret wishes, his interest in these men, and when the daughters establish a connection with them, he savors their closeness, which he craves for himself. Tevye cannot know much about the workings of these underground motivations, but he still feels that somehow, by following his desires and fantasies, he has let down those who are closest and dearest to him.

  By the same token, Tevye seems aware of the fact that he systematically evades people, particularly family members, when they urgently need his attention or help. Shprintze, realizing that she is about to bring shame on the heads of her parents, starts her downward slide toward lethal depression that will end in her self-destruction. By refusing to talk to her, Tevye reinforces her sense that her out-of-wedlock pregnancy is unacceptable. More commonly he pushes people away by talking to them in a manner that is both irrelevant and offensive. Much has been written about Tevye’s wit, his playful game of quoting and mistranslating the sacred texts.3 What has rarely been noticed, however, is how much of a defense mechanism his clever pseudo-scholarly discourse is, or how much aggression it releases. On the one hand, Tevye intentionally talks above the head of a certain kind of interlocutor (particularly the kind who has a social or financial advantage over him) in order to humiliate him. On the other hand, he is quick to hide behind his quotations and references as soon as a serious issue is to be discussed or a difficult decision made. When his wife, Golde, reminds him that they urgently need to marry off their older daughters, he responds by referring her to a series of midrashim (exegetical, narrative, and homiletic glosses appended to the sacred texts), whereupon Golde, only too familiar with his subterfuges, cuts him short, maintaining that “grown daughters are a good enough midrash in their own right.” After his daughter Chava’s elopement with her Gentile lover (which Tevye could have seen coming and might have prevented), he pounces on poor Golde: how could she, a mother, not have seen what was going on under her nose! And why did she not alert him in time? Once again, Golde’s answer
is cutting: how and why would she tell him anything? “When one tells you something, you immediately respond with a biblical quotation. You buzz my head off with quotations and think you have done your share!” For a moment Tevye seems struck by the bitter truth of his wife’s rebuke, then takes shelter behind his habitual disrespect for women. “She has a point,” he thinks; he should not have blamed her, for “what does a woman understand?”

  The most blatant example of Tevye’s strategy of shutting off reality with clever words is found in the opening section of the seventh tale, when Tevye tells about Golde’s last days. Golde, depressed, desperately sick, and aware of her impending death, was never properly taken care of. Tevye never thinks of seeking medical help for her. (When he finally does bring in a physician, she is already dead.) Instead he offers her some argument concerning God’s handling of the world’s affairs. Once again Golde stops him short and in a whisper puts to him a simple question, her ultimate response to his intentional obtuseness: “I am dying, Tevye; who will cook your dinner?” Never has our protagonist been so floored by such a direct, authentic, and devastating existential question. Never has the hollowness of his wit been so sweepingly exposed. But Tevye holds on for dear life to his quibbling—his only defense. As much as Golde’s words touch him, his response consists of a proverb, a biblical quotation, a midrash and yet another midrash. Under the circumstances, what is left for him to say? Throughout his life he has wrapped himself with this insulating stuff, and it’s too late to tear open his cocoon. Indeed, by tearing it open he probably would have exposed himself to the same withering radiation that killed Golde. Tevye has to go on talking, narrating, being clever and funny, quoting and playfully mistranslating. This is his hold on life, for what is he if not a Jewish Scheherazade, whose head will be cut off the morning after he loses his ability to charm and please through narrating?

  Talking, however, does not altogether assuage his guilt. He divulges his sins halfheartedly, only when he can explain them as resulting from sheer naïveté. Other, graver sins, both of commission and of omission, he cannot afford to admit, but we can glimpse them in the narrative. For example, toward the end of “Shprintze” he suddenly puts to Sholem Aleichem an uncharacteristic question, which, he says, he has intended to ask his learned and worldly friend for some time: Why are the eyes of people who have died by drowning always open, whereas dead people’s eyes are usually shut? But Tevye does not wait for an answer—he cuts the conversation short and bolts. Both the unexpected question and the sudden haste hint at what Tevye was about to divulge, had he not caught himself. Haunted by the wide-open stare of his dead daughter as she was being fished out of the river, he was on the verge of acknowledging his guilt. His question was as clumsy as it was disingenuous: most people do not die with their eyes shut; rather, their eyes are shut to produce the semblance of sleep for the benefit of the mourners. But Tevye had seen his daughter before this could be done, and her horrible stare was burned into his memory.

  For all his lighthearted prattling, Tevye is gnawed by guilt. But as a rule, when he talks about blows inflicted on the national collective, his mood immediately improves—indeed, it soars. No matter how many conventional expressions of sorrow he piles one upon the other (“What times we live in! What a miserable time to be a Jew!” etc.) or how many times he mentions the urgent need for the coming of the Messiah, he himself is in high spirits, and his dialogue with God, usually replete with bitterness and self-effacement, is for once spirited and upbeat, refreshingly free of sarcasm as well as servility. This changed tonality dominates “Lekh lekho,” Tevye’s last tale, the main topics of which are pogroms, the Beiliss blood-libel trial, and the expulsion of Jews from the villages. Here Tevye is more than self-controlled; he is actually relaxed and almost happy, even though the expulsion decree has reduced him to beggary and vagrancy.

  How is this mood shift to be understood? It is an expression of Tevye’s elation at being relieved, if only temporarily, of his guilt. For once the disaster—of being expelled from one’s home and cut off from one’s source of income—is not one he brought upon himself and his family. Taking care of the nation’s fate is God’s business, and the onus is on Him. Being the victim rather than the culprit feels good; and besides, when hundreds of thousands are afflicted, one’s personal losses are somehow minimized and marginalized. “Tsores rabim khatsi nekhome!” (“The tribulation of the many is half consolation”), Tevye says with obvious satisfaction when he learns that he is not the only local Jew to be expelled, and that the powerful householders of the neighboring shtetl Anetevke will soon follow, since the authorities, in their unfathomable wisdom, are about to redefine small provincial towns as villages and thus apply the decree of expulsion to their Jewish inhabitants. In short, Tevye is happy because for once, with easy conscience, he can shift responsibility for his and his family’s undoing to something bigger than himself. The tale “Lekh lekho” offers a catharsis of sorts, and this immense relief brings the Tevye cycle to closure. In fact, if the Tevye-Job analogy is at all valid, it is not because Tevye resembles Job but because God answers his complaints as He answered Job’s—“out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), the whirlwind or storm being national holocaust. Only through holocausts does God now speak to his chosen people and silence their complaints. In any case, Tevye, the obsessive talker, can be silenced, as Job was (“I repent in dust and ashes,” Job 42:6), because he has been purged, regaining through devastation a state of innocence.

  If silencing Tevye signals the end of his story, then his talking constitutes the center. By obsessively verbalizing, he seeks to release the burden of his guilt and, in his roundabout and perhaps not entirely conscious way, inch toward a confession. Otherwise, why would Tevye seek the company of his “Pani Sholem Aleichem” in the wake of each disastrous event in his life?

  Why does Tevye choose Sholem Aleichem as his father-confessor, and why does Sholem Aleichem acquiesce in playing that role, taking upon himself the responsibility of purging Tevye’s guilt and absolving him? The answer to both questions must be that Sholem Aleichem plays the role because he is a writer, a virtuoso storyteller, a man of words, a sublimator of real-life events into works of art. In short, Sholem Aleichem is chosen because he resembles Tevye, duplicating his behavior at a higher and more symbolic level. He can become Tevye’s alter ego—or his superego and as such have the authority to judge and absolve. Absolution is activated particularly through humor, since humor is the strategy (the narcissistic strategy, according to Freud) that the superego employs for the purpose of shrinking or minimizing the ego’s painful feelings of hurt and guilt.4

  The foundations of this relationship between Tevye and his alter ego or superego are laid bare in Tevye’s first tale, and even more so in Tevye’s letter, which in the original 1894 version serves as its epilogue or appendix. (In the canonical editions it functions as a prologue to the entire cycle under the biblical title “Kotonti—I Am Unworthy,” a reference to Jacob’s humble acknowledgment of the mercies and goodwill shown to him by the angels in Genesis 32:10.) Ostensibly this is a mere thank-you letter for the author’s intention of putting Tevye in a book, an honor of which the dairyman deems himself unworthy. The letter contains, however, implicit background information as well as explicit statements that belie Tevye’s supposed gratefulness and humility. The most interesting is Tevye’s reference to the fact that his acquaintance with Sholem Aleichem goes back quite a few years. Tevye remembers those earlier contacts, although he’s not sure Sholem Aleichem remembers them, since the writer was a rich person in those years, who could afford a summerhouse in Boiberik (the suburb of Yehupetz-Kiev where most of Tevye’s customers reside and where the present meeting between the dairyman and the writer takes place), and Tevye can hardly expect a rich entrepreneur (who also dabbled in writing) to pay attention to a mere dairyman. Circumstances changed, however, once Sholem Aleichem’s fortunes took a dive (which they did in 1890), reducing him, now a writer eking out a living from his scri
bbling, to a position not unlike that of Tevye himself. Are they not on par as hardworking producers and suppliers of goods (dairy products, stories) who depend on the market and have to find buyers for their merchandise? Not that Tevye forgets the difference between a published author, who is by definition a learned person, and a rustic dairyman. He never fails to acknowledge this difference, to defer to his interlocutor in all matters pertaining to learning and erudition and to find other ways of giving him the ego-massage at which he is an expert (having practiced for years the art of keeping disgruntled customers pleased). Nevertheless, Tevye does not refrain from discreetly reminding Sholem Aleichem of the shrinkage in the social gap between them. For instance, at the end of the first tale he urges both himself and his interlocutor to go back to work and attend to their respective businesses, since neither is in a position to indulge in pleasant conversation for its own sake. Both have to go back to their means of production: “Ir tsu ayere bikhlekh, ikh tsu mayne teplekh un tsu mayne kriglekh . . .” (“You to your little books, I to my little pots and to my little jugs”). The list of three diminutives (bikhlekh, teplekh, kriglekh) conveys not only Tevye’s understanding of books as mere containers (like pots and jugs) into which one pours one’s verbal merchandise, but also his sense that he and his interlocutor are both small fry, people who, far from playing important roles in the world, offer the public items to which the language of diminution is applicable.