Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  Sholem Aleichem intended for Motl to be artistic in some way. As the scion of a cantorial family, Motl was originally meant to be musical, but even as the first episodes were being serialized, Sholem Aleichem reconceived him as a cartoonist. His Motl, he realized, should not be contaminated by any vestige of the traditional shtetl culture; nor should he in any way be seen as an extension of his father, whose death at the beginning of the story is supposed to symbolize the final expiration of his world. Drawing, being essentially a non-Jewish art (did not the Lord prescribe through Moses: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” [Exodus 20:4]?), dovetails with the innovative, nontraditional aspects of Motl’s personality. Above all else, being a cartoonist rather than a musician goes hand in hand with his detached manner of observing and describing.

  Motl’s inclination toward caricature contributes to Sholem Aleichem’s objective to deconstruct shtetl literature, to dismantle its components and expose it as nonfunctional. Together they present the metamorphosis of a people, driven by the sheer instinct of survival, in the harsh terms of a comic epic that rarely if ever allows the pathetic fallacy to cloud its mimetic transparency. It has to be viewed as comic because the tragedy it supposedly is camouflages a sham. What died with shtetl culture had already, for a long time, not been really alive; shtetl culture had been for some time a caricature of itself. Its social order had been bankrupted; its ethos of communal unity and responsibility was a fraud, as Motl’s family discovers in their hour of need; its hallowed rabbinical culture went gaga, as the horrified Motl learns when he is hired to spend the nights with a demented scholar who carries the proud traditional name of Luria (the name of the great sixteenth-century cabalist known as Ha-ari, as well as that of a host of other rabbis, scholars, and writers); its texts, as represented by the Aramaic prayer for the dead, the kaddish, amount, as far as Motl is concerned, to sheer gibberish. If this culture has to be sloughed off in the process of emigration and acculturation, no tears should be shed over it. No matter how crass and culturally clumsy those denuded of it are, the option they represent is preferable to the one they reject. Motl at once incorporates the vitality and talent for survival that render their metamorphosis possible, and he functions as its epic recorder. His vivacity and health, contrasted with the ugliness he sees around him, define the message of the work as a whole: in the darkening world of eastern European Jewry, Motl’s vital spark represents the refusal of the shtetl Jews to loosen their hold on life, and that is what pushes them along to the new Canaan of economic self-sufficiency.

  At the beginning of the book Motl is presented as a prospective victim. The analogy between him and his only friend, the calf Meni, speaks for itself: healthy, normal, and equipped with the biological tools necessary for living and savoring life, Motl is primed for slaughter. His impoverished family, desperately trying to save some remnants of its middle-class status, first sells its furniture and sacred books; then in direct continuation its two sons. Elye, the older brother, an eligible youngster with yikhes (pedigree, good parentage) and no money, is sold into a marriage of convenience to the coarse daughter of a nouveau riche, while young Motl is sold to whoever will cover his basic expenses. He becomes a servant, a day laborer, the nanny of a miserable cripple, and finally a babysitter who is to spend his nights with a madman who threatens (in a demented parody of Maimonides’ inductive logic) to eat him alive. Motl’s environment—exploitative, grotesque, sick, vitiated both physically and mentally—is quite ready to swallow him, to quash his high spirits, to imbue him with its lugubrious moribundity, and to stunt his mental and emotional growth forever. Paradoxically, only the death of his father and the final downfall of his family as a result of the bankruptcy of Elye’s in-laws save Motl from the life of bourgeois respectability that a marriage like his brother’s would have locked him into.

  When destitution and penury drive the family out of its hometown and middle-class decorum, Motl is finally allowed to be happy; and he is genuinely happy, the happiest among Sholem Aleichem’s child protagonists, perhaps the only genuinely happy boy protagonist in a contemporary Yiddish literature rife with miserable orphans and dejected youngsters. Of all of Sholem Aleichem’s books featuring children, Motl is the only one in which the fire of child rebellion is not extinguished, and the child’s libidinous and instinctual egotism is not crushed by a brutal process of socialization. As the shtetl’s oppressive system of education, along with its economy and social order, finally fall apart, Motl is spared the internalization of its punitive ethos—the fears, the guilt, the sense of sin, the endless chain of crime and punishment. When Motl’s father, his superego, so horrendous in his decrepitude and decomposition, dies, Motl celebrates his independence. “Mir iz gut—ikh bin a yosem” (I have it good, I’m an orphan) is Motl’s motto. It sounds like a paradox, but it actually articulates in one compressed sentence the historical truth: orphanhood and pauperization not only saved Motl’s life but also freed the entire community from paralysis and propelled it in search of food and shelter. Motl is a book about an orphaned people who finally emerges from historical lethargy and, once whipped into wakefulness, gropes for the happiness that has evaded it for so long.

  The first part of the book, in every way superior to its unfinished sequel, is subtly organized as a series of variations on the themes of sickness and death versus health and rebirth. They play out not just at face level—the obvious encounter between Motl and his father in the first chapter—but also through witty polysemies such as Motl’s joyful interjection “a feld, a fargenign, a gan-eyden” (“a field, what pleasure! sheer paradise!”), which he utters as the family’s beds are sold, reducing him and his brother to sleeping on the bare floorboards. Motl is delighted that he can now roll in his sleep across the empty room, as wide as “a field.” In Yiddish, however, feld, besides signifying a field, also means a cemetery, and paradise is where the souls of the saintly dead reside. Motl’s enjoyment of his enlarged sleeping space parodies the eternal rest of the dead in their graves and the ethereal pleasure of souls in paradise. In a later chapter Motl attempts a reentry into the forbidden paradise, in the form of an orchard whose gate is blocked by an angry, niggardly woman—a hilarious version of the cherubim positioned, flaming swords in hand, at the gate of paradise. Motl devises a means of reaching for the tree of life and enjoying its delectable fruit. The punishment promised by scripture (death) is reduced to a minor embarrassment, since Motl is protected by the armor of orphanhood. Then Motl fakes sickness, triggering his mother’s worst anxieties, only to miraculously recuperate without touching the bitter medicine that the local hack prescribes. False premonitions of death are replaced by a phony last-minute resurrection.

  In the section following the marriage of Elye and the bankruptcy of his father-in-law, the themes of sickness and health are developed under a new and surprising guise. While Elye tries in vain to earn a fortune by producing suspicious commodities nobody needs, the family, like the putrefying social body it actually is, poisons the environment, selling beverages made of dirty soapy water, contaminating the local rivulet with ink, and spreading mouse poison. In these minor ecological disasters Motl, as his brother’s emissary, gleefully plays the role of contaminator and is almost caught by the police and incarcerated. He is saved by the final collapse of the family fortune, making emigration unavoidable. Thus commences Motl’s great adventure. The family’s slow movement along the emigrants’ trail is replete with sickness and suffering, but they somehow do not touch the boy, vibrant, upbeat, and impatient as he is to get on with the voyage. As they illegally cross the border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the family is shot at by guards, and only quick movement—Motl’s specialty—saves them. The loss of their luggage pales in comparison with the death, rape, and plunder that the pogroms’ refugees are now fleeing. Eye ailments get pride of place in Motl’s account, because healthy
eyes are supposed to open the gates of America for the immigrants. Motl’s mother’s constantly red eyes loom ominously as a possible impediment to the family’s entry into the promised land. But Motl’s eyes are literally and metaphorically crystal clear, as healthy and coldly observant as ever. True, he temporarily develops a crush on a girl whose eye sickness has separated her from her family, and he lapses into sentimentality, promising to send the girl bluestone salve (an eye cure) as soon as he reaches America, but he quickly overcomes this weak moment, and as soon as he sets foot on the deck of the Prince Albert, he altogether forgets the poor girl. The short stay in foggy and rainy London and the difficult ocean passage amplify the theme of death and sickness and bring about its culmination. Throughout, Motl’s high spirits counterbalance the hopelessness, fatigue, and frustration of those around him. Together with Mendl (an orphan he befriends along the way), Motl ridicules his mother and Bruche, his sister-in-law, eliciting from the two old ladies a hilarious scene of competition over who is more miserable. But it is Motl’s spark of vitality, found in every one of the emigrants, that carries them forward through the maze of inefficient charitable organizations toward their destination: America.

  The main themes of part 2, the American section of the book, are youth and freedom. Having concluded that only the young and unencumbered, those whose burden of shtetl culture is minimal, will find their place in America and successfully adapt to its pace and rugged individualistic ethos,7 Sholem Aleichem mobilizes Motl and Mendl in portraying America as a boys’ paradise. His two child protagonists immerse themselves in New York’s hectic ambience. They love the city’s bustle, its noisy and quick subway and elevated trains; the new American art, the cinema, fascinates them, and they choose for their hero and model Charlie Chaplin, in his classic role as a small but nimble-bodied vagabond who always gets himself into but also out of trouble. The huge metropolis never strikes these newcomers as alien and threatening—it immediately becomes their normative habitat.

  It is not entirely clear in what direction Sholem Aleichem might have sent his Motl had he lived to bring the book to a close. He hints that his friend Mendl would rise to prominence as a chief organizer of the Jewish trade union movement, whereas Motl himself might flourish as a successful cartoonist. (This single instance of a future perspective suggests that the American chapters of Motl were written while the artistic discipline of the author was already in decline.) But how might the two boys, particularly our chief protagonist, arrive at their respective destinations unsullied and not coarsened? We have no answer. The book ends in the middle of the eighteenth chapter of part 2. Motl is about to throw himself into a family business, which would squeeze from him (and from every member of the family) all his energy and steal his last minutes of freedom. Would he have retained his high spirits and clarity of vision throughout many years of fierce struggle for upward mobility? Would his Peter Pan charm and Puck-like dexterity have withstood the test? Surely the agencement consisting of both naïveté and perspicacity, energy and meticulous observation, would have to be dismantled. And what about the sexual awakening that was certainly in store for this normal, full-blooded boy, whose sensuality has found expression in his craving for food and fondling (Motl enjoys sleeping in his mother’s bed)? For the time being, as far as the story goes, Motl, although aware of the role of sex in the lives of the people who surround him, is almost sexless. His is the romance of the pleasure principle played out against the backdrop not only of eternal summer but also of eternal latency. If he were to grow, latency would have to be replaced by puberty. The author would have had to sentimentalize his protagonist’s pubescence, cover it with Victorian drapery, or have him jump headlong into puerile sexuality, masturbation, erotic daydreams, and the like. In other words, Motl would have had to lose his honesty and straightforward attitude toward the facts of life, or allow it to be muddled. Both options would have destroyed the coherence of his story. Perhaps it is better for Motl to have been left unfinished as it tragically was. Unfinished, it can retain its narrative and ideological consistency and stand out as one of the author’s best and most original works.

  DAN MIRON

  New York, 2008

  NOTES

  1 For example, the much-debated issue of whether Tevye “really” had seven daughters, since he tells about only five and barely mentions the sixth; the seventh altogether disappears. See Khone Shmeruk, “Tevye der milkhiker—letoldoteha shel yetsira,” Ayarot ukhrakim: prakim bytsirato shel Shalom Aleichem (Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 9-32.

  2 All references are to Gauts Tevye der milkhiker, vol. 5 of the so-called Folksfond edition of Sholem Aleichem’s collected works, New York, 1917, and for the purposes of literary analysis, the translations are my own.

  3 See, for instance, Michael Stern, “Tevye’s Art of Quotation,” Prooftexts 6 (1986), 79-96.

  4 Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London, 1961), 159-66.

  5 J. H. Brenner, “Leshalom Aleichem,” Ktavim 4 (1985), 1422-28.

  6 Shmuel Niger, “Sholem Aleichem,” Vegn yidishe shrayber, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1912), 111-12.

  7 Khone Shmeruk, “Sholem Aleichem and America,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Research 20 (1991), 211-38.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  ON TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN

  Bal-Makhshoves (Isidore Elyasiv). “Sholem Aleichem: A Typology of His Characters.” Prooftexts 6 (1986), 7-15.

  Frieden, Ken. A Century in the Life of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye. B. G. Rudolf Lectures in Judaic Studies. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

  ———. “Tevye the Dairyman and His Daughters’ Rebellion.” In Classic Yiddish Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

  Hadda, Janet. “Shprintse.” In Passionate Women, Passive Men: Suicide in Yiddish Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

  Stern, Michael. “Tevye’s Art of Quotation.” Prooftexts 6 (1986), 79-96.

  Wiener, Meyer. “On Sholem Aleichem’s Humor.” Prooftexts 6 (1986), 41-54.

  Wisse, Ruth R. “The Comedy of Endurance.” In The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture. New York: The Free Press, 2000.

  Wolitz, Seth. “The Americanization of Tevye or Boarding the Jewish Mayflower.” American Quarterly 40 (1988), 514-36.

  ON MOTL THE CANTOR’S SON

  DeKoven Ezrahi, Sidra. “By Train, by Ship, by Subway: Sholem Aleichem and the American Voyage of Self Invention.” In Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

  Halkin, Hillel. Introduction to Menakhem Mendl and Motl, The Cantor’s Son. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

  Kachuck, R. S. “On Sholem Aleichem’s Humor in English Translation.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Research 1 (1956-57), 39-81.

  Miron, Dan. “Bouncing Back: Destruction and Recovery in Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse dem khazns.” In The Image of the Shtetl. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

  Shmeruk, Khone. “Sholem Aleichem and America.” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Research 20 (1991), 211-38.

  A Note on the Translations

  TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN

  The greatest challenge in translating Tevye is Tevye’s frequent (mis)quoting of scripture. For example, the biblical quotation “Thou shalt rejoice in thy fast” is rendered by Tevye as “Live it up, you paupers.” In this manner Tevye often insinuates his own commentary into the text, reducing its high-flown rhetoric to the bitter reality of his circumstances. This is Tevye in action, whether he is debating with God or showing off his “erudition.” My solution was to present the scriptural quotations in italics alongside Tevye’s highly personal interpretations.

  I was fortunate to have the use of the glossary that is appended to an earlier Tevye translation, by the noted Hebrew and Yiddish scholar Hillel Halkin. The glossary consists of transliterations of the orig
inal biblical quotations and their exact sources and English translations. I thank Hillel Halkin for his scholarly help. Rather than have the reader flip back and forth from text to glossary, I have incorporated within the text both the quotations and Tevye’s interpretations of them. Every translator of Tevye must find a solution to this problem. I hope mine works for the reader of English.