Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  Just then, I looked up and saw a white horse and rider coming straight to my door! He stopped, got off, tied the horse to the post, and came right over to me. “Zdrastoy, Tevel! Greetings!”

  “Greetings to you, your honor!” I answered in a friendly manner, and in my heart I was thinking, Haman approacheth. As Rashi says, When you await the Messiah, the village constable comes instead. I rose and said to the constable, “Welcome to you. What’s happening in the world, and what good news do you bring, your honor?” My heart was pounding—I wanted to know what and when.

  But he, the constable, took his time. He smoked a leisurely cigarette, blew out the smoke, spat, and said to me, “How much time do you think you need, Tevel, to sell your house and all your things?”

  I stared at him. “Why should I sell my house? Is it in anyone’s way?”

  “It isn’t in anyone’s way,” he said. “I’ve come to tell you that you must leave the village.”

  “That’s it, no more? For what good deeds do I deserve this? How have I earned this honor?”

  “It isn’t me sending you away,” he said. “It’s the provincial government.”

  “The government?” I said. “What does the government have against me?”

  “Not just you,” he said, “and not just from here, but from all the villages all around, from Zlodeyevka and from Rabilevka and from Kostolomevka, and even Anatevka, which was a town and now has officially become a village, so we can drive all, all of you Jews from here.”

  “Even Lazer-Wolf the butcher? And Naftali-Gershon the cripple? And the ritual slaughterer of Anatevka? And the rabbi?”

  “All! All!” he said, making a gesture with his hand like cutting with a knife.

  That made me feel somewhat easier, as it is said: The troubles of others are half a comfort to one’s self. But I was nevertheless infuriated, and a fire burned within me. I decided to confront the constable. “Tell me, does your honor realize that I’ve lived in this village much longer than you? Do you realize that in this little corner of the world my father lived and my grandfather and my grandmother, may they all rest in peace?” And I listed my whole family by name, whoever lived there and where and when they died.

  He heard me out, and when I finished, he said to me, “You are a clever Jew, Tevel, and you can talk a blue streak. What good are your stories about your grandmother and grandfather to me? Let them have a bright paradise! But you, Tevel, had better gather up your stuff and get going to Berdichev!”

  That made me even angrier. Enough, you Esau that brought me such good tidings, now he ridicules me by telling me to get going to Berdichev! Let me at least teach him a lesson. “Your honor, as long as you’ve been constable here, have you ever heard any of the neighbors complain that I’ve ever robbed them or cheated them or tricked them or taken anything from them? Go ahead, ask anyone,” I said, “whether I didn’t live much better alongside all of you than anyone else. How many times did I come to you to plead the case for my Gentile neighbors, asking you not to mistreat them?”

  That did not sit well with him! He stood up, crushed his cigarette with his fingers, tossed it away. “I don’t have time to waste with your idle chatter,” he said. “I received an order, and that’s all I need to know. Come, you’ll sign the order right here. They give you three days to pack up, sell everything, and get on your way.”

  I saw it was bad. “You are giving me three days?” I said. “For this may you live three years in honor and in riches! May God repay you many times over for the good news you brought me!” I gave it to him good, as only Tevye can! After all, what did it matter, what did I have to lose? If I had been twenty years younger and Golde were still alive, and if I had been the same Tevye the dairyman as before, in my prime—oh ho! I wouldn’t have given in so easily! I would have fought back to the last drop of my blood! But the way things were now—what could I do? What are we and what is our life?—what am I today and who am I? Only half a body, a wreck, a broken vessel! O ye ruler of the earth, our Father! I thought, why are you picking on poor Tevye? Why don’t you once in a while play around with Brodsky or Rothschild? Why don’t they have to learn the portion of Lech l’cho—Get Thee Gone? They would probably benefit from it more, wouldn’t you think? They would experience what it was really like to be a Jew, and they would see that we have a powerful God.

  Well, these were all empty words. You don’t argue with God or give Him advice on how to run the world. As He says, The heavens are mine and the earth is mine—which means He is the boss and we must obey Him. What He says is said!

  I went into the house and told my daughter the widow, “Tzeitl, we must prepare to leave here and go to a city somewhere. We’ve lived in the country long enough. Change your place, change your luck. Start packing the bedding and the samovar and the rest, and I will see to selling the house. A decree came saying we had to clear out of this home of ours in three days.”

  She tried to hold back her tears, but her children saw her distress and burst into tears. It was like, what can I say, Tisha B’Av in the house! Angrily, I let out my bitter heart at my poor daughter. “What do you want from me?” I cried. “Why are you sobbing like an old cantor on Yom Kippur? Who do you think I am, God’s favorite child? Aren’t enough Jews,” I said, “being driven out of their villages? Listen to what the constable has to say. Anatevka, which used to be a town, with God’s help, is now a village, so that they can feel free to drive out all the Jews! If that’s the way it is, how are we any worse off than all the other Jews?”

  So I poured my heart out to my daughter. But she is, after all, female, and she asked, “Where can we go on such short notice? Where can we find a city to live in?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” I said. “When God came to our great-great-grandfather Abraham and told him, Get thee gone from thence, you must leave your native land—did Abraham ask him, ‘Where to?’ God said, to the land of Arad. We will go wherever our eyes take us, wherever all Jews go! What will be for all the children of Israel will be for us.

  “And what makes you think you are better than your sister Beilke? It isn’t beneath her dignity to be with her Podhotsur in America, scraping out a living, so it shouldn’t be beneath yours either. Let us thank God, blessed be He,” I said, “that we have the means with which to set out. We still have some money from before, and a little from selling the cows, and some will come from the house. It all adds up, and may it be for the best! And even if we had, God forbid, nothing,” I said, “we are still better off than Mendel Beiliss!”

  In short, I convinced her not to be obstinate. When the constable brings a decree telling you to leave, I explained, you can’t be piggish; you must go. Then I went into the village to sell my house.

  I went straight to Ivan Poperilo the mayor, a fat goy who I knew was dying to buy my house. I didn’t give him any explanations—a Jew is smarter than a goy. “You should know, Ivan, my friend, I am leaving,” I told him.

  He asked me why.

  I said, “I am moving to the city. I want to be among Jews. I am no longer a young man, and I might die at any time.”

  Ivan said, “So why can’t you die here? Who is stopping you?”

  I thanked him warmly. “Better you should die here,” I said. “You’re more deserving, and I will go die among my own. Buy my house and my garden from me. I wouldn‘t sell it to anyone but you.”

  “How much are you asking for your house?”

  “How much are you offering?”

  Back and forth, up a coin, down a coin, we haggled until we reached a price and shook hands on it. I took a nice down payment so he wouldn’t change his mind. A Jew is smarter than a goy. And that was how I sold my house and all my belongings in one day, dirt cheap, but still making a bit of a profit. I went off to hire a wagon to cart off the remainder of my poor household goods. But just listen to something that can only happen to Tevye. I won’t keep you long, but listen carefully and I’ll tell it to you, as you say, in three words.

  I ca
me home to find, not a house, but a wreck, the poor walls bare, as if they were shedding tears for all that was happening to them! On the floor were piles, bundles everywhere! On the hearth the cat perched, sorrowful as a poor orphan. My heart almost broke, and tears sprang to my eyes. Had I not been embarrassed before my daughter, I would have had a good cry! Here was where I had grown up, here I had struggled all my life, and suddenly—Lech l’cho—get thee gone! Say what you will, it’s a terrible loss!

  But Tevye is not a woman. I straightened up, put on a cheerful face, and called out, “Come here, Tzeitl. Where are you?” She stepped out of the other room, her eyes red and her nose puffy. Aha, I thought, she’d been bawling again, like a woman on Yom Kippur! These women, do you hear, as soon as something happens, they weep! Tears are cheap to them! “You silly,” I said to her, “why are you crying again? Aren’t you being foolish? Just think of the difference between you and Mendel Beiliss.”

  She didn’t want to hear that. “Papa, you don’t know why I’m crying,” she said.

  “I know very well,” I said. “Why shouldn’t I know? You’re crying because you’re sad to leave your home. You were born here and grew up here, and so you are sad. Believe me,” I said, “if I weren’t Tevye, if I were somebody else, I would kiss these bare walls and these empty shelves. I would get down on my knees on the earth. I will miss every little thing the same as you. Even the cat,” I said, “is sitting on the hearth like an orphan. It’s a dumb animal, and yet I have pity on her. She will remain alone without someone to care for her, a forsaken creature.”

  “There is, I must tell you,” she said, “a greater sorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We are leaving someone behind who will be as alone as a bare stone.”

  What did she mean? “What are you babbling about? Which person? What stone?”

  “Papa, I am not talking about our leaving. I am talking about our Chava.”

  When she uttered that name, I swear to you, it was as if hot boiling water had been poured over me or a block of wood had hit me on the head! I fell upon Tzeitl in a rage. “Why do you suddenly bring up Chava? I told you how many times that Chava for me is no longer alive!”

  Do you think that frightened her? Not one bit! Tevye’s daughters have great strength in them!

  “Papa,” she said, “stop being so angry, and remember what you yourself said so many times. It is written that a human being must have pity for another like a father for a child.”

  Do you hear those words? I became even more enraged and lit into her, as she deserved. “You are speaking to me of pity? Where was her pity when I was stretched out like a dog before the priest, cursed be his name, kissed his feet, while she was in the next room and heard every word? And where was her pity when her mother, may she rest in peace, was lying right here on the ground covered in black? Where was she then? And the nights I couldn’t sleep,” I said. “And the heartache that gnaws at me to this very day when I remember what she did to me and for whom she forsook us? Where is her pity for me?” My heart was breaking, and I could no longer speak.

  But Tevye’s daughter found an answer. “You yourself, Papa,” she said, “have said that a person who is sorry for what he has done, even God must forgive.”

  “Sorry?” I said. “It’s too late! The branch once torn from the tree must wither! The leaf that has fallen to the ground must shrivel. Do not say any more to me about it—thus far and no more!”

  When she realized that words were of no use, that she could not win Tevye over with words, she threw her arms around me and began kissing my hands. “Papa, may I suffer, may I die right here on the spot if you cast her off again as you did there in the woods when she ran back to you and you turned your horse away and sped off!”

  “Why are you tormenting me? Why are you torturing me like this? What do you want of me?”

  But she would not let go—she gripped me by the hands and pleaded her case. “May evil come to me, may I perish if you do not forgive her,” she said. “Because she is your daughter, just as I am!”

  “What do you want of me?” I said. “She is no longer my daughter! She died long ago!”

  “No, she didn’t die, and she is your daughter again as always. Because from the first minute she found out we were being sent away, she decided they would send all of us, she too along with us. Wherever we go—so Chava herself said—she will go. Our exile is her exile. Here is the proof,” she said. “Here is her bundle on the floor.” My daughter Tzeitl said this to me in one breath, the way we recite the ten sons of Haman in the Megillah, not letting me get in a word, and pointed to a bundle wrapped in a red shawl. Then she flung open the door to the other room and called out, “Chava!”

  And what can I tell you, dear friend? Just as you describe in your books, Chava appeared from the other room—healthy, tall, and lovely as she always was, unchanged except for her face, which wore a worried look, her eyes sad. Holding her head high with pride, she remained standing, and she looked at me as I did at her. Then she stretched out her arms to me and could only utter one word, one word only, softly:

  “Pa-pa . . .”

  Please don’t think badly of me that tears come to my eyes when I remember this. But do not even think that Tevye shed so much as a tear or showed, as they say, a sign of sentimentality—never! What I felt in my heart at the time is another story. You yourself are a father, and you know, just as I do, the meaning of the verse like as a father pitieth his children, and you know how a father feels when a child, no matter how it has sinned, looks right into your soul and says to you, “Papa!” Well, try to be strong and drive those feelings away! Then again the hurt persisted, and that fine bit of spite she played on me came to mind. I remembered Chvedka Galagan, may he sink into the earth, and the priest, may his name be erased, and my tears, and Golde’s death, God rest her soul. . . . No! Tell me yourself, how can I forget it, how can I forget it?

  But then again, after all, she was still my child, and again the verse came to me, like as a father pitieth his children. How can a person be so harsh when God says of Himself that He is an all-forgiving God! And especially since she had repented and wanted to return to her father and to her God! What do you say, Pani Sholem Aleichem? You’re a Jew yourself who writes books and gives advice to everybody. Tell me, what should Tevye have done? Should he have embraced her as one of his own, hugged and kissed her, as we say on Yom Kippur at Kol Nidrei, I have pardoned according to Thy word—come to me, you are my child? Or should I have turned my back on her, as I did before, and told her, Lech l’cho—get thee gone, go back to where you came from? No, imagine that you are in Tevye’s place, and tell me honestly, as a true and good friend, what you would have done. And if you cannot tell me right away, I will give you time to think it over.

  Meanwhile I must go. The grandchildren are waiting for me, looking for their grandfather. You must surely know that grandchildren are a thousand times more precious and more lovable than children. Sons and sons of sons—that’s no small thing!

  Goodbye, be well, and forgive me for filling your head with so many words. It will give you something to write about. If God wills it, we will meet again someday.

  VACHALAKLOKOS

  A belated story from Tevye the dairyman, recounted before

  the war but, because of the wartime turmoil, not seeing the

  light of day till now

  WRITTEN IN 1914-16.

  You probably remember, Pani Sholem Aleichem, that I once told you about the portion of Lech l’cho—Get Thee Gone, with all the details. I told you how Esau settled accounts with his brother Jacob, repaid him well for the blessings of the firstborn son he stole from him. Like Jacob of old, I was exiled from my village with all my worldly goods, with my children and grandchildren, as their edict required. They made an utter ruin of my property and poor belongings; even my horse had to be sold, which to this day I cannot speak of without tears coming to my eyes. As we say on Tisha B’Av, This too is worthy of
tears. That poor horse earned the right to have a few tears shed over him.

  But never mind. After all, it’s the same story. Why am I more special to God than the rest of our Jewish brethren, whom Ivan is driving from the blessed villages as quickly as he can manage it? He is sweeping and cleaning out and uprooting every trace of a Jew! As we say in yaaleh veyavo, so as there shall be no sign—nothing will remain of their presence. I have nothing more to complain to God about than all the rest of the village Jews who are being driven out and are now wandering in every direction, having no place to lay their heads, quaking with fear every minute lest a police officer appear for whatever reason. Tevye is not ignorant like other village Jews. He understands a few Psalms and is no stranger to the midrash and can, with God’s help, interpret a portion of Chumesh and Rashi as well. So what? Do you expect Esau to appreciate this and have respect for such a Jew? Or maybe I deserve thanks for it? The fact is, I have nothing to be ashamed of, and a fault it certainly isn’t. Thank God I am a Jew, the equal of others, and am not so blind that I cannot see or understand the small print in the holy writings. I am acquainted with the ins and outs of scripture, as it is said: Worthy is he who understands.