Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  “You’re lucky you live next door to decent neighbors. If you had splashed ink on Menashe the doctor’s garden, you’d know what kind of God we have!” our neighbor Pessi says to my mother.

  “What are you talking about? Do you mean you need to have luck to have bad luck?” My mother looks at me meaningfully.

  What do you think she means?

  C .

  “Now I’ll be smarter,” my brother Elyahu says to me. “Just wait till nightfall, and we’ll take the bottles down to the river.”

  Right, as I am a Jew! What could be smarter than that? People pour filth into the river anyway! They wash laundry and water horses there, and it’s where the pigs wallow. I know that river well. I used to catch fish in it. In fact, I’m looking forward to going to the river.

  As soon as night falls, we load baskets full of bottles and carry them to the river. We pour out the ink and carry the empty bottles back home, then take another load of full bottles. We work all night. I haven’t had such a happy, enjoyable night in a long time.

  Just picture it: the town is asleep, the sky is full of stars, and the moon is reflected in the river. It’s peaceful and quiet. A river is like a living thing. After Passover, when the ice melts, it performs wonders! It swells, spreads itself out, and pours over its banks. And then it grows smaller, narrower, and shallower. By the end of summer, it quiets down and takes a nap. Occasionally some creature in the bottom mud goes bul-bul-bul. A pair of frogs reply from the other side: krua-krua! It’s so small, it’s an embarrassment, not a river! And I can cross by foot to the other side without even taking off my pants!

  Because of our ink, the river becomes a little wider. Imagine, toiling like oxen, we pour in about a thousand bottles! We sleep afterward like the dead.

  The next morning my mother awakens us. “Woe unto me and my miserable life! What have you done to the river?”

  It appears we have brought catastrophe to the whole town. The washerwomen don’t have anywhere to wash their laundry. The coachmen don’t have anywhere to water their horses. The water-carriers are ganging up to come after us. That’s the good news our mother brings. But we aren’t going to wait. We aren’t anxious to learn what the water-carriers have in store for us. I and my brother Elyahu decide we’d better take off as fast as our legs can carry us to his friend Pinni.

  “Let them look for us there if they want us!” My brother Elyahu takes my hand, and we speed down the hill to his friend Pinni. When we meet again, I’ll tell you all about Pinni. It’s worth your while to get to know him: he also has lots of good ideas.

  X

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD SNEEZES

  A .

  Guess what we’re breaking our heads over these days. Mice! All week my brother Elyahu has been studying his little book on how to make money with little investment, From One Ruble—A Hundred! Lately he’s learned, he says, how to drive out mice, cockroaches, and other vermin. Rats too. Just let him put a powder in a place, and not one mouse will be left! They’ll run away, or die—no more mice. How he makes it, I don’t know. It’s a secret. He keeps the book in his chest pocket, the powder wrapped in a piece of paper. The powder is reddish and ground fine like snuff. It’s called shemeritzi.

  “What is shemeritzi?”

  “Turkish pepper.”

  “What is Turkish pepper?”

  “If you don’t stop all this what-is, you’ll find your head going through the door!”

  My brother Elyahu hates to be asked questions when he’s in the middle of work. I shut my mouth. Along with the red powder, I notice that he has another powder. It also works on mice. But you have to be very careful with it!

  “Deadly poison!” my brother Elyahu says maybe a hundred times to my mother, to Bruche, and to me. Especially to me lest, God forbid, I touch it—it’s poison!

  We make our first test on our neighbor Pessi’s mice. An endless horde of mice live there. Her husband Moishe is a bookbinder, and the house is full of prayer books. Mice love prayer books. Well, not so much the prayer books as the glue that holds the books together. But as long as the mice are eating the glue, they might as well eat the prayer books too. They do enormous damage. One time they gnawed through one of his holiday prayer books, brand-new, right to where THE KING was printed in large letters. They really loved those words THE kING! They only left the crown of the letter lamed.

  “Let me at them for one night!” my brother Elyahu pleads with the bookbinder.

  The bookbinder won’t have it. “I’m afraid you’ll ruin my prayer books,” he says.

  “How will I ruin your prayer books?” my brother Elyahu asks.

  “I don’t know how, but I’m still afraid. These prayer books belong to other people.”

  You can’t argue with a bookbinder! But finally we got him to let us spend just one night there.

  B.

  That night didn’t work out too well for us. We didn’t catch one mouse! But my brother Elyahu says it was a good sign. The mice, he says, sniffed out our powder and ran off. The bookbinder shook his head and smirked. He didn’t believe it. Still and all, word got around town that we could drive away mice. It was our neighbor Pessi who spread the word around. She went off one morning to the market and told everyone that “no one drives away mice like they drive away mice.” She made our reputation. Earlier she praised our kvass all over town, and then she trumpeted far and wide that we made the best ink in the world. It turned out that no one needed ink, but mice are not the same as ink. Mice are everywhere, in every house. Every homeowner has a cat. But what good is one cat against so many mice? And rats! Rats are about as afraid of cats as Haman is of Purim noisemakers. In fact, cats are afraid of rats. That’s what Berreh the shoemaker says. He tells tales of terrifying rats. People say he is a big exaggerator, but even if only half of what he says is true, it’s still bad. Rats ate up a new pair of boots, he says. It was at night. He was afraid of coming too close to them—two huge rats, as big as calves. From a distance he whistled at them, stamped his feet, screamed kish-kish-kish-kish! Nothing helped. He threw the heel of a boot at them, but they just glanced up and then went about their business. Then he threw the cat at them. They attacked the cat and ate her. Nobody wanted to believe him, but if a person swears, you have to believe him.

  “Give me just one night,” my brother Elyahu says to him, “and I’ll drive out all the rats!”

  “Ah, with the greatest pleasure!” says Berreh the shoemaker. “I’ll thank you for it!”

  C.

  We sit through one whole night at Berreh the shoemaker’s, who himself sits with us. Ah, what wondrous tales he tells us! He’s a veteran of the Turkish War, stationed in a place called Plevneh.

  “They were shooting with cannons. Do you know how big a cannon is? One cannonball is bigger than this whole house, and they shoot a thousand cannonballs in one minute. What do you think of that? When that cannonball flies through the air, it screams so loud you can go deaf!”

  Once he was standing guard, as Berreh the shoemaker tells it, when suddenly he heard a bang. Something was carrying him up into the air, high up, way above the clouds, and there the cannonball exploded into a thousand pieces. Luckily he fell on a soft place, he says, otherwise he would have broken his head. My brother Elyahu listens to this tale, and his eyebrows smile—that is, he isn’t laughing, but his eyebrows are laughing. It’s a strange laughter. Berreh the shoemaker doesn’t notice. He keeps on telling his fantastic tales. Each story is scarier than the one before. And that’s how we spend our time until daybreak. And rats? We see not a one.

  “You’re a magician!” Berreh the shoemaker says to my brother Elyahu. And he goes out into the town and tells everyone about this miracle, how with a magical incantation we drove away all the rats in one night. He swears that he himself saw it—my brother Elyahu muttered something, and the rats came out of their nests and than ran down to the river, swam across, and kept running, he does not know where to.

  D .

  “Are you
the people who drive away mice?” People are coming to hire us to drive away mice with our magical incantation.

  But my brother Elyahu is an honest person. He hates lies. He doesn’t drive away mice with a magical incantation, he explains, but with a powder. He has a kind of powder that, once the mice smell it, they run away.

  “Let it be a powder, let it be whatever you want,” they say, “so long as you drive away the mice! How much will it cost?”

  My brother Elyahu hates to bargain. For the powder it will cost so much, he says, and for the labor, so much and so much. As you might expect, with each new customer he raises the price. Actually, it isn’t he who raises the price; it’s my sister-in-law.

  “Make up your mind,” she says. “If you’re going to eat pig, let the fat run down your beard. If you’re going to be a mouse-catcher, at least make some money out of it.”

  “Nu, and where is fairness? Where is God?” my mother interjects.

  My sister-in-law snaps at her, “Fairness? There is fairness!” She indicates the stove. “God? Here is God!” She slaps her pocket.

  “Bruche! What did you say? God be with you!” My mother wrings her hands.

  “Don’t waste your time talking to a fool,” my brother Elyahu says to my mother, pacing around the room, twisting his beard. He has quite a full beard now. It grows like crazy. He twists it, and it grows in a weird way. Of all places, it grows thickest on his throat. His face is smooth, but his throat is hairy. You’ve never seen such a beard!

  At any other time my sister-in-law Bruche would have ruined his day for calling her a fool, but this time she ignores it because he is earning money. Whenever my brother Elyahu is earning money, he becomes a big shot in her eyes. She also values me more because I help him earn money. Usually she calls me shlepper or shlimazel or “poor excuse of a kid.” Now she is more endearing—she calls me Mottele.

  “Mottele! Hand me my shoes.”

  “Mottele! Draw some water for me.”

  “Mottele! Take out the garbage.”

  If you earn money, they talk differently to you.

  E .

  The trouble with my brother Elyahu is that he overdoes things. When he made kvass, he made a barrelful. Ink—a thousand bottles. A powder for mice—a full sack. Our neighbor’s husband Moishe the bookbinder told him, “Why do you need so much powder?” I don’t think my brother Elyahu appreciated this problem.

  Well, they should have locked the sack up in a closet . . . but no. One day they all go off and leave me alone with it. Is it my fault that I ride the sack as if it were a horse? Be a prophet, and know that the sack would burst and all this yellow stuff would come pouring out! It’s the powder that my brother Elyahu uses to drive the mice away! It has such a sharp smell, you could faint from it! I bend down and try to sweep up what spilled, but I’m seized by a fit of sneezing. If I’d inhaled a whole box of snuff, I wouldn’t sneeze as hard. I sneeze and sneeze till I finally run outside, hoping to stop sneezing.

  Guess what happens. Along comes my mother, who sees me sneezing. “What’s the matter?” she asks me. All I can do is sneeze and then sneeze some more! And still more!

  “God help me, where did you get such a cold?” She wrings her hands. I can’t stop sneezing and just point toward the house. She goes in but soon runs back out, sneezing even worse than I am. Along comes my brother Elyahu and sees us both sneezing. “What’s the matter?” My mother points toward the house.

  He goes in and then comes bounding out, shouting, “Who did th—katchoo! katchoo!”

  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my brother Elyahu so angry. He comes at me with both hands. It’s just lucky he’s sneezing or else I’d really get it.

  My sister-in-law Bruche comes along and finds all three of us holding our sides sneezing. “What’s going on here? Why all this sneezing?”

  What can we tell her? Can we so much as utter a word? We point toward the house. She goes in and runs right out again, red as fire, and assails my brother Elyahu: “What did I tell—katchoo! katchoo! katchoo!”

  Along comes our neighbor Fat Pessi. She speaks to us, but none of us can answer her with so much as a word. We point toward the house. She too goes in and comes running out again. “What have you—katchoo! katchoo! katchoo!” She waves her hands in the air.

  Along comes her husband Moishe the bookbinder. He looks at us and laughs. “What’s all this sneezing about?”

  “Just go in there—katchoo! katchoo! katchoo!” We point toward the house.

  The bookbinder goes into our house and runs out, laughing. “I know what it is! I smelled it! It’s shemer—katchoo! katchoo!” He grabs his sides and sneezes. With each sneeze he lifts himself up on his tiptoes.

  Within half an hour all our neighbors and their neighbors and their uncles and aunts and third cousins and friends—the whole neighborhood, from one end to the next, is in a sneezing fit!

  Why is my brother Elyahu so frightened? Apparently he’s afraid they’ll be angry at him for the sneezing. He takes me by the hand, and, still sneezing, we run down the hill to his friend Pinni.

  It takes a good hour and a half before we can even speak like human beings again. My brother Elyahu tells his friend Pinni the whole story. His friend Pinni listens thoughtfully, like a doctor listening to a patient. When my brother Elyahu finishes, his friend Pinni says to him, “Give me that book.”

  My brother Elyahu takes the book out of his chest pocket and hands it to his friend Pinni.

  His friend Pinni reads the title, From One Ruble—A Hundred! Remedies Made from Ordinary Ingredients. With Your Own Hands, Make a Hundred Rubles a Month and More.

  He takes the book and tosses it into the stove, right onto the fire. My brother Elyahu lunges with both hands toward the fire. His friend Pinni holds him back: “Slow down!”

  After a few minutes my brother Elyahu’s book about making a hundred rubles a month and more is a pile of ashes. One unburned page remains, on which you can barely make out the word sh-e-me-r-i-t-z-i.

  XI

  OUR FRIEND PINNI

  A.

  Do you remember, I once told you I’d tell you about my brother Elyahu’s friend Pinni? He’s always full of good ideas. But first I have to tell you about his grandfather, father, and uncle. Then I’ll tell you about Pinni. Don’t worry—I’ll make it short. I’ll start with his grandfather.

  Have you ever heard of Reb Hessi the glazier? That’s Pinni’s grandfather. He’s a glazier, a mirror-maker, and a painter who can also make tobacco. He’s quit his windows, mirrors, and painting, but he still makes tobacco and sells it. As long as a man lives, he says, he has to work and not depend on anyone. He’s a tall, thin man with red eyes and a big, scary nose, bent like a ram’s horn. I guess it got that way because he sniffs tobacco. He’s maybe a hundred years old and still in his right mind. Probably he’s smarter than his two sons, Hersh-Leib the mechanic and Shneur the watchmaker. Hersh-Leib the mechanic is as tall and thin as Reb Hessi. He’s got a large, straight nose, maybe because he doesn’t sniff tobacco. Maybe one day he’ll take it up like his father.

  Hersh-Leib makes and fixes ovens. Everyone says he’s brilliant. If he’d learned a real trade, he says, he would now be one in a million. There’s nothing on earth he can’t figure out. He says so himself. He can figure anything out with one glance. He learned all about ovens on his own. When he saw Ivan Pitchkur making ovens, he laughed out loud. The goy didn’t understand a thing about ovens, he said. Hersh-Leib once dismantled an oven and built a new one from the same tiles. But you could choke from the way it smoked. So he dismantled it and rebuilt it. After doing it several times, he became a master at making ovens. He invented an oven that has to be refueled only once in eight days. If he can only find the right tiles, he’s convinced it’ll work. Once he finds real Kachlioveh tiles, he’ll build you an oven that has to be seen to be believed! An oven is more complicated than a clock—he says so in order to spite his brother Shneur the watchmaker.

  His
brother Shneur is younger and taller than he and also has a long nose. He was supposed to be a rabbi, or a ritual slaughterer, or a teacher—that’s what a head he had for learning! But he preferred to be a clockmaker. Here’s how he got interested in clock-making.

  When Shneur was still a kid in cheder, he asked smart questions. For example, when you turn a lock to the right, it opens, and when you turn it to the left, it locks—why? How does a clock work? Why does it chime when the small hand meets the twelve? A cuckoo clock almost drove him out of his mind. On the hour a little door opened and out came a bird chirping cuckoo! The bird looked absolutely alive. Even the cat was fooled. Whenever the bird came out with a cuckoo, the cat would arch its back, ready to catch it. Shneur promised himself that he would find that cuckoo bird’s secret. Once when no one was at home, he took the clock down from the wall, unscrewed all the screws, and took out its insides. His father beat him severely for it. To this day, he says, his body has the scars. But he succeeded in finding out what made the bird go cuckoo, and today he is a clockmaker.

  I don’t know if he’s the best, but he’s fast and cheap. My brother Elyahu has Shneur repair his fob watch about every other week. It’s a peculiar fob watch—either it runs crazy fast, or it slows down by an hour, or it stops altogether. It never seems to work right for long. Maybe my brother Elyahu should go to a different watchmaker, but Pinni says it’s probably the fob watch’s fault, not his uncle Shneur’s. Let’s face it, if the fob watch were just a regular watch, any watchmaker could fix it. But it isn’t a regular fob watch, so of what help can a watchmaker be?

  You argue with him and tell him he’s wrong!

  B .

  My brother Elyahu’s friend Pinni is a smart person like his father Hersh-Leib the mechanic and like his uncle Shneur the clockmaker. He also has a long nose like them. It runs in the family.