Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  That’s number one. The second mishap occurs that very same day, on the Jewish street they call by the strange name Whitechapel. Here they sell fish and meat, prayer books, fringed garments, apples, kvass, cookies and cakes, kippered herring, prayer shawls, lemons, eggs, glasses, pots, galoshes, noodles, brooms, whistles, pepper, and string—exactly as people do at home, not a hair’s difference. Even the mud is the same as ours, as are the smells and odors, often worse. We’re delighted to be in Whitechapel. Pinni overdoes his delight. “Berdichev!” he exclaims. “Good God, Jewish children! We aren’t in London, we’re in Berdichev!” Oh my, did he pay for that comparison. Berdichev! The Whitechapel Jews don’t like it at all. I thought they would have to take him off to the hospital. From that time on Teibl never lets him out of her sight. I look around at Whitechapel. My God! If London is like this, what can America be like?

  But if you talk to Bruche, she says London should have burned down before we arrived. From the very first minute she takes an instant dislike to the city. “Do you call this a city?” she says. “It’s not a city—it’s a hell! A fire should have destroyed it last year!” My brother Elyahu tries to say nice things about it, to no avail. Bruche spouts curses and insults at the city, wishing it would burn down. That’s her only punishment for it—having it burn to the ground. Pinni’s wife supports her. My mother says, “Maybe God will have pity on us, and London will be our last ordeal?” But the three of us—I, Elyahu, and Pinni—think of London as the Promised Land. We are actually thrilled with the turmoil and noise, the hustle and bustle.

  What do we care if it’s noisy and crowded? Let them push all they want! The one thing troubling us, however, is that we’re without work. We look for a committee but can’t find one. Whoever we ask doesn’t know or won’t answer. They have no time. They’re busy, also running! But we must find a committee. Without a committee we won’t have enough money to get to America. My brother Elyahu’s secret pocket is now empty. The money we made selling our house has gone up in smoke. Pinni pokes fun at Elyahu: “What’ll you do now with that pocket?” This angers Elyahu. He hates being teased. He’s a pessimistic sort of person, exactly the opposite of his friend Pinni, who calls him “the worried little boss of the family.”

  I love Pinni because he’s always jolly. Since we came to London, he’s become even jollier. In Cracow, Lemberg, Brod, Antwerp, and Vienna, he says, we had to speak German. But here in London it’s a pleasure—we can speak Yiddish just like at home, which means half Yiddish, half Russian.

  Their language is worse than German. Bruche says that three Englishmen are not worth one German. Who on earth ever heard of a street called Whitechapel? And money is called ha’penny, tuppence, and thruppence! And there’s another word that has to do with money called a fife. We had an incident with this fife, if you want to hear about it.

  B .

  You already know we’re trying to find a committee in London, which is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But we do have a God. We’re walking along Whitechapel one night—that is to say, it isn’t really night but daytime. In London there isn’t daytime or morning. In London it’s always night. We run across a man in a short coat and an odd-looking cap who seems to be looking for someone.

  “I could swear you’re Jews,” says the man.

  Pinni replies, “Absolutely, and what Jews! Real Jews!”

  “Would you like to do a good deed?” the man says.

  “For instance?”

  “I have to observe the anniversary of a death in the family today and can’t leave home. I need a few men to make a minyan of ten. Is the lad a bar mitzvah yet?”

  He means me. I’m quite pleased that he calls me a “lad” and thinks I’m a bar mitzvah.

  We climb some stairs with him and enter a dark room. It’s packed with small, dirty children and filled with the thick odor of fried fish. There aren’t the necessary ten yet. He needs seven more. The man asks us to sit and runs out into the street to find them. He does this several times until he succeeds. In the meantime I get acquainted with the grimy children and peer into the stove where the fish are frying. Fried fish isn’t as bad as my sister-in-law Bruche makes it out to be. If they’d give me a piece of fried fish right now, I’d love it. I don’t think even Bruche would refuse it. We’ve hardly eaten all day. For several days we’ve been living on herring and radishes. In Whitechapel you can get good black radishes. The man would be doing us a favor if he’d offer us a bite to eat, but obviously he has no idea we’re hungry. How do I know? As soon as we finish the mincha prayer and polish off the kaddish, he thanks us for our trouble and leads us to the door. But my brother Elyahu stalls long enough to ask about a committee, glancing in the meantime at the fried fish and swallowing hard. The man has one hand on the doorknob and gestures with the other while telling us not such good news.

  First of all, he says, the committee doesn’t exist. That is, there’s a committee, really several committees, but the London committees don’t hand out money so quickly. If you need help from a London committee, you have to do a lot of running around first, bringing papers and witnesses proving that you’re an emigrant going to America. The reason is that all the emigrants, and there are many here, only say they want to go to America. Once they’ve brought everything, they demand that the committee give them money for return fare home. The London committee doesn’t think highly of America.

  And Pinni, a hothead, spouts his customary fiery Yiddish-Russian: “How is this possible? What right do they have to send us back? Aren’t they ashamed of themselves, living in such a civilized country—”

  The man interrupts him and holds open the door. “You can complain as much as you want,” he says. “I’ll give you the address of a committee. Go there, and maybe you’ll find that it’s all right!”

  C.

  We leave the yahrtzeit with the odor of fried fish in our nostrils. We’re all really disappointed, but no one says anything except Bruche. She wishes them every ill in the world. She wishes they would choke to death on their fried fish that smelled a mile away.

  My mother can’t stand it. “What do you have against them, poor honest folks?” she snaps at Bruche. “They live in a hell but still and all, when it comes to a yahrtzeit, they look to find a minyan.”

  Bruche’s answer is, “Mother-in-law! Let them burn together with their yahrtzeit and their fried fish! They stop strangers and drag them into their house but can’t give the child so much as a little piece of fried fish out of charity.”

  She means me. Not so long ago I was a bar mitzvah lad, and now I’m a child. But it’s nice that Bruche is looking out for me.

  The six of us make our way to the committee. We thank the man for suggesting that we go by tram. But the London tram doesn’t like to stop to pick people up. No matter how hard you wave your arms, it keeps going. Running after it is useless—you won’t catch it. Luckily a clean-shaven Englishman takes pity on us. If you see a person with a clean-shaven face, know that he’s an Englishman.

  He sees us waving our arms at the passing trams and shows us a place to stand in front of a church. And he’s right. In no more than a minute, a tram stops. The six of us get on, and off we go. The conductor comes over and asks us to buy tickets. What then happens, we come to understand only later.

  Pinni asks him in Yiddish, “How much?” The conductor says, “Fife.” Pinni asks him again, “How much?” The conductor, becoming annoyed, again says, “Fife.” Pinni turns to us and says, “Do you hear that? He’s telling me to go whistle!”

  My brother Elyahu goes up to the conductor and asks with the help of sign language, “How much does a fare cost?”

  The conductor, now really angry, shouts, “Fife!”

  Pinni starts to laugh and Elyahu, now also angry, says to the conductor in Yiddish, “Go fife yourself!”

  The conductor pulls the cord to stop the tram and throws us all off in such a rage, you’d think we wanted to murder him and run off with his money purse.


  It turns out that when we thought the conductor was telling us to go whistle, he was telling us the price of the ticket in English.

  “Nu, I ask you, shouldn’t London burn down?” says Bruche as we walk to the committee.

  D .

  At the London committee it’s just as lively as at all the other committees. The courtyard is filled with emigrants, like so much trash, and inside people are sitting around smoking cigars and saying to one another, “All right.” The difference is that while the German committees wear their whiskers curled up at the ends and speak German, the London committees have clean-shaven faces and say, “All right!” It’s a real show—the men are shaven, and the women wear wigs. Even the girls wear false hair and braided buns, have large teeth, and are so ugly they turn your stomach. Yet it’s they who are laughing at us, pointing their fingers and squealing so loudly, we’re embarrassed for them.

  Two girls stop us in the middle of the street and accost my brother Elyahu, telling him to go to a barbershop. At first we don’t understand what that means, but now we know: going to a barbershop means getting shaved and cutting your hair. What strange creatures! They go around gobbling up fried fish in the middle of the street that you can smell a mile away, their mouths dripping grease, and they hate hair. Drunks there are plenty of, but they don’t sprawl all over the street as they do at home. The English don’t allow it. “It’s quite a country,” says Bruche, “but it refuses to burn down.”

  “What good will it be if it does burn down?” asks my brother Elyahu, and gets an earful from her.

  When Bruche wants to, she really knows how to put you down. Sometimes she gives you the silent treatment and doesn’t speak, but other times the words flood out and you have to either stuff your ears with cotton or run away as far as you can. Here’s what she said, word for word: “Why are you defending this accursed country with its black sky and shaven snouts and its dirty Whitechapel, its fried fish, old maids with braided buns, greasy dresses, paupers who drink ginger beer, conductors who tell you to go whistle, and Jews who have yahrtzeit and begrudge you a drink of water? A city like that should burn down!”

  Bruche takes a breath, crosses her arms, and says, “London, why don’t you burn down?”

  God in heaven! When will we ever get to America?

  PART TWO

  In America

  Written in 1916.

  I

  MAZEL TOV, WE’RE IN AMERICA

  A .

  Give us a mazel tov, we’re in America. Or they tell us we’re in America. We haven’t really set foot in America yet because we’re still in Castle Garden. Or that’s what it was once called—now it’s called Ellie’s Island. Why do they call it Ellie’s Island? Because it once belonged to someone named Ellie. Pinni is very angry at Ellie’s Island because they detain the poor people there but let the rich ones go the minute they get off the ship. He says that’s more like what you would expect from those Russian thieves than from this land of the free. Here everyone is equal. There are no poor, no rich. He spouts names like Columbus, Shakespeare, and Buckle and big words I don’t understand like civilization. He wants to write a song about them but has no ink, pen, or paper. My brother Elyahu tells him that if he doesn’t like this country, he can go back. You remember that these two are rarely of one mind? Whatever one says, the other says the opposite. “Summer and winter,” Bruche calls them, receiving a stern look from her husband, who calls her a cow and a busybody and other names not fit to repeat. My mother intercedes and tells her daughter-in-law that when cats fight, a person shouldn’t get in the middle because he might get scratched.

  B .

  What are we doing on Ellie’s Island? We’re waiting for our family and friends to come from the city so they can vouch for us in writing. They questioned us over and over before we boarded the ship, while we were on the ship itself, and when we just disembarked from the ship. And it’s always the same questions: Who are we? Where are we going? Whom do we have in America?

  We tell them there was a man named Peysi the cantor and he died. He left a widow, our mother. She has a son named Elyahu, who has a wife named Bruche and a friend named Pinni, who has a wife named Teibl. And I am the youngest, named Motl. This is my friend named Mendl, and because he is large, Bruche named him the Colt.

  Whom do we have in America? We know everybody in America and all the Jews are our friends. First of all, there is Moishe the bookbinder and his wife Fat Pessi—our neighbor with a whole gang of children. Each one has a name and a nickname. We tick them off on our fingers: Pinni Barrel, Velvl Tomcat, Mendl Stork, Chaim Buffalo, Hershl with the birthmark on his forehead, so we call him Vashti—

  They interrupt us, “Enough—enough children. Give us grown-ups.” So we give them the grown-ups, tick off their names: Yoneh the baker, an angry man, that’s one. His wife Rivele, a woman with a fur cape—that’s two. Actually, she once had a fur cape but it was stolen at the border. The word border reminds my mother of how our things were stolen at the border. She asks if it’s possible to get these things back—and she starts crying, at which point Elyahu reprimands her. She says that now she is in America, she is no longer worried about her eyes and can cry and cry.

  C .

  That they allowed her through with those eyes is a miracle, as is the fact that we survived the ocean crossing. Was it not a miracle of miracles? How many times did we see the Angel of Death with our own eyes? How many times did we think our lives were over?

  At first when we boarded the ship Prince Albert, everything was fine. I and my friend Mendl measured the Prince Albert from stem to stern with our strides. No one had it as good as we did. Never had we had accommodations to match what we had on the ship. It was a three-story house on the water. Just picture it—you’re sitting in your house, or walking around outside, hands in your pockets, and you’re moving! You’re eating and—you’re moving! You’re drinking and—you’re moving! And the people you see—a world of people, an entire city—are traveling with you on one ship and going to the same place, America. You can get to know all of them, and they you. You find out in one day so many things that in another place you wouldn’t learn in a year.

  D .

  Oh my, how many friends my mother and my sister-in-law Bruche and Pinni’s wife Teibl make among the women! But that’s nothing compared with the friends my brother Elyahu and his friend Pinni make among the men. No matter how much any of us talks, they can never talk enough. The women talk about kitchens, cupboards, linens, laundry, bedding, stockings, sheets, and fur capes. The men talk about America, business, Columbus, edicts, and pogroms.

  They can’t live without talking about edicts and pogroms. As you know, I hate to talk about those things. When they start talking about them, I leave. I take my friend Mendl by the hand, and together we stroll through the streets of Prince Albert.

  E .

  Prince Albert is big enough—and beautiful. It has marble stairs, brass railings, and steel and iron wherever you look. And the crew—some are called stewards and nurses; others are sailors, who run back and forth like the wind. Mendl and I envy them. We promise each other that when we grow up, we will enlist as sailors.

  But Price Albert has one big fault—we’re not allowed to go wherever we wish. As soon as we try to go beyond our assigned quarters, the mean sailors drive us away. The upper-class passengers are just as mean, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t let the sailors chase us away. What harm could we do—take a bite out of them? My friend Mendl is irate. He doesn’t understand why you need to have different classes. He says that in America there are no classes. If you don’t believe me, he says, you can ask your brother Elyahu. But my brother hates to be asked dumb questions. I prefer to ask our friend Pinni, who loves to talk about such things—he can bury you in words. And if you get him started, he’s like a wound-up alarm clock—he won’t quit until the wheels stop turning.

  F.

  I find Pinni sitting on the deck with his nose in a book. Because he is
nearsighted, he doesn’t read with his eyes but with the tip of his nose.

  I come up close to him. “Reb Pinni, I have to ask you something.”

  Pinni takes his nose out of the book. “What did you say, Peewee?” Peewee is what he calls me when he’s in a good mood, which is almost always, even when he bickers with my brother, and even when his Teibl pouts.

  I tell him what I have in mind: is it true there are no classes in America?

  You should have seen Pinni flare up with fiery, lofty expressions. America is the only country where true freedom and equality reign, he says. And here’s where Pinni pours out his favorite words. In America, he says, you can be sitting here, and right next to you the president, and next to him a beggar, a tramp, a shlepper. And a little farther on—a count, an earl, a millionaire! Civilization! Progress! Columbus!

  An emigrant, a complete stranger, interrupts him. “If it’s such a fortunate land as you say, where everyone is equal, then where do all these shleppers, counts, beggars, and earls come from?”

  Let’s leave Pinni to fight it out with the stranger and a few others. We now know that in America there are no classes. Mendl is right—he says you have to hate the upper classes, which means we have to hate those who sit in the ship’s higher classes. I don’t understand—what do I have against them? Mendl points out that “they’ve locked themselves up in first and second class among their fancy mirrors. Why? Aren’t we good enough for them? Aren’t we human beings just like they are? Isn’t our God the same as their God?”