Tevye the Dairyman & Motl the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  Why can’t Pinni achieve this too? It isn’t because he’s lazy, God forbid! Pinni will accept anything to make a living in America. The problem is, he’s nearsighted and does everything too fast. They sat him down at a machine and also gave him scraps of material to practice with, sewing back and forth. In his enthusiasm he accidentally caught the left sleeve of his jacket in the machine and sewed it up. He was lucky it wasn’t his hand. Oh my, did they laugh at him! His fellow tailors shouted hoorah! They called him a greenhorn. A greenhorn is someone who just got off the boat and doesn’t know which way a door opens. That word is a terrible insult, worse than thief. That wouldn’t have been, as Bruche put it, half bad. But there is more. Just listen.

  D .

  In the same shop where my brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni are working is Pinni’s old enemy, the Heissen tailor. In this shop the Heissen tailor is a big shot. He’s not an operator working on a machine, but a cutter who cuts the material that the operators sew. But that isn’t enough for him. He says he won’t stay in this business for long. He hopes before long to become a designer. Now that’s really an important position. A designer is the one who draws the patterns for the clothes. A designer earns fifty dollars a week, maybe seventy-five or even a hundred!

  Some people have all the luck! As Bruche says, “God grants this one a lot and another He grants a lot of nothing.”

  E.

  When Pinni comes into the shop, the Heissen tailor goes up to him. He peers at him through his spectacles, puts a hand out to Pinni, and says, “Hallo, londsmon! How do you do?”

  Our friend Pinni looks at him with his nearsighted eyes. Who is this buffoon? He does not recognize him at all. Not until he mentions the ship Prince Albert does Pinni recall who this is. It’s as if someone shot three holes in his heart! The Heissen tailor has done nothing to offend him, yet Pinni cannot bear looking at him. Even if he were to earn a thousand dollars an hour, he would not stay in this shop another minute! Add to that the accident with the sewn-up sleeve.

  F.

  In short, Pinni is no longer an operator. He’s beginning as an apprentice presser in another shop. Once he learns the work, he’ll move higher and higher. How far can he go?

  “You never know,” says Pinni. “No one knows what tomorrow will bring. Carnegie and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller didn’t know they would become what they are today.”

  In the meantime Pinni has new problems on account of his habit of doing things too impulsively, in addition to his nearsightedness. He comes home every day burned by the iron.

  One day he comes home with his nose burned by the iron. What happened? How did the iron get to his nose? Pinni says his nose didn’t wait for the iron to kindly reach up but consented to reach down to the iron. How did the nose get to the iron? Apparently Pinni was groping for a piece of material, and since he is nearsighted, he bent down too close to the ironing board, and the tip of his nose hit the red-hot iron.

  “When a shlimazel falls down in the snow, he manages to hit a rock,” says someone. I won’t tell you, but I’m sure you’ll guess it’s Bruche. My sister-in-law can really hurt a person with her barbs.

  G.

  Bruche is not happy, nor is my mother, nor Teibl. Have you ever known women to be happy? They lament that we men have to work so hard in America to make a living. No easy thing, working in a shop! At half past seven in the morning you must already be at work. It takes an hour to get there. You have to grab a bite to eat, and you certainly must recite your daily prayers. You figure out what time we have to get up. And you may not be so much as a minute late, because if you are, they deduct half a day’s pay for every five minutes you’re late. How do they know if you’re late? In America every shop has a kind of clock. As soon as you arrive you have to “punch the clock,” as they call it here, so they know exactly when you started work. That’s America for you.

  H .

  We aren’t going to get old working at this shop, I’m afraid. My brother Elyahu says the workers are having problems with the “foreman.” Every shop has a foreman, an elder, an overseer. On every floor there’s a foreman. On the floor where my brother Elyahu works, the foreman is a Haman. He used to be an operator but he worked himself up and became a foreman. The workers say he is worse than the “boss.”

  The word goes around in the shop that the foreman is moving the clock so that no matter what time you arrive, it says you’re late. What do you say to such a bastard? Our friend Pinni has even better stories to tell about his foreman. He doesn’t let his workers so much as look at a newspaper. If you do, your life is in danger! As for smoking, forget about it. Talking to another person is out of the question. Pinni says you can hear a pin drop! The only sound is the clattering and whirring of the machines.

  There’s another nuisance—the irons are heated by gas, which stinks to high heaven.

  I .

  The reeking smell of the gas gives the workers bad headaches that make them become faint and stop working. It comes off their pay at the end of the week, leaving a big hole in their salaries. If you are five minutes late—off with half a day. If you leave too early—off with half a day. If you feel faint and cannot work—there goes a whole day.

  No, we can’t take it anymore. We must call a strike.

  X

  WE STRIKE!

  A .

  Personally, I think there’s nothing better in the world than striking. It’s like studying with a teacher who beats you and punishes you too hard and then they take the students away from him and look for another teacher. In the meantime you don’t go to school.

  My brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni stop going to work. Our house feels different now that they’re home. We used to see them once a week—on Sundays, because, as I told you, when you work in a shop, you have to get up before dawn in order not to be late, and when they come home, I’m already asleep. Why am I asleep? It’s because they’re working overtime, which means all the other workers go home and our men stay on at the shop working, not because they’re forced to but in order to earn more. But when it came to paying them, the company deducted days for who knows what. “It’s as if we’ve been attacked by thieves!” my brother Elyahu says. Bruche says that if she were there, all the foremen and all the bosses would bite the dust, and you can believe her. Bruche can do it!

  B .

  She cools down, however, when all the shops declare a strike. All the tailors and pressers in New York lay down their scissors and irons and—goodbye! Oh my, what goes on then, at home, on the street, and in halls! A hall is a large room or a theater. All the tailors gather from all over New York for a meeting, and they talk, talk, and more talk. You hear words you’ve never heard in your life: general strike, union, organized, forty-eight hours, higher wages, better conditions, scabs, strikebreakers, pickets, and many more words I don’t understand. My friend Mendl says he does understand them, but he won’t explain them. When you get older, Mendl says, you’ll understand. It’s possible, but for now I’m watching how the crowd gets all stirred up and my fingers are itching to put the striking tailors all down on paper, to draw each one, what he looks like, what he’s doing, how he’s standing, and how he’s speaking.

  C .

  My brother Elyahu doesn’t speak so much as a word. He goes from group to group and sticks his nose in, or cocks an ear, biting his nails nervously. I like it when my brother nods in agreement with every speaker. He agrees with them all, no matter what they say. A tailor with a boil on the left side of his head comes up to him, grabs him by the lapel, and shakes him, trying to convince him that all this fuss is a waste of time. The tailors won’t accomplish anything with their strike, because the “association of manufacturers” is too strong for us! My brother Elyahu nods in agreement. I’m afraid my brother knows what association of manufacturers means as much as I do. Another tailor approaches my brother Elyahu, this one with the face of a duck, smacking his lips as he speaks. He grabs my brother Elyahu by a coat button and cries out, “No! We mus
t fight, fight to the end!” My brother Elyahu nods in agreement to him too. It’s too bad Bruche isn’t here. She would certainly give him the needle.

  D.

  The story with our friend Pinni is different. Whoever hasn’t heard him speak at a meeting has missed something really special. He loves to name-drop famous people and use fancy words. Now imagine him all fired up, speaking to an audience of a thousand people who really don’t want to hear him. He begins his speech all the way back with Columbus and how he discovered America, and soon he’s talking about the United States, prepared to go on and on and on, but they won’t let him continue.

  “Who’s the speaker?” asks one tailor of another.

  “A greenhorn!” the other one answers.

  “What does he want here?”

  “Why is he bothering us like this?”

  “What’s he blabbering about?”

  “Sharop!” one person calls out and others soon join in: “Sharop!”

  E.

  Sharop is not a nice word. It means “Stop talking,” but our friend Pinni isn’t afraid of words. When Pinni starts speechifying it’s like a water barrel from which the cork is missing. You can cover the hole with your hand or stuff a rag in it—nothing will work until the water runs out till the last drop, so don’t even bother. Pinni has to have his say to the end, unless you drag him off the stage. This time they actually do have to remove him forcibly. Two young pressers’ apprentices take him by the arms and drag him off. But that doesn’t prevent him from continuing his speech on our way home, and when we come home, he goes on talking to my mother, Bruche, and Teibl. My friend Mendl and I are also in the audience. I feel Pinni is right in his grievances, but try to tell that to women.

  When Pinni is finally finished, Bruche speaks up with her usual kind of remark: “What difference does it make to a turkey whether you slaughter it for the Purim feast or for the Passover seder?”

  Do you have any idea what she means?

  F.

  In the meantime one day follows another. The strike is still on. The workers are steel and iron. Meetings take place every day, always in a new place. The manufacturers, I hear, are also steadfast. They won’t give in, but they’ll have to give in. That’s what everyone is saying. There’s nothing the workers won’t achieve. This is America! We’re down to our last resort, and if that doesn’t work, it’s the end! That’s what our people say. What’s the last resort? We’ll assemble all the strikers from all over New York and march through the streets. Thousands and thousands of tailors will march with flags through the entire city. I and my friend Mendl really like that plan. We’ll march at the head of the parade. But try to talk to a woman like Bruche, who says that to her it looks like children playing at soldiers. She says, “Don’t waste your shoe leather.” You should have seen our Pinni’s face and heard what he said about that!

  G.

  We are deeply into the strike. My friend Mendl and I are readying ourselves for the Fourth of July the way Americans do. The Fourth of July is a big holiday in America. They shoot firecrackers in the streets, and sometimes, they say, a person is killed. It’s a great holiday, that Fourth of July. It’s the day the Unites States freed itself from its enemies.

  Mendl and I are already dressed in our holiday clothes when our celebration is spoiled by a setback. On Canal Street someone is killed. Pinni brings us the news. He was on the spot and saw the murder. He says the man deserved to die. He was a “gangster.” My mother asks, “What’s a gangster? A thief?”

  “Worse than a thief!” Pinni says. My mother asks, “A bandit?” Pinni says, “Worse than a bandit.” My mother says, “What can be worse than a bandit?” Pinni explains, “A gangster is worse than a bandit because a bandit is only a bandit, while a gangster is a hired bandit, hired to beat up the strikers. One of them attacked a girl who was striking and was about to hit her. She screamed and people ran to rescue her, and there was a fight.” That was all we could get out of Pinni. He paced up and down with his long legs, sparks flying, in a fit of rage. He tore his hair and spouted words and names:

  “Ai-ai, Columbus! Ai-ai, Washington! Ai-ai, Lincoln!”

  When he finishes, Pinni gets up and flees!

  H .

  In the meantime this is what happens to Mendl and me. My mother swears on her health and on her life that she won’t let us out on the street for all the money in the world—not any of us! Because, she says, if it’s gone so far that people are being killed on the street, it’s the end of the world! She throws us all into such a panic that Teibl bursts into tears like a small child. God knows where her Pinni is now. My mother forgets about us and begins comforting poor Teibl. We have a powerful God and nothing will happen to her Pinni. With God’s help he’ll return safely. And he’ll be a husband to his wife and a father to his children who will, with God’s help, one day be born. Until now Teibl has had no child, but she’s seeing a doctor and hoping she’ll someday have children.

  “May you have many children!” says my mother.

  “Amen, may it be so!” I say, and catch a slap from my brother Elyahu for putting in my two cents where they don’t belong.

  I .

  Praised be God—Pinni returns, and he returns happily and with good news: the gangster who they thought was killed is still alive and will live, although he’ll remain a cripple for life. They beat him up, gouged out an eye, and broke an arm. “Serves him right—let him not be a gangster!”

  But my mother feels sorry for him. “Let him be what he is,” she says. “There’s a God in Heaven, let him settle things with Him. Why does he deserve to have an arm broken and an eye gouged out? Why are his wife and poor children to blame that they should have a crippled father?”

  J .

  The strike lingers on, and we’re without work. My brother Elyahu is beside himself. My mother tries to console him. She says that God, who brought us to America, will surely not forsake us. Our in-law Yoneh and our good friend Fat Pessi and her husband Moishe and all our friends come every day to comfort us with kind words. They say the sky has not yet fallen. Where is it written that we must make a living only as tailors? You can make a living in America without being a tailor. How? Let me tell you how we made a living in America.

  XI

  KASRILEVKA IN NEW YORK

  A .

  Thanks to our Kasrilevka family and friends, we have slowly worked ourselves up and begun to make a living. Kasrilevka has moved to America. After our departure from our old home, a frightful pogrom was followed by a fire. The whole town went up in flames! They tell us there was a rush to leave, an exodus. Who do you think brought us the news? My mother. Wherever there is bad news, my mother is the first to find out. How? From her synagogue, the Kasrilevka shul. There is one in New York.

  B .

  During our first week here, my mother began asking around about a shul where she could pray on Shabbes. In New York, thank God, there is a shul on almost every street. Our neighbor Pessi took us that first Shabbes to a shul where the Jews from our city all pray. It is called the Kasrilevka shul. There we find many old acquaintances from our town. Guess who we saw. If you had eighteen heads, you couldn’t guess. First of all our cantor, our Hersh-Ber the cantor with the long beard, the one for whom I was once a chorister, if you remember, and carried his crippled little daughter Dobtzi around. The child died back home during the pogrom. Now Hersh-Ber and his wife and older children are here in America and making a living. He is a cantor and a mohel and a teacher too. He pinches his students when no one is looking because in America you aren’t allowed to hit a child. He’s doing very well, but he’s changed completely. In truth he’s the same as he once was, but he dresses differently. If he were to wear the same hat at home as he wears here, they’d run after him and make fun. His coat is now shortened and his sidelocks cut, but he hasn’t touched his beard, even though some people bother him about the beard. Here in America they hate a beard more than a pious Jew hates pork. Once a gang of mischievous boys�
�here they call them loafers—got hold of him in the street and wanted to cut off his beard. Luckily Jews passing by rescued him from their hands. From that time on, whenever he goes out on the street, he hides his beard in his overcoat.

  C .

  Berreh the shoemaker is also here. This is the Berreh whose mice my brother Elyahu once tried to drive away. If you recall, Berreh likes to exaggerate, to think up things that aren’t true and never were true. In other words, he’s a liar. Here they call it a bluffer. He works as a shoemaker as he did at home. He tells stories about his work that even if a third of it were true, it would still be good. He says he is the greatest shoemaker in America. His shoes, he says, are known all across the country. He swears that the president himself has ordered a pair of boots from him. My brother Elyahu says that story is as true as the one Berreh the shoemaker once told us about the mice eating his cat.

  D .

  Who else shall I tell you about? Reb Yossi the rich man, who all of us wished we had a third of his wealth, is also in America, but he isn’t rich anymore. What happened? It was the pogrom that did him in. He personally didn’t suffer that much from the pogrom, but thieves cleaned him out, smashed his furniture, ripped apart the bedding, stole merchandise from his shop. But they did not beat him or his family, because they were all hiding in the cellar for three days and nights. They almost died of hunger. And to make matters worse, all his debtors went bankrupt, and he went bankrupt too. Who would have foreseen that a respectable man like Reb Yossi would have to pack up and escape from Kasrilevka?