The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

by Sholem Aleichem

  Beginning with the writing of its first chapters, Sholem Aleichem intended Motl, the Cantor’s Son to be a saga of Russian-Jewish emigration to America in which Motl’s story would be continued through adolescence and into adulthood. His initial plan was for his hero to be a successful musician taking after his father, and the opening of Part I abounds in references to Motl’s musical talents. On his return trip from New York to Europe in 1907, however, Sholem Aleichem met aboard ship a young man, the son of Jewish immigrants to America, who was traveling to Europe to study art, and, much taken by him, converted Motl into a budding artist—a motif introduced for the first time in Chapter 17 of Part I, in which Motl tells us, “I’ve liked to draw since I was little.” As Dan Miron perceptively points out, the reason for this change was probably the author’s realization that, on a symbolic level, the character of Motl worked better if he did not follow in his father’s footsteps but rather struck out on his own in a creative field that, unlike music, was not traditionally Jewish.18

  It is entertaining to speculate what would have become of Motl had his creator lived to keep writing about him. A well-known painter? A syndicated cartoonist? Perhaps even an animated filmmaker in Hollywood? Any of these would have been in keeping with Sholem Aleichem’s expansive sense of the prospects America held for its Jews, the historical acumen of which seems even greater in light of his own failure to do well there. (Motl itself was discontinued in 1908 because the editor of Der Amerikaner thought it boring!)

  As for Pinye, who knows? “Prehzident,” which in his ignorance of constitutional law he believes himself eligible for, he will never be, nor as rich as his triumvirate of heroes, “Kahnegi,” “Rahknfelleh,” and “Vendehbilt.” But why not (if not a writer of lyrics for songs and Broadway musicals) president of his own large ad agency? He is still young, in his late teens or early twenties (Kasrilevke marriages take place at an early age—Elye’s when he has barely begun to grow a beard), and with his drive and a few years of night school, there is no reason why Pinye cannot go far.

  Elye should do well as a small-time businessman. Despite his comic entrepreneurial adventures in Kasrilevke, he is too hesitant and brooding to take larger risks and has Brokheh at his side to see that he doesn’t. A nice “foinitsheh” store—after all, he already knows the business—seems a good bet, unless he ends up going into his father-in-law’s knish business.

  Elye and even Pinye will always remain immigrants; they are too old to learn to speak English without an accent and this alone will mark them as first-generation Americans. Not Motl, however, who in a year or two will be indistinguishable from native-born New Yorkers his age. Already he is shooting marbles in the street; before long it will be stickball, handball, and off-the-stoop. He will become a Yankee, Dodger, or Giant fan; will finish P.S. 75 or 147 and go to Seward or Stuyvesant High; will spend long summer days at Coney Island. If he was nine in 1907, he may be sent to fight in World War I. He will be a young man during Prohibition; he will still be young when the Depression comes along. Too old to serve in World War II, he will be in his mid-fifties when he hears his first rock ’n’ roll and in his mid-sixties when John F. Kennedy is shot.

  It is a bit of a shock to think of him this way. It is a shock to realize that his memories of Kasrilevke will become few and fuzzy; that although he will not forget his Yiddish, he will rarely or never speak it once his mother dies. In fact, had Sholem Aleichem lived to continue Motl’s story, he would have been confronted by a dilemma, because Motl will soon stop thinking in Yiddish. Would it have been feasible, from a literary point of view, to have him continue narrating in it? What psychological sense would this have made?

  The rapid encroachment of English on Yiddish is a central theme in Part II of Motl. Put to comic effect there, it is nevertheless a reliable gauge of the speed with which Americanization is taking place. By contrast, one of the salient things about the book’s second half is how small a role Jewish tradition plays in it. Even in Part I, tradition fades increasingly into the background after Peysi the cantor’s death; although Motl grudgingly goes to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer, it is not clear how long he keeps this up, and once the family is on the road, the only religious rituals we hear of are a single accidental prayer quorum in London and the Yom Kippur service aboard the Prince Albert. Yet in America there is not even that much. Though Elye, it would seem, still observes the basics of Judaism and says his morning prayers before going to work, only his mother attends synagogue services, and the cuffs Elye gives Motl for smoking on the Sabbath—an act strictly prohibited by Jewish law—are less noteworthy than Motl’s reaction to them. “It seems that if Peysi the cantor’s son is caught smawkink on the Sabbath, you’re allowed to beat him to death,” Motl declares, not with defiance or guilt (that we last see aboard the Prince Albert, when he hopes God doesn’t know he is dreaming of food on Yom Kippur), but with the precocious amusement of one who no longer understands how such things could matter to anyone. If Motl—who once told us in Kasrilevke, in one of his few expressions of visceral Jewishness, of his hatred for pigs—has not already eaten his first New York ham sandwich, can we doubt that this is only a matter of time?

  Will he one day marry out of his people—something that, to his family and even to himself, is still unimaginable in 1907? Perhaps not, since the years when he is most likely to marry will be ones of low intermarriage rates for American Jews. If he does raise Jewish children, however, this will be strictly sociologically determined. Internally, there is nothing we can detect in him—no inelasticity of self, no allegiance to his father’s memory—to keep him within the Jewish fold.

  This is why Motl, the Cantor’s Son is not so cloudlessly sunny a work after all—or rather, why its sunshine is that of the summer that ends three times in the book: with the departure from Kasrilevke, with the embarkation from London, and with the final breaking off of the narrative. Though his two stays in New York barely added up to two years, Sholem Aleichem was quick to intuit the full enormity of the transformation that Jews in America were about to undergo. He was not oblivious to the sweatshops, the tenements, or the eastern European atmosphere of neighborhoods like the Jewish Lower East Side; these things are featured in Motl, too. But more than most Jewish writers and intellectuals of his time, with their view of America’s immigrant Jewish community as either another chapter in the repetitive cycle of Jewish history or part of a worldwide struggle against an oppressive capitalist order, he understood that America was something radically new: a truly gebentsht land for its Jews, who in return for its blessings would gladly relinquish the rich ethnic particularity that all his writing was about.

  Motl is the happy ending of the eastern European Jewish tragedy, the rise after which there is no longer any fall. But he is also the end of Sholem Aleichem’s world, his face lifted to the kiss that will kill it benignly at the same time that it is being murdered brutally in Europe. Even had Sholem Aleichem kept writing about him, Motl would have outstripped his creator, venturing into realms that Sholem Aleichem did not know and could not have followed him in without holding him back. Sholem Aleichem died before he could lose him, just as Peysi the cantor did.

  NOTES

  1. See, for instance, Dan Miron, “Bouncing Back: Destruction and Recovery in Sholem-Aleykhem’s ‘Motl Peyse dem khazns,’” Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science 17 (1978), p. 180.

  2. Marie Waife-Goldberg, My Father, Sholom Aleichem (London, 1968), p. 31.

  3. From the Fair: The Autobiography of Sholem Aleichem, translated by Curt Leviant (New York, 1985), chapter 45.

  4. Menakhem-Mendl, “Tsu der tsveyter oyflage,” volume 10 of the Folksfond Edition (New York, 1917–1925), pp. i–ii.

  5. Max Erik, “Menakhem-Mendl: A Marxist Critique,” translated by David G. Roskies, Prooftexts 6 (1986), pp. 24–25.

  6. This story, titled Bekhipozn (“In Haste”), was republished in Part I of Sholem Aleichem’s collection of short stories Lekoved yontef, volume 22 of the Folksfond E
dition, pp. 17–31.

  7. The plays in which Menakhem-Mendl appears are Yoknehaz (1894) and Agentn (1905), in Komedyes, volume 24 of the Folksfond Edition, pp. 29–133 and 197–218. Chapter 2 of Tevye was first published in 1899. The first two of the letters from America were published in the August 1903 Di tsukunft under the title “Tsvey letste briv fun Menakhem-Mendl” (“Two Recent Letters from Menakhem-Mendl”). The third, cited by me here, appeared in the October 1903 Der fraynd as “Adieu: Der letster briv fun Menakhem-Mendl” (“Adieu: The Latest Letter from Menakhem-Mendl”).

  8. “It’s No Go” was first published in Der Yid as “Es fidlt nisht: briv fun Menakhem-Mendlen tsu Sholem-Aleikhemen”; “A Respectable Profession” in Der Yid as “A bekovedike parnose: briv fun Menakhem-Mendlen tsu Sholem Aleikhemen”; and “Always a Loser” in Der Yid as “Shlim-Shlimazl: briv fun Menakhem-Mendlen tsu Sholem-Aleikhemen.”

  9. The complete text of these letters can be found in Menakhem-Mendl (New York–Varshe–Vin–Yehupets) (Tel Aviv, Bet Shalom Aleikhem–Y. L. Pe retz Faerlag, 1976).

  10. Y. Y. Trunk, Tevye un Menakhem-Mendl in yidishn velt-goyrl (New York, 1944), p. 284. Moyshe Mezhritsky, “Menakhem-Mendl fun Sholem- Aleykhem,” Di royte velt, May–June 1926, p. 141.

  11. Avraham Novershtern, “Menahem-Mendl le-Shalom Aleikhem: beyn toldotha-tekstle-mivnehha-yetsirah,”Tarbiz 54 (1985), pp. 105–146.

  12. “Adieu: Der letster briv fun Menakhem-Mendlen,”Menakhem-Mendl (New York–Varshe–Vin–Yehupetz), pp. 31–32.

  13. The reason for the omission of these two chapters in the 1911 edition of Motl, issued by the Progres publishing house of Warsaw as the fifth volume of Sholem Aleichem’s collected works, was the publisher’s wish to promote Motl as a children’s book, or at least as a book readable by children. Both “I Land a Swell Job,” with its old Jew who threatens—comically from an adult’s point of view but frighteningly from a child’s—to eat Motl alive, and “With the Emigrants,” with its brief but disturbing description of a pogrom, were deemed unsuitable for this purpose. In this Progres was following the precedent of Chaim Nachman Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky’s 1910 translation of Motl into Hebrew, published as part of a children’s book series issued by Moriah in Odessa. Although Sholem Aleichem himself did not think of Motl as a children’s book, he seems to have accepted the commercial logic behind the decision. See the discussions of this in Khone Shmeruk, “Sippurei Motl ben he-hazan le-Shalom Aleikhem: ha-situatsiya ha-epit ve-toldotav shel ha-sefer,” Siman Kri’ah 12/13 (1981), pp. 310–326, and in Shmeruk’s afterword to his variorum edition of Motl, Peysi dem Khazns (Jerusalem, 1997), pp. 320 – 322. The Yiddish text on which the present translation is based is that of Shmeruk’s 1997 edition. “I Land a Swell Job” and “Emigrants” appear there in an appendix to Part I. In the appendix to Part II there is also a chapter called Di vasrshtub, “The House on Water.” This chapter appeared in June 1914 in the periodical Di yidishe velt and represented Sholem Aleichem’s first attempt to resume the adventures of Motl and his family that had been broken off in 1907. It was an isolated effort, however, and when, in 1916, Sholem Aleichem once again took up the task of bringing Motl and his family to America, he recycled most of “The House on Water” in the two chapters “Congratulations! We’re in America” and “Crossing the Red Sea.”

  14. These paragraphs appear in Shmeruk’s variorum edition, pp. 299–300, but have been omitted from the present translation. Although it is noteworthy that Sholem Aleichem planned to have Motl’s family move to a new apartment, apparently as another indication of its economic progress, only the first two of the extant paragraphs of Mir moofn touch on this subject. In the first of these Motl tells us: “The Americans have a custom—they moof. That means you pack and go from one place to another. From one strit to another. From one biznis to another. Everyone has to moof. If you don’t want to, someone makes you.”

  15. See Shmeruk, “Sippurei Motl ben he-hazan le-Shalom Aleikhem,” p. 315n. 24. Berkovits was extremely close to Sholem Aleichem and consulted him often when translating his work, so that it is quite possible that the subject of Motl’s age came up between them. In any case, I have accepted his emendation in my translation. It makes good sense, since a five-year-old Motl is not credible. For a brief discussion of how many daughters Tevye has, see the introduction to my translation of Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (New York, 1987), pp. xviii–xix.

  16. Dan Miron, for instance (“Bouncing Back,” pp. 130–133), calls the time frame in Motl “non-realistic” and “non-linear” and claims the book takes place during an “endless summer.” But although Miron is right that the book’s chronology is sometimes slapdash (as when, even though it supposedly takes place in 1907–1908, it refers to Woodrow Wilson as America’s president), this does not mean that no chronology was intended. On the other hand, a critic like Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi (Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, University of California Press, 2000, p. 123), does think that the passage of time in Motl is calculable—and that it adds up to nine years. How such a figure is arrived at is not clear, but its absurdity is only made possible by the accompanying assumption (one held by a number of Motl’s critics) that Motl “doesn’t grow” psychologically in the course of the book and has no psychological age at all, so that, if he is five years old when the story begins and fourteen when it ends, this can be accepted as a literary given. But Motl does grow, his changing attitude toward religion being only one of several significant examples, and this growth is consistent with a boy who goes from being a little under nine to a little over eleven in the course of the book.

  17. Shmeruk, “Sippurei Motl ben he-hazan,” p. 324. Shmeruk credits the Yiddish critic M. Viner with being the first to broach this theory.

  18. Miron, “Bouncing Back,” p. 170.

  The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl

  Londons: The Odessa Exchange

  FROM MENAKHEM-MENDL IN ODESSA TO HIS WIFE SHEYNE-SHEYNDL IN KASRILEVKE

  To my wise, esteemed, & virtuous wife Sheyne-Sheyndl, may you have a long life!

  Firstly, rest assured that I am, praise God, in the best of health. God grant that we hear from each other only good and pleasing news, amen!

  Secondly, words fail me in describing the grandeur and beauty of the city of Odessa, the fine character of its inhabitants, and the wonderful opportunities that exist here. Just imagine: I take my walking stick and venture out on Greek Street, as the place where Jews do business is called, and there are twenty thousand different things to deal in. If I want wheat, there’s wheat. If I feel like wool, there’s wool. If I’m in the mood for bran, there’s bran. Flour, salt, feathers, raisins, jute, herring—name it and you have it in Odessa. I sounded out several possibilities, none of which were my cup of tea, and shopped along Greek Street until I hit on just the right thing. In a word, I’m dealing in Londons and not doing badly! You can clear 25 or 50 rubles at a go, and sometimes, with a bit of luck, 100. On Londons you can make your fortune in a day. There was a fellow not long ago, a synagogue sexton, mind you, who walked away with 30,000 faster than you can say your bedtime prayers and now he cocks his snoot at the world. I tell you, my dearest, the streets of Odessa are paved with gold! I don’t regret for a moment having come here. But what am I doing in Odessa, you ask, when I was on my way to Kishinev? It seems God wanted to deal me in. Listen to what He does for a man.

  I arrived at Uncle Menashe’s in Kishinev and asked for the dowry money. “How come you need it?” he asks. “I need it,” I say, “because I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” Well, he says, he can’t give me cash but he can give me a letter of credit to Brodsky in Yehupetz. “Let it be Yehupetz,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” That’s just it, he says. He’s not sure there is cash in Yehupetz. He can give me a letter of credit to Bachrach in Warsaw. “Warsaw’s fine, too,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” “But why go all the way to Warsaw?” he asks. “Suppose I give you a letter of credit t
o Barabash in Odessa?” “Make it Odessa,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” “So how come you need so much cash?” he asks. “If I didn’t,” I say, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  To make a long story short, he went round and round—it helped like cupping helps a corpse. When I say cash, I mean cash. In the end he gave me two promissory notes for 500 rubles, due in five months, a letter of credit to Barabash for 300, and the rest in banknotes to help cover my expenses.

  Because I’m in a hurry, I’ll be brief. God willing, I’ll write more in my next letter. Be well and give my fond greetings to your parents and the children, each and every one of them.

  Your husband,

  Menakhem-Mendl.

  P.S. When I brought the letter of credit to Barabash, I was told it was nothing of the sort. What was it? A letter to the tooth-fairy! First, I was told, let Uncle Menashe’s wagon of wheat arrive in Odessa and find a buyer—then I can see my money. Short, sweet, and to the point! Right away I sent a post card to Kishinev threatening to take action and send a telegram if the wheat wasn’t shipped at once. In short, a post card here, a telegram there—I didn’t have an easy time of it. But yesterday I received another 100 rubles from Kishinev and a promissory note for 200. Do you understand now why I’ve been out of touch? I had written off the 300 for lost. It just goes to show that a man should never give up! There’s a God in heaven looking after things. I’ve put all the cash into Londons, a nice batch of them. Sometimes they’re up and sometimes they’re down, but so far, thank God, I’m ahead.