wishes to maintain some contact with the traditional life he has left behind, even while seeking to throw himself into a more modern existence.

Part of the comedy, which is also tragic, derives from Menachem-Mendl’s inability to fully understand the modern life in which he is trying to participate. Sheineh-Sheindl understands it even less, and there is humor in her misunderstanding his references to coffee shops (she thinks they are the names of women) and her confusion over what her husband is doing. She keeps wanting to know the size and weight of the currency and stocks he is investing in, as if they were solid objects.

Part of Aleichem’s point is that these are not solid objects, but mere air, as Sheineh-Sheindl says at one point, and without anything solid beneath him, Menachem-Mendl perpetually falls. Thus, he eventually loses everything in his currency speculations and has to start again with nothing. He does, however, persist in starting over and over again, trying one business venture after another, moving from currency speculation to being a commodity broker, to discounting, to investing in real estate, forests, sugar mills, and mines, and to trying his luck as a writer, a marriage broker, and an insurance agent. Unfortunately, he has no luck at all, and though he is resolutely upbeat in the earlier letters, by the end he sometimes gives way to despair before deciding he should immigrate to the United States.

Another source of humor is the repeated contradiction between the flowery, conventional way both Menachem-Mendl and Sheineh-Sheindel begin their letters and the actual content that follows. Presumably they have learned the “proper” way to start a letter, which for Sheineh-Sheindl always involves thanking God that everyone is in good health. This is usually followed, however, by her writing that she or the children are ill. She also invariably signs off as Menachem-Mendl’s devoted wife, but this usually comes after a tirade against his foolishness and a demand that he end his speculations, stop ignoring his family, and come back to her. On the surface there is an attempt to maintain the forms of propriety and well-being, but underneath there is trouble and dissatisfaction.

Religion is notably absent from these letters. It is an absence brought to readers’ attention early on, when Menachem-Mendl notes that trading goes on in Odessa until the time when evening prayers are said in Kasrilevke. Menachem-Mendl seems too busy with business to attend to prayers and religion; business, in fact, seems to be his new religion, as well as a way to break free from his traditions. Also notable is the fact that Menachem-Mendl’s lodgings remind him of a jail. He is seeking freedom from the shtetl, but he seems to have found not freedom but a new sort of bondage, which includes perpetually avoiding the police, who might arrest him at any moment for living illegally in a city where Jews are forbidden to reside.

After his currency business fails, Menachem-Mendl moves to a new city, Yehupetz, a fictionalized version of Kiev. Sheineh-Sheindl becomes increasingly impatient, having expected him to return home after his first failure, and she begins to talk of her troubles at home. The author Hillel Halkin has suggested that Sheineh-Sheindl’s inclusion of more news from home may indicate that she subconsciously realizes that the only communication and intimacy possible with her husband will be through these letters. Also, since the news from home is usually negative, involving illness, death, broken engagements, fires, and bankruptcies, the total effect is of failure everywhere: Menachem-Mendl is a failure in the big city, and in the small town nothing goes right.

Tevye the Dairyman

First published: Tevye der Milkhiger, 1894-1914 (English translation, 1949 as Tevye’s Daughters; also known as Tevye the Dairyman)

Type of work: Short stories

After a cheerful Tevye tells how he struck it rich in the dairy business, a sadder Tevye tells the stories of his daughters’ marriages.

Like the collection of Menachem-Mendl’s letters, the stories in Tevye the Dairyman were originally published separately and then collected and published in book form. The stories are all monologues, in which Tevye is supposedly addressing Sholom Aleichem himself, and in them Tevye presents himself as a folksy philosopher, frequently quoting the Bible and other religious texts, although his references are always connected to the concerns of everyday life.

The first Tevye episode is the sunniest, as indicated by its title, “Dos groyse Gevins” (“Tevye Strikes It Rich”; also translated as “The Jackpot”), in which an impoverished Tevye goes into the dairy business by pure happenstance. He offers a ride to two women lost in the forest and as a reward receives money and a cow. This almost magical encounter makes Tevye and his wife, Golde, happy, and when he speaks about it eight or nine years later, Tevye is able to be philosophical about his earlier poverty. It is all up to God, he says; the main thing is to work hard, have confidence, and leave things to God. Throughout the stories, Tevye talks about God in a familiar way; he even seems to be mocking Him at times, as when he says that in his days of poverty his family went hungry three times a day with God’s help.

Still, in this first episode Tevye seems happy in his faith, something that will change in the later episodes, in which Tevye suffers tragedy after tragedy and begins to compare himself to the biblical Job. Like Job, he demands an explanation from God and also seems to lose his faith. However, in the earlier episodes he is still cheerful, even when he loses money through a foolish partnership with Menachem-Mendl. Man plans and God laughs, says Tevye, but not bitterly, more philosophically.

In the next episode Tevye has a chance to marry his eldest daughter, Tsaytl, to the town’s wealthy butcher, Layzer Wolf, but Tsaytl wants to marry the poor tailor, Mottel Kamzoyl. At first Tevye is resistant, not just because Layzer Wolf has more money but also because the parents traditionally decide whom their children should marry. In the end, however, Tevye lets Tsaytl marry the tailor, and the result is more or less happy because she gets to marry the man she loves. The situation does, however, prompt Tevye to complain to God about the lack of justice in the world: Why should others be rich and he not? It also makes him wonder what the world is coming to when children make the decisions.

The next four episodes all concern marriages or proposed marriages that in some way undermine tradition. First there is Hodl, Tevye’s second-oldest daughter, who wants to marry a revolutionary activist. Again, one of the issues is who decides, but there is also the clash between traditional ways and revolutionary ideas. Tevye again goes along, but this time the result is less happy; Hodl’s new husband is arrested and sent to Siberia, and she follows him there.

In a heartbreaking episode, Tevye’s daughter, Chava, falls in love with a non-Jewish boy, whom she wants to marry. This Tevye cannot accept. He has gone a certain distance in accommodating modern ways, but the traditional Jewish insistence on marrying within the Jewish faith is not something he is prepared to violate. When Chava insists upon marrying the Gentile, Tevye disowns her.

In the next episode, his daughter Shprintze falls in love with the son of a rich Jewish family. This pleases Golde, but Tevye is wary. People like money too much, he says, moving away from his earlier desire to be rich. He also thinks the rich family will oppose the match, and he is right. They spirit their son away, and Shprintze drowns herself in despair.

In the last marriage episode, Beilke, out of concern for her father, agrees to marry a rich man she does not love in order for her family to have some money. She marries the rich man, but instead of making Tevye happy, the marriage leaves him feeling that his daughter has sacrificed her own happiness. He now seems even more opposed to the pursuit of money; it just brings unhappiness.

In the final episode, a pogrom breaks out, forcing Tevye and others to flee, and though the pogrom is presented comically, it seems like a grim conclusion to an increasingly dark tale.

The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son

First published: Mottel, Peyse dem Khazns, 1907-1916 (English translation, 1953)

Type of work: Short stories

After the death of his father and the failure of various business ventures, Mottel, his family, and their friend Pinye set out for America.

The Adventures of Mottel, the Cantor’s Son is another collection of Sholom Aleichem’s stories. This time the stories are told by a young child, Mottel, whose father is dying. Despite this imminent death, or perhaps because of it, Mottel seems exuberantly happy. When his father dies and he becomes, according to the terminology of the shtetl, an orphan, he is even happier because it means everyone treats him nicely and he is excused from attending school. The critic Dan Miron suggests that the deeper reason for this happiness is that Mottel wishes to break free of the shtetl’s restrictions, which are represented by his father. However, in the opinion of critics Frances Butwin and Joseph Butwin, Mottel’s happiness is an Oedipal victory for the son over the father, avoiding the father-son conflict found in other stories by Aleichem.

Mottel spends as much time as he can outdoors, playing with a neighbor’s calf or going fishing. He also steals fruit from a garden, which lands him in trouble. He has a nightmarish experience staying with an old man, who first tries to read him a book by the medieval scholar Moses Maimonides and then threatens to eat him, perhaps suggesting that looking back into the past may be dangerous.

Mottel mainly looks forward and wants to have adventures. He is thus quick to join his brother Elye in various business ventures, such as manufacturing soft drinks, producing ink, and working as exterminators. Elye, who has a book suggesting all these projects, is sometimes compared to Menachem-Mendl; like Menachem-Mendl, all Elye’s projects come to nothing. Moreover, as Miron notes, all of Elye’s projects involve poison; it is as if such business ventures are poisonous, at least if they remain connected to the Old World. Only when the family escapes to the New World do their business ventures begin to succeed. America, it seems, is the Promised Land, where everything will finally work out.

The family experiences difficulty in getting to America, including a brush with thieves and murderers at the Russian border. Once out of Russia they encounter further problems, most notably getting medical clearance to enter the United States. Mottel’s mother, who is still attached to the shtetl they left behind, cries continually, and the others warn her that this will hurt her eyes so she will be unable to pass the medical examination. This turns out to be true; as Dan Miron says, this nostalgic attachment to the shtetl, manifested through tears, becomes a disease and an obstacle to emigrating. Thus, the family must find another way to free themselves from the Old World.

Meanwhile, Mottel develops a talent as a caricaturist and is always doodling, prompting his brother to slap him repeatedly, perhaps because drawing likenesses is a violation of Jewish tradition. Mottel is continually trying to break free of tradition and continually slapped down for it, but he remains cheerfully exuberant throughout, eagerly looking forward to the hustle and bustle he expects to find in New York.

Once the family arrives in America, Mottel celebrates it as a place for the underdog, while the family’s friend Pinye praises its freedom and democracy and the opportunity it provides to get ahead economically. Some of the family members are reluctant to seize this opportunity because it involves beginning at the bottom as manual laborers, and they see such work as demeaning to the family of a deceased cantor. Pinye, however, pushes them forward and they get jobs, ignoring the hierarchical rules of the Old World. They also immerse themselves in American culture, from chewing gum to film houses to learning English.

Left unfinished when Aleichem died, the Mottel stories end with the family moving on from factory work to operating a street stand to planning to open their own store. They are also planning to move; moving, indeed, is what Mottel loves about America. Throughout the book he is a force for movement, action, and adventure, and for breaking free of old ways.