Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem Read Free Book Online

combination of (for then) daring erotica, world-weary cynicism, and obsession with death, led to a wave of youthful suicides in Russia, comparable to that caused in Europe by
TheSorrows of Young Werther
over a century before. The times were ripe for it; they were what Tevye’s youngest daughter calls the disillusioned “Age of Beilke” as opposed to the idealistic “Age of Hodl”; and Etke, the daughter of the narrator, was patterned on cases of actual youngsters swept up in an adolescent death cult.
    Apart from the fact that they are all monologues,
The Railroad Stories
do not fit into any one mold. Some, like “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah” and
“Tallis Koton,”
are sheer hijinks; others, like “High School,” have an aspect of social satire; still others, like “The Man from Buenos Aires,” “A Game of Sixty-Six,” “It Doesn’t Pay to Be Good,” and “Fated for Misfortune,” belong to that ironic genre of gradual exposure wherein the reader comes to realize that the speaker is not the kind of man he is pretending to be. “The Automatic Exemption,” “Burned Out,” and “Go Climb a Tree If You Don’t Like It” are comic studies in hysteria and mania; “The Happiest Man in All Kodny” is a piece of pure pathos with few comic lines in it; and yet another story, “The Tenth Man,” is a single brilliant joke whose punch line is withheld till the last moment. Indeed, there are perhaps only two things that all these narrators have in common: each has his distinctive verbal tic or tics, one or more favorite expressions that keep recurring as a kind of nervous identification tag, and each has an obsessive, an uncontrollable, an insatiable, an almost maniacal need to talk.
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    This obsessive garrulousness is common in Sholem Aleichem and is in effect a precondition of the monologue, which can hardly be based on taciturn types. The speakers of his stories talk when they have something specific to say and they talk when they do not; in his famous monologue “The Pot,” for example, a woman, whose nagging voice is all we ever hear, comes to see a rabbi about some minor matter of Jewish law, chatters on and on about one unrelated subject after another without ever coming to the point, and stops only when the rabbi, still not having gotten a word in edgewise, finally faints from exhaustion.… There is something of this pot woman in many of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, who seem to be saying, “I talk, therefore I exist.” Nothing frightens them so much as silence—most of all, their own.
    Jews have perhaps always been a highly verbal people, certainly since the time when their religion became centered on a growing number of sacred texts and the constant exposition and reexposition of them; the vast “sea of the Talmud” itself, as it is called in Hebrew, is but the edited record of endless oral discussions and debates among the early rabbis, and for centuries, down to the yeshivas and synagogues of Sholem Aleichem’s Eastern Europe, the most common method of studying the Law was to talk about it aloud in groups of twos and threes and fours. Here the spoken word is still a functional tool of analysis and communication. In Sholem Aleichem’s world, however, it has become something else—or rather, many things: a club, a cloud, a twitch, a labyrinth, a smokescreen, a magic wand, a madly waved paper fan, a perpetual motion machine, a breastwork against chaos, the very voice of chaos itself.… His characters chute on torrents of words and seek to drag others into the current with them. And succeed. When the storyteller in “Baranovitch Station” breaks off his unfinished tale because it is time for him to change trains, his fellow passengers cannot believe that a Jew like themselves would rather stop talking in the middle of a sentence than miss his connection.
    No one understood better than Sholem Aleichem that this astonishing verbosity, this virtuoso command of and abuse of language,