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

was at once the greatest strength and the ultimate pathology of East European Jewish life. Reviled, ghettoized, impoverished, powerless, his Jews have only one weapon: the power of speech. And because it is a weapon that has come down to them honed by the expert use of ages, they wield it with the skill of trained samurai, men, women, and children. (One of Sholem Aleichem’s most wonderful long monologues, the picaresque
Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son
, is narrated by a ten- or eleven-year-old boy.) What can a Jew not accomplish with his tongue? He can outsmart a goy, bury an enemy, crush a wife or husband, conjure up a fortune, turn black into white, turn white into black … and believe it all has happened, so that the very sense of reality becomes distorted and defeat turns into victory, humiliation into triumph, grimy wretchedness into winged flight. Don Quixote would have felt at home in Kasrilevke and Anatevka. He might even have learned a few tricks there.
    Yet can we be so sure that this defiant quixotism, when all is said and done, does not represent a real triumph of sorts? In a discussionof Sholem Aleichem’s story “Dreyfus in Kasrilevke” (in which, being told by a fellow Kasrilevkite, who has just read it in the newspaper, that Dreyfus was found guilty, the town’s Jews refuse to believe it), Professor Ruth Wisse writes:
    Here, too, the oppressed replace the world’s reality with the reality of their argumentative concern. But the Sholem Aleichem story equates the Jews’ far-sightedness with faith.… Dreyfus in Kasrilevke is judged by God’s law; and is God’s truth to be sacrificed for journalism?
    And she quotes the final lines of the story:
    “Paper!” cried Kasrilevke. “Paper! And if you stood here with one foot in heaven and one foot on earth, we still wouldn’t believe you. Such things cannot be! No, this cannot be! It cannot be! It cannot be!”
    Well, and who was right?
    “It cannot be”: such is the true human voice of Sholem Aleichem’s world and the only one he really cared about. For a great writer, he was in some ways oddly limited: he rarely wrote more than cursory descriptions of people, places, and things and was not outstandingly good at them; abstract ideas did not interest him; and even his dialogue reverts quickly to monologue or peters out in misunderstandings and cross-purposes. As a consequence, those of his novels that are not monologic do not rank with the best of his work, and, when their comic thrust fails, they often lapse into sentimentality. (As all cynics are said to be wounded idealists, are not all humorists wounded sentimentalists?) The solo voice was his specialty: he had an uncanny ability to mimic it, to catch its rhythms and intonations, to study it as the mask and revelation of inner self. (Y. D. Berkovits relates how, upon emigrating westward in 1906 and first stopping in Austrian Galicia, whose Yiddish was quite different from that of Russia, Sholem Aleichem imitated the natives so well that soon they could not tell him from a local!) This voice is indomitable. It keeps on talking. It will not be stilled. “It cannot be!” is what it says, and in one way or another it is right.
    Human speech, of which nearly all the fiction in this volume is composed, is both the easiest and the hardest language to translate: the easiest because it is usually syntactically so simple, the hardest because it carries the greatest freight of those localisms and culture-bound words of a community that can never have atrue equivalent in other languages. And this is especially so of Yiddish, that Jewish tongue woven on a base of middle high German and richly embroidered with Hebrew and Slavic, whose syntax is far simpler than German’s but which is culturally more remote from the languages of Christian Europe than any of them are from each other. True, one needn’t exaggerate the difficulties: professional translators are used to insoluble problems, and they generally