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

manage to solve them. There are, however, two aspects of Yiddish speech that, because they have no real parallel in English and cannot be satisfactorily approximated in it, deserve to be mentioned.
    The first has to do with formulas for avoiding the evil eye. Superstition and the fear of provoking or attracting the attention of hostile forces, or simply of causing offense, are of course universal; but in Yiddish (perhaps because it was the language of a culture in which aggression, given little external outlet, was always felt to be threateningly close to the surface) this anxiety is so extreme that it dictates the use of a wide variety of appeasing expressions in daily speech. Thus, one should not mention a dead person one has known without adding
olov hasholom
, “may he rest in peace”; one does not boast of or express satisfaction with anything unless one says
kinnehoro
, “no evil eye” (i.e., touch or knock wood); if one mentions a misfortune to someone, one tells him
nisht do gedakht
or
nisht far aykh gedakht
, “it shouldn’t happen here” or “it shouldn’t happen to you”; if one makes a remark critical of somebody, one prefaces it with
zol er mir moykhl zayn
, “may he forgive me”; if the criticism is aimed at Providence, one says
zol mir got nisht shtrofn far di reyd
, “may God not punish me for my words.” Moreover, such expressions cover only the specific case; if a person is talking about a deceased relative, for example, and mentions him ten times, it is good form to say
olov hasholom
after each. The result is that one or several sentences of spoken Yiddish can contain a whole series of such phrases that break the speech up into a sequence of fragments punctuated by anxious qualifications. The translator can and should retain some of these, but being overly faithful to them makes the English tiresome, and I have left quite a few out. Wherever the reader sees one such expression in the English, he can assume there may be more in the Yiddish.
    Secondly, there is the widespread use in Yiddish of Hebrew, not in the form of quotations, as with Tevye, but of idioms that havebecome rooted in popular speech, commonly transplanted there from religious texts and prayers. These occupy an ambivalent position: on the one hand, they are understood and used even by uneducated speakers, yet on the other, their Hebrew etymology continues to be recognized and their sacral origins are not obscured, so that they often produce ironic or comic effects. For example, when the arsonist who narrates “Burned Out” relates his neighbors’ suspicions of him, he does not say that they accuse him of “setting fire” to his house and store, but rather of “making
boyrey me’oyrey ho’eysh.”
Literally these Hebrew words mean “He Who creates the light of fire,” but they belong to a blessing (“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who creates the light of fire”) that is said every week in the
havdalah
, the ritual of ending the Sabbath on Saturday night, part of which involves lighting a candle (an act forbidden on the Sabbath itself) and holding one’s hand up to the flame. What can the translator do with such untranslatabilities, which are not uncommon in Yiddish, and especially not in a comic Yiddish like Sholem Aleichem’s? Shut his eyes and hope to think of something! And in this case I did, because suddenly I remembered a snatch of a comic ditty that I knew as a boy in New York about a Jew who burns down his store for the “inshurinks,” just like the narrator of “Burned Out.” It was sung in a Yiddish accent to the tune of the Zionist anthem
Hatikvah
, and one stanza of it went:
    Vans I hed a kendy store, business it vas bed
,
Along came a friend of mine, vat you tink he said?

“I hear you got a kendy store vat you don’t vant no more;

Take a metch, give a skretch, no more kendy store!”
    And so “to make
borey me’oyrey ho’eysh”
became “to give the match a