The Tevye Stories and Others     by Sholom Aleichem, Translated by Julius & Frances Butwin Original language: Yiddish Country: Ukraine   Published by Pocket Books Pub. Date: 1965 Format: 230 pages Not available for ordering

Sholem Aleichem was the most famous and popular of the Yiddish writers and both the musical Fiddler on the Roof and Barbara Streisand’s film Yentl were based on Aleichem stories. When critics call the tone of Yiddish literature rather sentimental, taking a romantic and idealised view of Shtetl* life and personalities, it is often this writer that they have in mind. Nevertheless, amongst his huge production of work there is plenty of excellent reading and he’s indispensable for an understanding of the turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish world — with the proviso that many Jews did not live in the ’typical’ small rural communities where he usually sets his work.

There are various collections of Aleichem’s short stories and these are a better place to meet him than his often over-ambitious novels such as Marienbad where he takes himself a little too seriously. Overall, the short stories feed us the texture of Shtetl life, its comings and goings, the network of relatives, the poverty and the everyday difficulties. In the popular ’Tevye’ stories — which can be found in most Sholem Aleichem collections — we get to know the ’Little Man’ Tevye the Dairyman who perennially struggles to make a living, marry off his daughters and look after the horse that pulls his dairy wagon around the villages and dachas (country villas) of his corner of Russia. Tevye is an earthy character who loves his grub —’You should taste her noodle pudding. Then you would know what heaven and earth can be.’ — but also has pretensions to be an educated Jew and constantly drops garbled or inappropriate quotations from sacred texts into his speech.

Another of the ’typical characters’, one-dimensional yet telling, that populate Tevye-land is the distant relative, the Luftmensch* who is a great talker, a spieler* who sells Tevye a useless ’investment’ in the cautionary tale The Bubble Bursts. What this story also tells us is that in those times people lived on air (’luft’) and hope as much as herring and blintzes* and borscht*.

Sentimental as he can often be, something Sholem Aleichem was quite unsentimental about was the caste or class division amongst East European Jews — the Shtetl wasn’t all ’one big happy family’, and, in the story Modern Children, the harshness of social distinctions is made quite clear when a mere ’stitcher’ applies to marry one of the dairyman’s daughters; ’"A tailor" gasps Golde. [Tevye’s wife] "Where does a tailor come into our family? In our family we have had teachers, cantors, Shamosim*, undertaker’s assistants, and other kinds of poor people. But a tailor — never!"’. Similarly the story The Enchanted Tailor shows conflicts between poor Jews and the better-off individuals who held the official posts in the Jewish community This is a less-than-rosy view of social relationships in the Shtetl and is well-sprinkled with the pithy and often heavily ironic folk-sayings that Aleichem loved to reproduce, like this one; ’Silver and gold make even pigs clean’. The reaction of many young Jews to the widespread social and ethnic inequality and political stagnation of Czarist Russia is suggested when a suitor for another of Tevye’s daughters — Hodel, in the story of the same name — turns out to be a young revolutionary who ends up getting deported to Siberia.

The story entitled A Wedding without Musicians is about a pogrom* that is miraculously forestalled

There’s plenty more about the tricky ethnic situation of the Jews in Russia — who were subjected to all kinds of legal and economic restrictions — in other stories here such as The Lottery Ticket, the bitter story of an impoverished young Jew who has to renounce his religion to enter university while The Miracle of Hashono Rabo is a leg-pull at the expense of an ignorant Russian Orthodox priest who displays great arrogance towards his Jewish neighbours.

Sholem Aleichem’s stories are unmissable for their populist artistry and their flavour of the Russian Jewish world, so track down a collection of them — don’t be satisfied with the Hollywood version!

’The main thing is that what you bring must be good — the cream must be thick, the butter golden. And where will you find cream and butter that’s better than mine?

So we make a living... May the two of us be blessed by the Lord as often as I am stopped on the road by important people from Yehupetz — even Russians — who beg me to bring them what I can spare. "We have heard, Tevel, that you are an upright man, even if you are a Jewish dog..." Now, how often does a person get a compliment like that? Do our own people ever praise a man? No! All they do is envy him.’ (p141 Tevye Wins a Fortune)