Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (4 page)

In short, whether he is simply a natural democrat, or whether, staunchly traditional Jew though he is, he has unknowingly been affected by the liberal winds blowing in Russia, Tevye has fathered the daughters of his deepest dreams. Trunk puts it well when he writes of the man and his children, “Though consciously they have different outlooks on life, unconsciously they
share the same sense of it.” It is only in the novel’s penultimate chapter, the story of Beilke, however, that Tevye achieves a belated insight concerning this fact, for then, seeing Beilke’s unhappiness in her stultifyingly opulent surroundings and recalling the vivacious child who lived with him in semipoverty, he articulates at last what at heart he has always known, namely, that all that really matters in life is human love, warmth, and intelligence, thus realizing the pitifulness of his one great conscious obsession: to have a rich daughter. Fate, he tragically learns, not only mocks a man by withholding his desires, but also—and sometimes most of all—by granting them. And like any tragic hero’s, Tevye’s fate, as Trunk reminds us, is his character.

But what a disproportion between the two! What a character and what a fate! Surely no man, and most surely none as good as Tevye, deserves to see his daughters stricken, as he says, by a curse worse than any in the Bible … and this conviction of injustice, the subject of Tevye’s running debate with God, forms the novel’s third and most profound level of all. Sholem Aleichem, it is true, is not often thought of as a religious writer. Religious observance, though constantly referred to in his work as part of the everyday fabric of Jewish life, does not play an especially important role in it, and genuinely spiritual figures are rare there. Indeed, this was one of the reasons that Y. L. Peretz, his leading rival among the Yiddish writers of the day and the author of much edifying fiction, dismissed Sholem Aleichem as a basically lowbrow figure who never grappled with ultimate Jewish issues. Humor in general, though by no means an illegitimate medium for serious religious expression, is not commonly put to that purpose. Yet having said all this, I would submit that
Tevye the Dairyman
, the comitragic historical account of the death of an ancient culture and psychological analysis of a father’s unhappy love for his daughters, is also one of the most extraordinary Jewish religious texts of our own, and perhaps of any, time.

Tevye is a God-arguer: as such he belongs in a long jewish tradition that starts with Abraham and runs prominently on through Moses, through Job, through the Tannaitic rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi (who refused to accept a heaven-backed interpretation of Scripture even though it was supported by divine miracles), through Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, the saintly Hasidic master who is said to have held a trial at which God was the absentee
defendant, accused of having inflicted undeserved suffering on His people. Other religions may have their folktales about men who debate with and even rebuke God, but only in Jewish tradition, I believe, are such stories taken with high seriousness, the behavior in question being regarded—provided, of course that it comes from a spiritually ripe individual—as the highest form of religious service. Though it is Job’s friends who keep telling him to accept God’s judgment and Job who insists that he will not because that judgment is unjust, God Himself, after finally speaking to Job from the whirlwind, turns to his friends and says, “My wrath is kindled against you … for you have not spoken of Me what was right, as My servant Job has.” And what is right, apparently, is to hold God to the highest standards of a man’s conscience, even if He does not seem to behave by them.

It is worth considering this for a moment, for it presents an oddly paradoxical alternative, and by no means the main one adopted by Judaism either, to what have commonly been the standard responses of advanced cultures to the problem of innocent suffering in the world. Basically there have been three of these:

1. God exists, is good, and is all-powerful; what appears to us His injustice is either a legitimate testing of our character, a just retribution for our sins, or an illusion created by our inability to understand the workings of the Divinity.

2. God exists, is good, but is not all-powerful; beside Him are other, evil forces that contend with and sometimes best Him, thus gaining power over the world.

3. God does not exist and suffering is the result either of blind chance or of immutable laws working themselves out in the lives of men.

The first of these answers has been the one most often given by the major monotheistic religions; the second by Manichaeism, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, and various other dualistic beliefs; the third by modern science and, essentially, by Buddhism.

But there is also, as we have seen, a fourth possible response: God exists; He is good; He is all-powerful; therefore He must be just; but He is not just; therefore He owes man an explanation and man must demand it from Him.

This is Job’s response. And it is also Tevye’s.

Job is not one of the religious texts that Tevye is always quoting from, nor would it be likely to be. On the whole it was not a part of Scripture widely read by East European Jews, both because it was not linked to specific prayers, rituals, or holidays like other books in the Bible, and because its Hebrew is extremely difficult. But Tevye knows its story and, in “Shprintze,” on his way home from his humiliating meeting with Ahronchik’s uncle, when it seems to him that nothing worse can happen (little does he know that he is soon to receive the most terrible blow of all), his identification with it emerges. And yet though his suffering is truly Jobian, as is his reaction to it, how much more lonely and isolated a figure he is than Job! Job has his three friends, who despite their aggravating piety are a comfort merely by their presence, and he has his God, who finally speaks to him in a blazing epiphany that rewards him for all his anguish; Tevye, however, has no one. Alone in his village, without a Jew to speak to, without a synagogue to go to, without a God to be spoken to by, he must carry on the dialogue of Job all by himself, now being Tevye demanding to know what he has been punished for, now being his comforters patiently explaining that whatever God does is for the best, and now being God Himself threatening to blow him, little Tevye, away with a puff of His breath if he does not stop his tiresome complaining. All around him the world is as silent as the forest in which he has his deepest thoughts. There is not a consoling word. Man says nothing. God says nothing. The Messiah is a policeman with an eviction notice. And Tevye, who will not take nothing for an answer, goes on arguing with them all!

Did Sholem Aleichem think of this side of Tevye in more than just comic terms? Of course he did. Listen to what his son-in-law Y. D. Berkovits has to say about him at the time he was writing “Shprintze”:

One more word on the subject.

Not long ago I gave a talk on
Tevye the Dairyman
to a small audience in the town in Israel where I live. A lively discussion ensued, during which one of the participants, a professor of the history of science, exclaimed angrily, “But Tevye is a fool! Instead of realizing once and for all that there is no God, and that his own life is the best proof of it, he goes on wasting his energy on a God who doesn’t exist.” It was a perfectly natural comment and it led to an even more animated exchange, but as that went on, I kept asking myself, where have I heard those words before? And then it came to me: Job’s wife! “And then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God, and die!’ ”

For Job—and for Tevye—to curse God
is
to die, because neither can live in a world without Him. Even if God never answers, even if He never will, Tevye must go on debating with Him, for the minute he stops, his life has lost its meaning. And besides, who is to say when God answers and when He does not? In Job’s case, you say, it was obvious: “And then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” Yes: but had you or I been present in that whirlwind, would we have heard anything but wind? “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. And he also had seven sons and three daughters.” Tevye has exile and the road beneath his feet—and the daughter he loves most, Chava, restored to him from the dead. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And what shall Tevye call that which sometimes giveth again?

Tevye’s habit of peppering his Yiddish speech with endless quotations from sacred Hebrew sources is his most distinctive verbal quirk and, on the whole, the thorniest problem he presents to the translator. It does not, however, make him unique. The tendency liberally to cite Scripture and liturgy was widespread among speakers of Yiddish, as it must always have been among observant Jews everywhere, who, merely in the course of their daily prayers and their weekly and yearly rituals, commit to memory an enormous
number of texts. It was and is not unusual, for example, for a simple, uneducated Jew to know by heart the three daily Hebrew prayers, which even recited at breakneck speed would take a good half hour to get through, plus various other devotions, blessings, and bits of the Bible. In the work of Sholem Aleichem, too, Tevye is by no means the only chronic quoter, even if he is an extreme case for whom chapter and verse, depending on the situation and the person he is talking to, can serve any conceivable purpose: to impress, to inform, to amuse, to intimidate, to comfort, to scold, to ridicule, to show off, to avoid, to put down, to stake a claim of equality or create a mood of intimacy, and so on. He has, as his daughter Chava says, a quote for everything, and sometimes one quote for several things, for his stock is ultimately limited and he has to make the most of it.

In traditional Jewish terms, that is, Tevye is not nearly so erudite as the uninformed reader, or some of his own unversed acquaintances, may think. (Of course, such things are relative; there are not a few American Jewish congregations today in which he would have to be considered a highly learned Jew, second only—and not even always that—to the rabbi.) An analysis of his quotations shows that nearly all of them come from four basic sources, each read and heard year in and year out by the average Orthodox Jew: the daily and holiday prayer book; the Bible (especially the Pentateuch, portions of which are read every Sabbath; the Book of Esther, which is chanted on Purim; and Psalms, which observant Jews often recite as a paternoster when troubled or in their spare time); the Passover Haggadah; and
Pirkey Avot
or “The Ethics of the Fathers,” a short Mishnaic tractate of rabbinic sayings that is printed in the Sabbath section of the prayer book. Of the rest of the Mishnah and of the Talmud, to say nothing of the many commentaries upon them—the real bread and butter, as it were, of a higher Jewish education—he appears to know next to nothing. Indeed, when he wishes to quote a line of Talmud to Layzer Wolf, he has to make it up out of whole cloth.

Yet if Tevye is no scholar, neither is he the Yiddish Mr. Malaprop that others, overly aware of these limitations, have taken him to be. To be sure, he does occasionally clown, deliberately inventing, confusing, or misattributing a quote in order to mock an ignoramus who will never know the difference, thus scoring a little private triumph of which he himself is the sole witness. On
the whole, however—and certainly when directly addressing Sholem Aleichem, who is his superior in Jewish knowledge and whose approval he desires—his quotations are accurate, apropos, and show an understanding of the meaning of the Hebrew words, if not always of their exact grammar. Sometimes they are even witty, taking an ancient verse or phrase and deliberately wrenching it out of context to fit the situation he is talking about, as when, at the beginning of “Hodl,” in discussing how hard it is for a Jewish youngster to be accepted by a Russian school, Tevye says,
“Al tishlakh yodkho:
^*
they guard their schools from us like a bowl of cream from a cat.” The words
al tishlakh yodkho
mean “lay not thine hand” and are found in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Chapter 22 of Genesis, in which, at the last second, just as Abraham is about to slaughter his son, an intervening angel cries out, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him; for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me.” Tevye knows perfectly well where the phrase he is quoting comes from (the highly dramatic chapter is not only read once a year on the Sabbath like the rest of the Pentateuch, it is chanted a second time as a special selection for Rosh Hashanah)—but this does not keep him from putting it in the mouths of Czarist officials telling Jewish applicants to keep their hands off Russian schools!

Here too, it must be stressed, there is nothing particularly original about his method: Jews have been “deconstructing” biblical texts in this way practically since the Bible was written, and the vast corpus of rabbinical exegesis known as the midrash is based precisely on the enterprise of pouring new wine into old Scriptural bottles. Though these reinterpretations are not generally humorous, there is definitely a creative playfulness in the activity of midrash
per se
, which was, one might say, the ancient rabbis’ chief form of recreation—and to this day, if one has the good luck to be among a group of knowledgeable Jews who are in a “midrashic” mood, one can witness this fascinating interplay of encyclopedic recall and wit in which biblical and rabbinic texts are caromed around and off each other as though they were billiard
balls. Tevye is not quite in this league, but it is one he aspires to, for a religiously educated Jew in the traditional culture of Eastern Europe belonged to a universally recognized aristocracy of the spirit, regardless of his economic status. The riches Tevye dreams of are a mirage; yet the opportunity to rise above his station by a vigorous display of a body of knowledge that, while not large, he is in total command of, is a subjective and objective reality that he exploits to the utmost, and sometimes a bit beyond.