Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (5 page)

How, though, can this reality be translated into English? Theoretically, the translator has four choices:

1. He can give Tevye’s quotations in English instead of in Hebrew.

2. He can give them both in English and in Hebrew, the latter transliterated into Latin characters.

3. He can give them only in Hebrew (as in the original Yiddish text).

4. He can omit them entirely.

I have in fact utilized all these approaches. In some places, where a quotation of Tevye’s is neither especially striking nor crucial, and where leaving it out does not adversely affect the tone or the significance of his remarks, I have done so. At a few points in the text I have translated his quotes into English, sometimes retaining the Hebrew as well and sometimes deleting it. In the great majority of cases, however, I have chosen Option 3 and, like the Yiddish text, given only Tevye’s Hebrew, translations of which will be found in the glossary and notes at the back of the book. Though this may be the solution that seems at first glance to be the most inconvenient for the English reader, I preferred it for several reasons.

The first of these is that many of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish readers also failed to understand some or all of Tevye’s quotes. Sholem Aleichem had a mass audience, much of it composed of working men and women with little or no religious education, and if they did not mind being stumped by Tevye’s Hebrew, neither need the English reader today.

Secondly, most of the characters in
Tevye the Dairyman
—in fact, nearly all of them—are simple Jews themselves who complain that they can’t follow Tevye’s quotations, from which they keep begging him to desist. For the English reader to be told what these
mean at the same time that Tevye’s family and acquaintances are baffled by them would create a rather odd effect.

Thirdly, translating Tevye’s Hebrew in the text itself almost always results in the wrong tone, since the biblical and rabbinic passages that he cites have an archaic sound in English, which is not at all the case in the original. On the contrary, even when a Yiddish speaker did not know the meaning of a Hebrew verse, the feeling it suggested to him was generally the warm, homey one of religious rituals and synagogue services that he knew well.

Finally, as far as Jewish readers are concerned, modern Jewish history has ironically reversed the composition of Sholem Aleichem’s public. Once he was read by Jews who knew more Yiddish than Hebrew; today he is mostly read by those who, if they know any Jewish language at all, know more Hebrew than Yiddish. It is my hope that many such readers who cannot read Sholem Aleichem in the original will nevertheless be able to enjoy Tevye’s Hebrew wordplay in this English translation.

For those who cannot, there are two consolations. One is the glossary, which the reader is free to consult not only for the meaning and pronunciation of Tevye’s Hebrew quotes, but also for explanations of historical references and Jewish customs that may elude him. The other is the fact that there is no need to skip over the Hebrew quotations just because one does not understand them. Read them aloud; savor them; try saying them as Tevye did. There is no way to reproduce in print the exact sights, smells, and tastes of Tevye’s world, but a bit of the sound of it is in these pages.

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Though there is only one Tevye, there was also only one Sholem Aleichem, and, as readers of the twenty
Railroad Stories
will notice, as prolifically creative as he was (the first posthumous, incomplete edition of his work ran to twenty-eight volumes!)—indeed, it would seem, as a prerequisite for such productivity—there are in his work certain basic themes and situations that occur again and again. Thus, one is reminded by the story “Eighteen from Pereshchepena” of the comic scene between Tevye and Layzer Wolf in which the two carry on a single conversation that each thinks is about something else; by the narrator’s attitude toward women in “High
School” of Tevye’s antifemale posturing; by Berl Vinegar’s fast-talking of the priest in “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah” of Tevye’s handling of Ivan Paparilo in the pogrom scene of “Lekh-Lekho,” etc. Even Tevye’s rampant quotationism has its parallel in the narrator of “Burned Out”—who, however, is even less of a “scholar” than Tevye and wildly throws Hebrew phrases about without always knowing what they mean. Such recurrent elements served Sholem Aleichem as modular blocks out of which he was able to construct an amazing variety of characters and plots.

Although
The Railroad Stories
, first assembled in book form in 1911, are contemporary with the
Tevye
episodes, their composition was not widely spaced like that of
Tevye
but rather concentrated in two intense bursts of activity, one in 1902 and one in 1909–1910. In the first period were written “High School,” “The Automatic Exemption,” “Burned Out,” “Fated for Misfortune,” and, though it was later slightly revised to form the collection’s closing story, “Third Class.” With the exception of “It Doesn’t Pay to be Good.” which dates from 1903, all the other stories belong to the second period. It was only then, indeed, that Sholem Aleichem decided to write a book of tales all told to or overheard by a traveling salesman on a train, which explains a fundamental difference between the 1902–1903 series and the 1909–1910 one; for in the latter group trains and train rides are generally intrinsic, whereas in the former they are not. The 1902–1903 stories, in other words, were not originally written with railroads in mind, to which they were adapted after the fact by the simple device of adding a brief descriptive opening paragraph placing them on a train. As for the order of the stories in the book, it was determined by Sholem Aleichem himself. While it does not strictly reflect the sequence in which they were written, it does have a chronological basis, the first eleven tales dating from 1909–1910, the next five from 1902–1903, and the next three from 1909–1910 again.

Like
Tevye
, nearly all
The Railroad Stories
are monologues; this was Sholem Aleichem’s favorite form and one he repeatedly returned to. At first glance it may seem that the traveling salesman who records them is a more active party than the Sholem Aleichem who merely listens to Tevye, since he describes what he sees and occasionally participates in the conversation—yet this is but one side of the coin. Though Sholem Aleichem never speaks to Tevye, Tevye is always conscious of speaking to Sholem Aleichem;
his idea of the educated, cultured, sophisticated author he is talking to colors all that he says, and more than once he insists that he would never confide such things to anyone else. The commercial traveler of
The Railroad Stories
, on the other hand, is simply someone to whom his fellow passengers can tell their tale, at times revealing to the book’s readers aspects of themselves that he himself is naively unaware of. (Such as the fact, for example, that the “Man from Buenos Aires” is really a rich pimp engaged in the white slave trade, the shanghaiing of girls to Argentina to work as prostitutes there.) Who he is does not interest them in the least. A Jew meets another Jew on the train and straightaway begins to talk about himself.

Nevertheless, though the notion of trains running through Russia with almost no one in their third-class cars but Jews who tell each other stories may seem like an artificial literary convention, this is actually not the case. The Russia of Sholem Aleichem’s day, especially in the provincial Pale of Settlement, had a relatively small Christian middle and lower-middle class. The great bulk of the population belonged to either the peasantry or the landed aristocracy, and of the two groups, the first rarely traveled, and the second never traveled third class. Jews were often merchants, but mostly petty ones who preferred to travel as cheaply as they could—and the fact that Jews, when traveling, tend even today to talk nonstop to each other is something that can be vouched for by anyone who has ever taken a crowded flight to Israel.

Nor is this the only example in
The Railroad Stories
of the way in which our distance from the times may mislead us into thinking that Sholem Aleichem was deliberately exaggerating for literary or comic purposes. Take, for instance, the seemingly surrealistic plot of “The Automatic Exemption,” in which a father must run endlessly from draft board to draft board because a son who died in infancy still appears in the population registry; “the [Russian] government,” writes the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, “refused [in drafting Jews] to consider the fact that, owing to inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to emigrate abroad”; even the three hundred rubles that a lawyer tells the distraught father he will have to pay as a fine was the exact sum stipulated by Russian law for such cases! Or take the apparently farcical section of the story “High School” in which a
Jew must get a Christian drunk so that he will agree to send his son, at the Jew’s expense, to a commercial school together with the Jew’s son. Here is Dubnow again:

This is not to say that there are not elements of farce in these stories, but they lie far more in the reaction of the characters than in the situation itself. Always a stickler for getting the details right (even the fabulous Brodsky of
Tevye
and “Go Climb a Tree If You Don’t Like It” was a real Jewish sugar magnate of that name who lived in Kiev), Sholem Aleichem became even more so after leaving Russia in 1906, for he was afraid of being thought out of touch with the world he continued to write about. The Soviet Jewish critic Max Erik quotes a revealing letter written by him to an acquaintance in the White Russian town of Homel at the time that he was working on these tales:

Two more examples of such (on our part) unsuspected factuality in these stories are of particular interest.

One concerns a matter of language. In the first of
The Railroad Stories
, “Competitors,” we are presented with a woman train vendor who, when her tongue is unleashed, turns out to be a stupendous curser—and by no means a rote one, but a talented improviser who can match every phrase she utters with an appropriate imprecation. One of a kind, no? No. In a chapter devoted to curses in his
The World of Sholom Aleichem
, Maurice Samuel writes of what he calls the “apposite or apropos” curse in the Yiddish of Eastern Europe: