Tevye the Dairyman by Sholom Aleichem

First published:Tevye der Milkhiger, 1894-1914 (English translation, 1949, 1987)

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work:

Tevye the Dairyman is a collection of eight stories published by the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem between 1894 and 1914. The first Tevye story appeared in the Warsaw yearbook Der Hoyzfraynt. A fragment titled “Vekhalaklakoys,” written in 1914 and published shortly before the author’s death in 1916, deals with Tevye but is generally not included in the list of the Tevye stories. The collection Tevye’s Daughters was published in 1949; it contains the eight Tevye stories. Tevye the Dairyman and Railroad Stories was published in 1987. Tevye the Dairyman is considered by some to be a loose, episodic novel about the changes that were overwhelming Eastern European Jewish life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tevye recounts his gradual loss of control over his family, his continued questioning of God’s motives, and the appropriation of his community and livelihood by forces beyond his control. The stories are the basis for the popular stage musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964; the title comes not from Sholom Aleichem but from a Marc Chagall painting). While many are familiar with Tevye through the theatrical version, Tevye the Dairyman is of greater depth.

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The stories are purportedly verbatim reportage of personal anecdotes and reflections that Tevye shares with the author in occasional meetings through the years. The tone is conversational and familiar, and Tevye often refers to the place, time, and circumstances of meeting. In an ironic twist, Tevye often pleads with Sholom Aleichem that the intimate details of his life not be published to the world.

The first story, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” is a genial tale in which a good deed reaps the humble dairyman wealth beyond imagination. Returning to his village of Kasrilevke from a round of deliveries to Boiberik, where the rich Jews from Yehupetz summer in their dachas, Tevye meets two wealthy Jewish women who engage him to drive them home. Once arrived, the women and their families thank Tevye with a generous tip and a cartload of food. He rushes home to his wife Golde and they ponder how to enjoy their newfound riches.

The story introduces many of the elements that mark the entire collection. Tevye’s mode of expression is painstakingly circuitous; he constantly digresses to philosophize or to quote, and in many cases misquote, Jewish scripture and wisdom. He is a master of oxymoron and paradox, as when he says, “He’s only human too, don’t you think, or why else would God have made him a horse?” He is also adept at hyperbole, as in “The shadows of the trees were as long as the exile of the Jews.” Tevye is defined by his spiraling thought process and wry speech.

At each turn, whether dealing with the women or his horse or his wife, Tevye is endearingly skeptical and ornery. His contempt for the upper classes is evident, yet he fawns when there is money to be made; his is an odd mix of acceptance and opportunism. His thoughts never stray long from metaphysics, for Tevye is a traditional Jew, constantly searching for God’s wisdom in the slightest twist of fortune. He is often more apt to curse than to thank his creator, but Tevye’s faith is firm. He knows that there is divine wisdom he cannot understand, and that the best he can do with his miserable lot is to accept it with a modicum of good cheer.

In the second story, “The Bubble Bursts,” Tevye loses the small fortune he gained by foolishly trusting it to the speculating care of his cousin Menachem Mendl. Menachem takes a hundred rubles, promising to turn it into thousands, and then disappears. After being admonished by his wife, “Tevye . . . don’t just stand there doing nothing. Think!” Tevye sets off to Yehupetz in search of Menachem. When Tevye finally finds him, after some small adventures, he learns that his cousin lost all the money. In the end, Tevye interprets his bad luck as a confirmation from God of his place in the great scheme of things.

The first two stories trace equal motions, one forward and one backward. In the next stories, the emotional heart of Tevye the Dairyman comes into focus. Tevye has seven daughters. (In some of the stories, the number is unclear. Scholars speculate that Sholom Aleichem originally intended a story about each daughter, but ultimately wrote about only five.) As a poor father of daughters, a primary concern is how Tevye will marry them into happiness and reasonable prosperity. In his culture, matches are made by matchmakers and negotiated by fathers. Tevye comes to learn that such traditions are precarious at best.

In “Modern Children,” the third story, Tevye arranges a lucrative match for his oldest daughter Tsaytl with the wealthy widower butcher Layzer Wolf. Tsaytl, however, is heartbroken at the prospect, and Tevye relents, and later invents a prophetic nightmare to sway his wife Golde away from the match. Then Motl the poor tailor informs Tevye that he and Tsaytl are in love and plan to marry. While Tevye cannot conceive of a young couple making such a decision on their own, without deferring to matchmakers or parents, he ultimately gives his blessing.

This story begins the account of the unraveling of tradition and of paternalism. Tevye cannot stand firm against his daughters’ tears. As he is buffeted with the persistence and emotions of those around him, he debates in his mind the wisdom of the old ways and the brazenness of the new. In his humorously doubtful and self-effacing way, he searches for God’s will in each moment. Tevye sees the story end well, with Tsaytl married happily to a good, although not wealthy, man.

Hodl is Tevye’s second daughter, and she lends her name to the fourth story, in which the stakes are raised. Not only does Hodl choose her mate, a visiting student named Pertchik, but also she goes off with him to Siberia, where he is exiled for his revolutionary activities.

For the first time in Tevye the Dairyman, the tone in “Hodl” becomes pained. Tevye always protected his wife and daughters from unpleasant truths; now, as Hodl leaves, she has secrets, confidential information, that she cannot share with him. At the train station, Tevye bids Hodl farewell and she acknowledges that they may never meet again. Having maintained a stoic front, Tevye cannot endure the heartbreak any longer.

That did it! I couldn’t keep it in a second longer. You see, just then I thought of my Hodl when I held her as a baby in my arms . . . she was just a tiny thing then . . . and I held her in these arms . . . please forgive me . . . if . . . if I . . . just like a woman . . . but I want you to know what a Hodl I have! You should see the letters that she writes me . . . she’s God’s own Hodl, Hodl is . . . and she’s with me right here all the time . . . deep, deep down . . . there’s just no way to put it into words. . . .
You know what, Pani Sholom Aleichem? Let’s talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?

From this point on, humor and pain go hand in hand. Sholom Aleichem’s humor is a way of understanding the developing crisis of Eastern European Jewry. He neither belabors nor belittles that crisis; rather, he attempts to convey faithfully both the farce and the tragedy that he witnesses.

In the fifth and sixth stories, “Chava” and “Shprintze,” Tevye loses his next two daughters in even more devastating ways. When Chava chooses to marry a non-Jew, Tevye comes up against a wall that he cannot surmount. He declares her dead to him and refuses any further contact. He even flees in panic when he comes upon her alone in the forest. This time, when he beseeches Sholom Aleichem, “you’re not to breathe a word about this, or put any of it in your books!” Tevye is articulating the unspoken fears of a threatened people.

Then Tevye’s fourth daughter, Shprintze, falls in love with the son of a rich Jewish widow. At last, Tevye believes, one of his daughters is making a brilliant match, but soon Tevye is accused of scheming to entrap the young man. The wedding is canceled, Shprintze is heartbroken, and one day Tevye arrives home to find her drowned in the river. Here, the prose becomes taut and subtle; much of the pain of Shprintze’s suicide is conveyed indirectly.

In the last two stories, the unraveling of Tevye’s world is complete. In “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel,” his wife Golde has died, and his fifth daughter Beilke marries a wealthy Jew named Podhotzur. Tevye finally has a well-married daughter, but she abandons him, supporting her husband’s desire to exile the aging dairyman to Israel. Beilke will not question her husband’s lust for reputation, a reputation that has no room for impoverished in-laws. Always looking at the bright side, Tevye accepts his exile and is eager to return to the ancestral homeland in Palestine.

He never goes, however, because Motl the tailor dies and Tevye must look after his eldest daughter Tsaytl, and her children. In “Get Thee Out,” Tevye likens himself to Abraham in the Bible, being ordered by God to leave his home. Podhotzur loses his fortune, and he and Beilke leave for America, and now Tevye, Tsaytl, and her children are being driven from Kasrilevke. As they prepare to leave, Tsaytl reminds Tevye of the child that he so long ago banished, and he turns around to face his third daughter, Chava, whom he pronounced dead for marrying a non-Jew. He admits, “you know as well as I do that no matter what a child may have done, when it stands there looking right through you and says ’Papa’. . . .” Tevye ultimately leaves it to Sholom Aleichem and to the reader to intuit whether he embraces her in his arms or issues the biblical order “lekh-lekho,” or “get thee out.”

The reunion is the emotional conclusion of the collection, a catharsis amid social dissolution. The irony continues: Local Russians, under pressure to conduct a pogrom on their Jewish population, give their well-loved Tevye the option of breaking his own windows. The humor is fitting for a man ennobled by his humility and firm in the conviction that all the blessings and ills that visit him are the expression of God’s wisdom and will.

Bibliography

Frieden, Ken. “Tevye the Dairyman and His Daughters’ Rebellion.” In Classic Yiddish Fiction: Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Frieden, a professor of Judaic studies at the State University of New York, examines the Tevye stories and other works by Sholom Aleichem.

Gittleman, Sol. From Shtetl to Suburbia: The Family in Jewish Literary Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Discusses Aleichem and others as pioneers of the tradition. The extended chapter on Aleichem examines the crisis of contemporary family life as conveyed through the Tevye stories.

Liptzin, Solomon. The Flowering of Yiddish Literature. New York: T. Yoseloff, 1963. Offers an exhaustive historical narrative of Yiddish literature from the 1860’s to World War I. The chapter on Aleichem examines the historical, literary, and social values of his work.

Miron, Dan. The Image of the Shtetl, and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Miron’s study of the representation of the Jewish world focuses heavily on the major works of Sholom Aleichem, including the Tevye stories.

Samuel, Maurice. The World of Sholom Aleichem. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Samuel re-creates Sholom Aleichem’s milieu, with explorations of Tevye’s personality, landscape, philosophy, and family life. A very anecdotal volume that includes warm retellings of the Tevye stories.

Waife-Goldberg, Marie. My Father, Sholom Aleichem. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. An interesting and revealing memoir by Sholom Aleichem’s daughter, full of anecdotes about Sholom Aleichem and examining the parallels between him and his fictional persona, Tevye.

Wisse, Ruth R. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. This slim book includes a chapter on Sholom Aleichem entitled “Ironic Balance for Psychic Survival,” in which Wisse discusses the uses of irony and satire and the polarization of faith and fact as reflected in Tevye’s philosophical dialogues.