Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Read Free

the contrary, the persona took on a peculiar life of its own as Sholem-Aleichem fashioned himself into a folkshrayber , a folk writer. The multilingual, urbane businessman, in his tightly buttoned vests and wire-frame spectacles, who spoke Russian at home with his family, took stage as the Yiddish voice of the people. And readers—those who remained in the shtetls and those who had left them behind—embraced him as their own. They invoked his name every time they said hello.
    But there was nothing simple or artless about his extraordinary output. Coming into his own, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, Sholem-Aleichem brought to life enduring characters who appeared in Yiddish periodicals from time to time, as he conjured them into new episodes: the clueless financial speculator Menakhem-Mendl and his long-suffering wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl; the downtrodden yet lighthearted “little people” of Kasrilevke; and his supreme creation, the irrepressible Tevye.
    From Tevye’s first appearance in 1894, the stories take the shape of dialogues between the hero and his silent interlocutor, the author Sholem-Aleichem, whom Tevye addresses; they read like monologues but are framed as tales told to a specific listener, lending them complex layers of irony that allow readers to see the limits of Tevye’s self-consciousness as he narrates his experiences retrospectively. The first story, “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” uncoils tightly, introducing the garrulous, pious patriarch and painting Tevye’s social place in the isolating outskirts of a village (he does not live in a shtetl) where he barely ekes out a living for his wife and seven daughters as a drayman. When he delivers some wealthy women lost in the woods back to their dacha, he is rewarded with the astonishing sum of thirty-seven rubles and a cow, and he becomes Tevye der milkhiker —milkman or dairyman in the usual translations but more literally, in Sholem-Aleichem’s neologistic application, “the milky one” (as distinct, as any reader familiar with kosher dietary rules would know, from being fleyshik , or meaty). It’s a feminizing descriptor, signaling Tevye’s warmth and nurturing nature and, later, the challenge to his paternal authority that will come from his daughters as the eight tragicomic stories unfold over the next two decades. Tevye opens the first episode telling Sholem-Aleichem what he learned from his good fortune: “Just like it says in the Bible … as long as a Jew lives and breathes in this world and hasn’t more than one leg in the grave, he mustn’t lose faith.”
    The world begins to challenge that faith in the second story, “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune” (1899), in which his distant relative Menakhem-Mendl persuades him to invest in a disastrous financial scheme. By the third story, “Modern Children” (1899), modernity begins to push from within the family, as Tsaytl persuades her father to forgo the marriage deal he arranged for her with the butcher Lazar Wolf and to let her marry her poor, beloved tailor, Motl. The pressure intensifies in the fourth story, “Hodl” (1904), written in the midst of the fervor that produced men like Perchik, the revolutionary, whom Hodl follows when he is imprisoned in Siberia. Bereft, Tevye ends this chronicle by asking Sholem-Aleichem to discuss something more cheerful with him: “Have you heard any news about the cholera in Odessa?”
    In the early years of his career, before finding the mature literary voice that would produce Tevye, Sholem-Aleichem struck the tone of the maskilim —proponents of the Haskalah —by calling for a world-class Yiddish literature that would rise above the shund , or shameful trash, of the pulp novels that had dominated Yiddish fiction in the nineteenth century (though many of the maskilim never let go of their distrust of Yiddish and, as Sholem-Aleichem developed his own work, ended up dismissing him, in the literary scholar Dan Miron’s words, “as a