“Why do you need to know about other people’s weddings and other people’s brises?” I said. “Better see that there is something to eat. Let all who are hungry come and partake—you can’t dance on an empty stomach. If you have a borscht, good, and if not, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll have knishes or kreplach or knaidlach or maybe even blintzes. You can decide, but be quick about it.”
We all washed our hands and ate well, as Rashi said: And thou shalt eat, as God commanded. “Eat, Menachem-Mendl,” I said to him. “As King David said: ‘It’s a foolish world and a false one.’ Health, as my grandmother Nechama, of blessed memory, used to say — she was a wise woman, sharp as a tack—‘seek health and pleasure in the dish before you.’ ” My poor guest’s hands were trembling, and he couldn’t praise my wife’s cooking enough, swearing to God he could not remember the time he had eaten such a delicious dairy meal, such tasty knishes, and such savory knaidlach. “Nonsense,” I said. “You should taste her taiglach, her poppyseed cookies, and then you’d know what paradise really is!”
After we finished eating and saying the blessings, we chatted, I about my business, he about his, telling stories about Odessa and Yehupetz, how one day he’s rich and the next a pauper. He was using strange, complicated words that I had never in my life heard of, like stocks and shares, selling high and buying low, options, the devil only knows, and accounts and reckonings, ten thousand, twenty thousand — money like water!
“To tell the truth, Menachem-Mendl,” I said to him, “what you are telling me about your financial dealings is impressive. You must know a lot about such things. But there’s one thing I don’t understand. I’m surprised your wife lets you run around like this and doesn’t come after you riding on a broomstick.”
“Ah,” he said to me with a sigh, “don’t remind me of it, Reb Tevye. I have enough problems with her. You should see what she writes me. You yourself would say I’m a saint to take it. But that’s a small matter. That’s what a wife is for, to put you down. I have a much worse problem. I have, you understand me, a mother-in-law to deal with! I don’t need to tell you. You know her!”
“You are telling me it’s like in the Bible: streaked, speckled, and spotted, which means a blister on a boil on an abscess.”
“Yes, Reb Tevye,” he said, “you said it exactly. A boil is a boil, but the abscess, oy, the abscess is worse than the boil!”
We went on chatting idly this way till late into the night. His stories of wild business deals involving thousands of rubles flying up and down in value, and the fortune that Brodsky was earning, made my head spin. My dreams that night were a tangle of Yehupetz shopwindows, half shares, Brodsky, Menachem-Mendl, and his mother-in-law. Not until morning did he finally get to the point: “Here’s how it’s been going for us in Yehupetz for some time now. Money is scarce, and goods are just sitting there not sold,” he said to me. “You now have the chance, Reb Tevye, to make quite a few groschens and also save my life, literally bring me back from the dead.”
“You’re talking like a child,” I said. “The difference between what I have and what Brodsky has, we should both earn between now and Passover.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know that. But you really don’t need a great deal of money. If you were to give me a hundred rubles right now, in three or four days I would make it into two hundred, three hundred, six or seven hundred, and why not a thousand?”
“That’s certainly possible,” I said, “but what would make it possible? You must have something to invest. But if there aren’t a hundred rubles, then as Rashi says: If thou investeth in an illness, thy profit shall be the ague.”
“Really now,” he said, “are you telling me you can’t find a mere hundred, Reb Tevye, with your business, and your reputation, kayn eyn horeh?”
“What good comes from a reputation?” I said. “A reputation is certainly a good thing, but what of it? I have my reputation, and Brodsky still has the money. If you want to know, I can barely pull together a hundred, and there are eighteen holes to fill with it. First of all, I have to marry off a daughter—”
“Listen to me,” he said, “that’s the point I’m making! When, Reb Tevye, will you have another chance to put in a hundred and take out, God willing, so much that you will have enough to marry off your daughter and then some?” And in the next three hours he gave me a song and dance about how he had made from one ruble three and from three ten. “First of all,” he said, “you take a hundred, and you tell them to buy ten shares” or whatever he called them. “You wait a few days till they go up. You send a telegram and tell them to sell, and for that money you buy twice as many. Then you start all over again and again send off a telegram, until finally from the hundred you have two; from the two, four; and from the four, eight; from the eight, sixteen — wonder of wonders! There are,” he said, “in Yehupetz those who were not too long ago going around without shoes, were nobodies, servants, porters. Today they have their own houses made of stone surrounded by high walls. Their wives complain about their indigestion and go abroad for a cure, while they ride around Yehupetz on rubber wheels and pretend not to know anyone!”
To make a long story short — why should I carry on? — I developed a yearning, and it was no laughing matter. Who could tell? I asked myself. Maybe he was a heaven-sent messenger. I was hearing that ordinary people get lucky in Yehupetz, so why should I have been worse than they? He didn’t strike me as a liar, making up tall tales out of his head. And what if things did turn around as he had said, and Tevye could become a bit of a mensch in his old age? How long could a person struggle and slave day after day, again and again the horse and wagon, again cheese and butter? It’s time, Tevye, I said to myself, for you to rest, to become a respectable man among respectable men, to step into the synagogue once in a while and look into a Jewish book. Why should I not? Was I afraid that it wouldn’t work out, that the bread would fall butter side down? I could argue the other way around.
I asked my old lady, “What do you say? How do you like his plan, Golde?”
“What can I say about it? I know Menachem-Mendl isn’t someone who would cheat you,” she said. “He isn’t, God forbid, from a family of tailors or shoemakers! He has a fine father, and his grandfather was very brilliant, studied Torah day and night, even when he went blind. And Grandma Tzeitl, may she rest in peace, was also not a common sort.”
“What has all this got to do with the business we’re talking about? What do your Grandma Tzeitl, who baked lekach, and your grandfather have to do with it?” A woman remains a woman. Not for nothing did King Solomon travel all over the world without finding a single woman with a brain in her head.
And so it was decided that we would become partners. I would put up the money, and Menachem-Mendl the brains, and whatever God granted us we would share fifty-fifty. “Believe me, Reb Tevye,” he said, “with God’s help you will do well with me, really well, and I will make lots of money for you.”
“Amen, the same to you,” I said. “From your mouth into God’s ear. But I must ask you, how does that cat get across the river? I am here, you are there. Money,” I said, “is a very delicate material, you understand. Don’t be offended — I’m not trying to criticize you, God forbid. It’s simply, as Abraham our Father said, They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. It’s better to be warned than to weep.”