The outbreak of World War I caught him in Berlin as the subject of a hostile country; he thereupon managed, with great difficulties, to reach New York, where he attempted to resume his writing career. His health, however, was failing, and the bitter news that his son had succumbed to tuberculosis in Europe overwhelmed him. He died in May 1916 in New York, the most popular Yiddish writer ever. A large part of the eastern European Jewish community of the city came into the streets in a state of mourning comparable to that which would follow the death of Rudolph Valentino, the film star. Sholem Aleichem bequeathed to the Jewish world not only his literary works but also a universal recognition that the new American Jewish community was a resourceful sociopolitical entity with its own culture and a distinct role to play both in American affairs and in those of world Jewry.
WHO WOULD WANT TO LISTEN TO TEVYE?
I will speak, that I may find relief; I will open my lips and answer.
For over a century Tevye der milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman) has been universally acknowledged as Sholem Aleichem’s masterpiece. Endowed with a deep humanity, a delicate equilibrium between tragedy and comedy, and a vivacious comic narration, Tevye soars above the author’s other achievements, brilliant as they are. Its vitality is such that it has survived a score of translations of uneven quality and questionable fidelity; various stage adaptations (including one prepared by the author himself), which for ideological or commercial considerations wrenched the story’s heart out of its ribcage, crudely transmuting and obfuscating its meaning; and even a successful stage version as one of Broadway’s schmaltziest musicals, Fiddler on the Roof, which superimposed upon the popular imagination a Tevye figure — a diluted, semi-Judaized Zorba — that tenuously, if not accidentally, resembles Sholem Aleichem’s original creation no more than a beautified postcard resembles the reality of a foreign city. To withstand all this treatment, a work of art has to possess a formidable inner strength. Our task here is to point to the sources of that strength.
In the last century scholars and critics dwelled mainly on Tevye’s social and cultural implications or on the character of Tevye and his symbolic or archetypal significance. Both topics are, of course, of considerable importance, but neither yields a full understanding of the work’s unique qualities.
Its social and cultural significance is far-reaching. A historical panorama, the unfolding of which would normally necessitate the writing of a cycle of voluminous novels, is here squeezed into eight short novellas. The affairs of a provincial dairyman and the fortunes of his daughters become prisms that refract much of what is essential in the history of the Jews in the czarist empire during the last two turbulent decades of its existence. Because the eight tales were written intermittently, in each one the author was in a position to look at a different aspect of progressively endangered Jews living amid a hostile non-Jewish population and under a hostile autocratic regime. Starting with the rustic mock-idyll of Tevye’s “miraculous” deliverance from penury, the tales gradually shed light on wider historical arenas, pointing to realities that loom far beyond the protagonist’s provincial circumference: the revolutionary mood that swept the czarist empire in the first years of the twentieth century; the pogroms triggered by the failed 1905 revolution; the egotistic and hedonistic culture that emerged in the wake of the stillborn revolution, with its emphases on unbridled sexual gratification and the liberation of women from traditional restrictions on the one hand, and its epidemic of suicides on the other; the rise of a new Jewish plutocracy during the Russo-Japanese War; and finally the waves of vicious anti-Semitism that engulfed the Jewish population in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I, finding expression in the famous Beiliss blood-libel trial (1911-13) and the expulsion of Jews from the countryside. Thus the cycle, from its quasi-pastoral beginning to the pandemonium of its ending (where Tevye, once a rooted villager, roams as a homeless refugee by foot, cart, and train throughout Ukraine), is chock-full of historical vistas and sociocultural insights. But the greatness of Tevye does not inhere in this historical panorama. Sholem Aleichem’s narrative art, while making full use of the given milieu, transcends its sheer mimetic presentation. It is not as a historical pseudo-novel that Tevye carries this art to the ultimate realization of its aesthetic potential.
Nor does this realization occur through a presentation of Tevye as an archetypal hero, a folksy philosopher symbolizing Jewish fortitude and tenacity, able to hold on to life due to a well-balanced personality and an unbreakable bitokhn (confidence) in a divine providence. Tevye, as reflected in his monologues (all his tales are written in the form of dramatic monologues recited by himself for the benefit of the literary persona Sholem Aleichem, the silent but solidly present interlocutor), has nothing exemplary about him. In all aspects of his personality but one — his extraordinary talent as a raconteur — he is a deeply conventional, limited, and flawed person of his time and class. His vast respect for money and social status amply illustrates his conventionality, as does his disrespect for women and his nagging need to assert his male superiority. (“Tevye is not a woman” and “a woman remains no more than a woman” are his mantras, and he parades, in the most inappropriate situations, his Jewish “erudition”—book learning being in traditional Jewish society the exclusive prerogative of males.) Hardworking as he is, Tevye lacks faith in his ability to become affluent, leave the village, and join the traditional shtetl society, where he would be respected as a learned and generous philanthropist. Were he to achieve such goals at all, it should have been through the efforts of others; his beautiful daughters, through lucrative matches, were in a position to free their father from hard work, while a millionaire son-in-law might trust him with a well-paid job. But not for the life of him could Tevye understand how these successful others had achieved the power and riches he coveted. To him, self-improvement and will are divorced. Enterprise, acumen, courage, and practical cleverness never count as means of self-elevation, for which only sheer luck or the unfathomable will of God is responsible.
From the very beginning of the first tale, Tevye sticks to the formula: man cannot improve his lot by his own volition or seykhel (cleverness). For all his piety and purported intimacy with God, his religious bitokhn, when examined closely, rarely amounts to more than fatalism or rather a passive acquiescence to “things as they are”; for if things are the way they are, it must be because God wanted them so. Tevye more than once compares his troubles with those of biblical Job, but the comparison is misleading; the Book of Job makes the point that one must question God’s ways and rebel against divine injustice if one is to retain active faith in Him. Tevye’s self-serving need to view himself as a latter-day Job (because he wishes to see himself, like the great biblical sufferer, not at all responsible for the disasters that befall him) is rooted in nothing like Job’s moral courage, let alone readiness for a confrontational (and therefore vital) I-Thou dialogue with God such as the Bible ascribes to such moral paragons as Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Job. Indeed, Tevye’s position amounts to the very opposite of the courage and risk taking that Abraham displayed as he challenged God: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).