The only domain where Tevye can be seen as “great” is that of narrative performance. What he inadvertently tells about himself as a husband and a father is far from appealing or morally acceptable. But the telling itself is nothing less than seductive, and the best proof is the critics’ (and readers’) love for Tevye, which blinds them to his many shortcomings. Tevye’s “greatness” belongs to the realm of the aesthetic rather than the moral or intellectual. The artistic brilliance of his tales emanates neither from his moral presence nor from the social background they unfold but rather from the narrative and rhetorical formula that is repeated from one tale to another, in which a loquacious Tevye endlessly talks to his ubiquitous interlocutor, Sholem Aleichem. Tevye der milkhiker, like many other creations of Sholem Aleichem’s, is above all a story of talking and listening and their complementary dynamics, of a nagging need for verbal self-exposure and the will to absorb what is told. Such verbal interaction rather than the tales’ content defines and prescribes the essence of Tevye’s reality, a rhetorical rather than a mimetic one. Whatever mimetic reality Tevye’s narrative conveys is, of course, interesting — indeed, it is riveting — but it is not half as real or fascinating as the talking itself, its meandering progression and changing rhythms.
Tevye knows how to make the best of a good story and takes great pleasure in doing so. No matter how tragic or even personally humiliating his stories may be, we can count on him to tell them as effectively as he possibly can. His impotence in the face of life’s vicissitudes never contaminates its dexterous and clever narrative articulation. On the contrary, the impotence is counterbalanced, and to a certain extent overcome, by plenipotentiary narration. As good raconteurs often do, Tevye tells the truth but not necessarily the whole or the exact truth, for no genuine storyteller would allow the facts to undermine the dramatic effect of his story. If one succumbs to the charm and warmth of the narration or accepts its confessional tonality at face value, the little discrepancies strewn all over the stories will help in maintaining one’s vigilance. Tevye skillfully manipulates the rhetoric of sincerity, but he is not always in full control of it, and when he momentarily slips, we have our chance to glimpse through the cracks in his mask.
Some discrepancies can be attributed to the fact that the tales were composed at different times and places.1 Others, by far more significant, cannot be explained away. For example: in “Shprintze,” the sixth and most tragic of the tales, Tevye tells of his daughter’s suicide by drowning after being seduced by a rich city boy (to whom she had been introduced by Tevye himself). Starting the woeful tale by describing how the strapping young man and his friends are invited by Tevye to his cottage, Tevye waxes lyrical about the beauty of the village in springtime, the magnificent canopy of the blue sky, and the pleasures of living in the lap of bountiful nature. (Even the cows, he says, smile as they chew their cuds in the meadow.) Yet he has told Sholem Aleichem often enough how distasteful is his life in the countryside and how fervently he wishes to move to a proper Jewish shtetl. “No,” he concludes, refuting an imaginary objection, “say what you will, I wouldn’t trade it for the best job in the town, I would not for the world swap places with you.”2 This, of course, does not hinder him from reverting a few pages later to his original pro-urban position. Once he starts fantasizing about his daughter marrying her affluent lover boy, he sees himself again in town, an important, well-to-do member of the community. What explains this blatant discrepancy? The inherent needs of the story itself. Tevye is about to tell a very painful tale, which he feels he has to organize aesthetically and morally around the binary oppositions of nature/civilization, innocence/moral irresponsibility, naïveté/cunning, village/city if it is to have its full impact. His daughter (and by inference himself as well) represents the virtues of nature, innocence, naïveté, and the village, whereas the seducing young man’s rich relatives stand for the corrupt civilization of city, money, and moral irresponsibility: Tevye and his daughter are the blameless rustic victims of heartless city predators. Ever the expert storyteller, Tevye knows that such a melodrama also minimizes, perhaps even obliterates, his own responsibility for orchestrating the disastrous meeting of the youngsters. (The boy’s uncle justifiably asks him what, as a reasonable man, he could have thought when he had brought the two together.)
Clearly we are permitted to characterize Tevye as an unreliable narrator. He manipulates the truth because he needs to charm his listener and buy his sympathy as a way to avert, or at least soften, the harsh judgment that his listener would otherwise pass on him. Tevye knows he has much to account for. He has never taken good care of his family, and he has let trouble run its full course without doing anything to stop it. More often than not he brings trouble on himself, exhibiting a strange pattern of self-defeating, passive-aggressive behavior, the origins of which he cannot fully gauge. In his second tale Tevye loses his meager savings by bringing home a distant relative, the irresponsible and unrealistic stock-exchange speculator Menachem-Mendl (the protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s other chef d’oeuvres), and allows himself to be tempted by the charlatan’s wild promises of riches. How could he have made such a fool of himself, Tevye wonders, ascribing his silly behavior, as always, to God’s wilclass="underline" “If God wants to punish a person, he deprives him of his good sense.” This pattern reemerges in some of the other tales, and Tevye, unable to control it, keeps wondering, “What was at the root of this? Perhaps my innate gullibility, which makes me trust everybody? — But what am I to do, I ask you, if, in spite of everything, such is my nature?” Of course this behavior, which becomes progressively more self-destructive, is caused by more than sheer gullibility. Tevye never faces the fact that each of his mistakes corresponds to a need or desire of his: his craving for riches, the need for self-importance, his yearning for young men who either intellectually or even physically and erotically attract him, allowing him to fantasize about playing the role of father figure to them and unconsciously or semiconsciously transmitting to his daughters, who are very much attuned to their father’s secret wishes, his interest in these men, and when the daughters establish a connection with them, he savors their closeness, which he craves for himself. Tevye cannot know much about the workings of these underground motivations, but he still feels that somehow, by following his desires and fantasies, he has let down those who are closest and dearest to him.
By the same token, Tevye seems aware of the fact that he systematically evades people, particularly family members, when they urgently need his attention or help. Shprintze, realizing that she is about to bring shame on the heads of her parents, starts her downward slide toward lethal depression that will end in her self-destruction. By refusing to talk to her, Tevye reinforces her sense that her out-of-wedlock pregnancy is unacceptable. More commonly he pushes people away by talking to them in a manner that is both irrelevant and offensive. Much has been written about Tevye’s wit, his playful game of quoting and mistranslating the sacred texts.3 What has rarely been noticed, however, is how much of a defense mechanism his clever pseudo-scholarly discourse is, or how much aggression it releases. On the one hand, Tevye intentionally talks above the head of a certain kind of interlocutor (particularly the kind who has a social or financial advantage over him) in order to humiliate him. On the other hand, he is quick to hide behind his quotations and references as soon as a serious issue is to be discussed or a difficult decision made. When his wife, Golde, reminds him that they urgently need to marry off their older daughters, he responds by referring her to a series of midrashim (exegetical, narrative, and homiletic glosses appended to the sacred texts), whereupon Golde, only too familiar with his subterfuges, cuts him short, maintaining that “grown daughters are a good enough midrash in their own right.” After his daughter Chava’s elopement with her Gentile lover (which Tevye could have seen coming and might have prevented), he pounces on poor Golde: how could she, a mother, not have seen what was going on under her nose! And why did she not alert him in time? Once again, Golde’s answer is cutting: how and why would she tell him anything? “When one tells you something, you immediately respond with a biblical quotation. You buzz my head off with quotations and think you have done your share!” For a moment Tevye seems struck by the bitter truth of his wife’s rebuke, then takes shelter behind his habitual disrespect for women. “She has a point,” he thinks; he should not have blamed her, for “what does a woman understand?”