The most blatant example of Tevye’s strategy of shutting off reality with clever words is found in the opening section of the seventh tale, when Tevye tells about Golde’s last days. Golde, depressed, desperately sick, and aware of her impending death, was never properly taken care of. Tevye never thinks of seeking medical help for her. (When he finally does bring in a physician, she is already dead.) Instead he offers her some argument concerning God’s handling of the world’s affairs. Once again Golde stops him short and in a whisper puts to him a simple question, her ultimate response to his intentional obtuseness: “I am dying, Tevye; who will cook your dinner?” Never has our protagonist been so floored by such a direct, authentic, and devastating existential question. Never has the hollowness of his wit been so sweepingly exposed. But Tevye holds on for dear life to his quibbling — his only defense. As much as Golde’s words touch him, his response consists of a proverb, a biblical quotation, a midrash and yet another midrash. Under the circumstances, what is left for him to say? Throughout his life he has wrapped himself with this insulating stuff, and it’s too late to tear open his cocoon. Indeed, by tearing it open he probably would have exposed himself to the same withering radiation that killed Golde. Tevye has to go on talking, narrating, being clever and funny, quoting and playfully mistranslating. This is his hold on life, for what is he if not a Jewish Scheherazade, whose head will be cut off the morning after he loses his ability to charm and please through narrating?
Talking, however, does not altogether assuage his guilt. He divulges his sins halfheartedly, only when he can explain them as resulting from sheer naïveté. Other, graver sins, both of commission and of omission, he cannot afford to admit, but we can glimpse them in the narrative. For example, toward the end of “Shprintze” he suddenly puts to Sholem Aleichem an uncharacteristic question, which, he says, he has intended to ask his learned and worldly friend for some time: Why are the eyes of people who have died by drowning always open, whereas dead people’s eyes are usually shut? But Tevye does not wait for an answer — he cuts the conversation short and bolts. Both the unexpected question and the sudden haste hint at what Tevye was about to divulge, had he not caught himself. Haunted by the wide-open stare of his dead daughter as she was being fished out of the river, he was on the verge of acknowledging his guilt. His question was as clumsy as it was disingenuous: most people do not die with their eyes shut; rather, their eyes are shut to produce the semblance of sleep for the benefit of the mourners. But Tevye had seen his daughter before this could be done, and her horrible stare was burned into his memory.
For all his lighthearted prattling, Tevye is gnawed by guilt. But as a rule, when he talks about blows inflicted on the national collective, his mood immediately improves — indeed, it soars. No matter how many conventional expressions of sorrow he piles one upon the other (“What times we live in! What a miserable time to be a Jew!” etc.) or how many times he mentions the urgent need for the coming of the Messiah, he himself is in high spirits, and his dialogue with God, usually replete with bitterness and self-effacement, is for once spirited and upbeat, refreshingly free of sarcasm as well as servility. This changed tonality dominates “Lekh lekho,” Tevye’s last tale, the main topics of which are pogroms, the Beiliss blood-libel trial, and the expulsion of Jews from the villages. Here Tevye is more than self-controlled; he is actually relaxed and almost happy, even though the expulsion decree has reduced him to beggary and vagrancy.
How is this mood shift to be understood? It is an expression of Tevye’s elation at being relieved, if only temporarily, of his guilt. For once the disaster — of being expelled from one’s home and cut off from one’s source of income — is not one he brought upon himself and his family. Taking care of the nation’s fate is God’s business, and the onus is on Him. Being the victim rather than the culprit feels good; and besides, when hundreds of thousands are afflicted, one’s personal losses are somehow minimized and marginalized. “Tsores rabim khatsi nekhome!” (“The tribulation of the many is half consolation”), Tevye says with obvious satisfaction when he learns that he is not the only local Jew to be expelled, and that the powerful householders of the neighboring shtetl Anetevke will soon follow, since the authorities, in their unfathomable wisdom, are about to redefine small provincial towns as villages and thus apply the decree of expulsion to their Jewish inhabitants. In short, Tevye is happy because for once, with easy conscience, he can shift responsibility for his and his family’s undoing to something bigger than himself. The tale “Lekh lekho” offers a catharsis of sorts, and this immense relief brings the Tevye cycle to closure. In fact, if the Tevye-Job analogy is at all valid, it is not because Tevye resembles Job but because God answers his complaints as He answered Job’s—“out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1), the whirlwind or storm being national holocaust. Only through holocausts does God now speak to his chosen people and silence their complaints. In any case, Tevye, the obsessive talker, can be silenced, as Job was (“I repent in dust and ashes,” Job 42:6), because he has been purged, regaining through devastation a state of innocence.
If silencing Tevye signals the end of his story, then his talking constitutes the center. By obsessively verbalizing, he seeks to release the burden of his guilt and, in his roundabout and perhaps not entirely conscious way, inch toward a confession. Otherwise, why would Tevye seek the company of his “Pani Sholem Aleichem” in the wake of each disastrous event in his life?
Why does Tevye choose Sholem Aleichem as his father-confessor, and why does Sholem Aleichem acquiesce in playing that role, taking upon himself the responsibility of purging Tevye’s guilt and absolving him? The answer to both questions must be that Sholem Aleichem plays the role because he is a writer, a virtuoso storyteller, a man of words, a sublimator of real-life events into works of art. In short, Sholem Aleichem is chosen because he resembles Tevye, duplicating his behavior at a higher and more symbolic level. He can become Tevye’s alter ego — or his superego and as such have the authority to judge and absolve. Absolution is activated particularly through humor, since humor is the strategy (the narcissistic strategy, according to Freud) that the superego employs for the purpose of shrinking or minimizing the ego’s painful feelings of hurt and guilt.4