“My dear, do you know what?” he said to her. “Your father is abandoning us. He is selling everything he owns and is leaving one two three for Eretz Yisroel.”
As Pharaoh said to Joseph, I dreamed a dream but I did not understand it. This was a nightmare, I thought. I looked at my Beilke. Do you think her face showed any feeling? She stood like a post, not a drop of blood in her face, looked from him to me and back, and said not a word! I was also silent. Both of us were silent, as it is written in the Psalms: May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth—speech had failed us.
My head was spinning, my temples were pounding, and I felt I was suffocating. Was it the smoke from that fine cigar Podhotsur had given me? But he was smoking one too, and talking, his mouth never shutting, though his eyelids kept lowering as if he could not wait to take a nap.
“You must go,” he said to me, “from here to Odessa by the express, and then by sea to Jaffa. Now is the best time to go by sea, because later on the winds and hurricanes and the snows begin, and then. .” His tongue stumbled, as if he were overcome by the desire to sleep, but then he forged ahead. “And when you are ready for the journey, you must let us know, and we will both ride out to the station with you and see you off, because who knows when we will see each other again?” He gave a big yawn, stood, and said to Beilke, “My dearest, sit here a bit while I go lie down for a nap.”
That was the best thing he could have said, as I am a Jew! Now at least I could let out my bitter heart! I thought. I longed to talk to my Beilke, to tell her everything that had happened that morning. Suddenly she fell into my arms and began to weep. But what weeping you can only imagine! My daughters, poor things, are all like that. First they act mature and in control, and then when something bad happens, they weep like willow trees. Take my daughter Hodl. Just before she left for Siberia to join her Fefferl, she wept bitter tears. But how can I compare them?
I will tell you the honest truth. As you know, I am not a person of tears. I really cried only once, when my Golde, may she rest in peace, was lying on the earth, and I also had a good cry when Hodl went off to her Fefferl and I remained on the station platform like a great fool, all alone with my horse. And a few other times I welled up with tears, but I don’t remember if I ever cried. But Beilke and her tears moved me so deeply that I couldn’t hold back. I didn’t have the heart to criticize her. With me it isn’t necessary to say a lot. My name is Tevye. I understood her tears right away. They were not ordinary tears. You understand, they were tears brought on by the sin I have sinned before you—the sin of not listening to your father. And instead of blaming her, as I could easily have done, and baring my soul about her Podhotsur, I comforted her by telling her one biblical story after another, as only Tevye can do.
Beilke heard me out. “No, Papa, you can’t stop my tears with stories. That’s not why I’m crying — I have no complaints about anyone. It’s because you are going away on account of me and I cannot help you. That’s why I am so despondent.”
“You’re talking like a child,” I said. “You forget that we still have a great God and that your father is still in his right mind. Your father,” I said, “has a plan to go to Eretz Yisroel and come back, like in the commentaries: They journeyed and they camped—they didn’t know if they were coming or going.” That was the way I talked, but I was thinking, Tevye, you’re lying! You’re going to Eretz Yisroel, and that will be the last of you — no more Tevye!
As if she had read my thoughts, she said to me, “No, Papa, that’s how you comfort a small child. You give it a toy, you put a plaything in its hand, and you tell it a pretty story about a little white goat. If you do want a story,” she said, “I will tell you one, not you me. But the story I will tell is more sorrowful than pretty.”
Tevye’s daughters don’t mince words. She laid out for me a tale, a story worthy of A Thousand and One Nights, about how her Podhotsur became rich after being a nobody. He grew from the lowest of the low and with his own ability reached the highest levels and now wanted to invite to his house people like Brodsky. He was handing out charity, throwing thousands around. But money wasn’t enough — you still needed a pedigree, power, influence, and status. Podhotsur was doing everything possible to show he was somebody. He bragged that he came from the famous Podhotsurs, his father was also a famous contractor. But “he knew very well that he was a street musician,” Beilke said. “Now he tells everyone his wife’s father is a millionaire.”
“Who does he mean?” I said. “Me?” Maybe I was once fated to have millions, I thought, but that was as close as I’d ever get to having them.
“Do you know, Papa,” she said to me, “my face burns whenever he introduces me to his friends and tells them about my father and my uncles and the whole family — things that never were and could never be. I must listen to it all and be silent because he is, about those things, very capricious.”
“To you,” I said, “it’s being capricious, but to us it’s simply lying or bragging.”
“No, Papa,” she said, “you don’t know him. He isn’t as bad as you think. He is just a person who is one way one minute and another the next. He has a good heart and an open hand. If you make a sad face and catch him in a good mood, he’ll give you his soul. And especially for my benefit, the sky can be the limit! Do you think,” she said, “I have no influence on him? Just recently, to rescue Hodl and her husband, he promised me he would spend many thousands, on the condition they went straight to Japan.”
“Why Japan?” I said. “Why not India or Mesopotamia, or to the Queen of Sheba?”
“Because he has businesses in Japan,” she said. “He has businesses all over the world. What it costs him in telegrams alone, we could live on for half a year. But what good does it do me when I cannot be myself?”
“As it is written in the chapters, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? — I am not me and you are not you.” My heart was breaking to see my poor child miserable, although as they say, ‘in riches and in honor.’ “Your sister Hodl wouldn’t have done that.”
“I told you not to compare me to Hodl, Papa. Hodl lived in Hodl’s times and Beilke lives in Beilke’s times. From Hodl’s times to Beilke’s times is as far as from here to Japan.” Do you understand what she was talking about?
Anyway, I realize you are in a hurry, Pani. Two minutes more and it will be an end to all the stories. I was full up to here. I’d heard enough of sorrows and troubles from my youngest daughter and left her house wretched and brokenhearted. I flung the cigar that had clouded up my head onto the ground and said to it, “Go to hell!”
“Who are you cursing, Reb Tevye?” I heard a voice behind me. I turned, looked, and saw — it was he, Ephraim the matchmaker, may he have a stroke!
“Welcome,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was visiting my children.”
“How are they?”
“How should they be? May we be as well.”
“I see,” he said. “You are satisfied with my merchandise?”
“Satisfied?” I said. “May God repay you for what you have done.”
“Thank you for the blessing,” he said. “Maybe you can add a little extra on to the blessing?”
“Weren’t you paid for the match?”
“May your Podhotsur only be worth as much as he paid me.”
“What is it?” I said. “Was the fee too small?”