Can a work of fiction begun with no overall plan, written in installments over a twenty-year period, and ending more than once, be called (as it has been here) a novel at all? There are critics whose answer is no. The noted Sholem Aleichem scholar Dan Miron, for instance, has written that the structure of Tevye is more “mythic” than novelistic, each of its episodes consisting of a pattern of rise, fall, and recovery that can repeat itself endlessly; Sholem Aleichem, Miron argues, could have brought Tevye to a close after its seventh chapter or gone on to write a tenth and eleventh — in terms of the book’s form and thematic contents, it would hardly have mattered. But though it certainly is true that each episode of Tevye can be read as a story in itself (which is undoubtedly how some of its original readers, not all of whom were familiar with what came before, did read it), and true too that each shares basic patterns with the others, it is equally clear that each builds on the previous installments and that there is a definite development from one chapter to the next. Indeed, if what perhaps most characterizes the novel as a literary form is the flow of time in it, the fact that more than in any other artistic medium we see human beings exposed to time, shaped by time, worn by time, then Tevye is a novel par excellence, perhaps the only one ever written in real time, that is, according to a scale on which time for the author and time for his characters are absolutely equivalent. Sholem Aleichem and Tevye age together: a year in the life of one is a year in the life of the other, and twenty years in the life of one is twenty years in the life of the other. Even as Sholem Aleichem sits at his desk writing down Tevye’s stories, Tevye continues to grow older by the amount of time that writing takes.
It is in part this aspect of Tevye that makes him so real a character, for despite the great misfortunes that befall him and his extraordinary resilience in confronting them, the years affect him much as they do most men: slowly, subtly, almost imperceptibly in the course of any one of the book’s episodes — in which, as in the short story generally, time is not a significant factor — but enormously when regarded over the whole span of them. Le plus ça change, le plus ça reste la même chose is only one side of Tevye and of us all; le plus ça reste la même chose, le plus ça change is the other. He is, as Miron says, always Tevye; but who, meeting him in 1894 and again in 1914, would not be shocked by the difference — and not only because of the gray hairs? Tevye has changed internally — and with these changes, the novel’s three internal levels of meaning all reach a climax too. Let us consider them.
The first of these is the story of Tevye and his family as a paradigm of the fate of Russian Jewry. It is a measure of Sholem Aleichem’s great artistry that Tevye, Golde, and their daughters — and with what a bare minimum of strokes these last are sketched! — are all wonderfully alive and individualized human beings who never strike us as being anything but themselves. Yet this should not obscure the perception that they are also, like most of the other characters in the book, representative types of Russian Jewish life who, taken together, tell the tale of its destruction. Indeed, each of Tevye’s daughters falls in love with and/or marries a man who can be said to embody a distinct historical force or mood, and if Tevye himself is the very incarnation of the traditional culture of the shtetl, then beginning with the novel’s second chapter, every one of its episodes illustrates another phase of this culture’s helpless disintegration. In “Tevye Blows a Small Fortune,” for example, we see in the person of Menachem Mendl the economic collapse of a community that has been driven by the unnatural conditions imposed on it to seek its livelihood in the most pathetic kinds of nonproductive speculation. In “Today’s Children” we read of that undermining of parental authority which, though still relatively mild in Tsaytl’s case, will eventually bring Tevye’s world crashing down on him. “Hodl” deals with the defection of Jewish youth to the revolutionary movement, and “Chava” with its loss to intermarriage. Shprintze’s suicide is the outcome of a situation that at first resembles Tsaytl’s and her other sisters’, i.e., she has fallen in love with a young man whom Tevye originally disapproves of as a match for her — but precisely because of this parallel, the difference between Tsaytl’s and Motl’s behavior, on the one hand, and Shprintze’s and Ahronchik’s, on the other, shows how dramatically the lines of communication between generations have broken down in the space of a few years. In Beilke’s story, “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel,” we meet yet another new Jewish type, the contractor Podhotzur, a vulgar nouveau-riche assimilationist ruthlessly intent on climbing the social and economic ladder of a society making the transition from rural feudalism to urban capitalism. And finally, in “Lekh-Lekho,” what is left of Tevye’s life literally falls apart: expelled from the village in which he and his ancestors have lived since time immemorial, he is forced to become a homeless wanderer. Coming in the final chapter of the novel, this expulsion is the ultimate concretization of the ruin of an entire world.
In all this, Tevye’s role is essentially passive; he schemes, he fantasizes, he makes a great fuss over things (although less so as the years go by and he grows more aware of his powerlessness) — yet each time the events, like his own unruly horse, simply run away with him, leaving him aghast and uncomprehending. And yet, as the Yiddish critic Y. Y. Trunk has perceptively observed, what makes him a genuinely tragic figure and not just the comic victim of a world beyond his control is that in every case it is he himself who brings about his downfall — a theme that comprises the second level of the book, that encompassing the relationships in Tevye’s family, especially between him and his daughters. With his wife Golde, all in all, Tevye’s relations are simple: they might be defined as those of a harmonious conjugal antagonism, a common enough modus vivendi among East European Jews that is composed on Tevye’s side of equal parts genial misogyny and husbandly loyalty to hearth and home. This misogyny, however, runs only skin-deep, because, despite his protestations to the contrary (it is when he protests, in fact, that he most reveals his true feelings, a more direct expression of affection not being in his vocabulary), Tevye clearly loves his daughters to distraction. Nor does he just adore them; he admires and respects them with that unconventionally unsnobbish openness, that basic inclination to judge everyone on, and only on, his merits, which, beneath his facade of patriarchal autocracy and middle-class pretensions, is one of his most endearing traits. It is just this openness and capacity for love, however, that prove his undoing, for without his quite grasping the fact, these are the qualities that, absorbed from him by his daughters, make them act as they do in the face of his own apprehensions and objections. As is so often the case with parents and children, Tevye’s daughters are much more like him than he is willing to admit; they are, in fact, the actors-out of the fantasies and values that he has transmitted to them. Does Tsaytl, disappointing her father, refuse to marry the rich Layzer Wolf and choose the poor Motl Komzoyl instead? But Tevye cannot stand Layzer Wolf, he truly likes Motl, and he himself has told Sholem Aleichem: “Money is a lot of baloney … what matters is for a man to be a man!” Is Tevye devastated because Hodl has linked her life with the young revolutionary, Pertchik? But besides having brought Pertchik into his home (for which, it is true, he blames himself — he just does not go beyond this), who if not Tevye has sat on his front stoop imagining what it would be like to trade places with the rich Jews of Yehupetz, living in their dachas while they bring him milk and cheese each day! Has Chava done the unthinkable, married a goy? Why, Tevye himself has wondered in the solitude of the forest, “What does being a Jew or not a Jew matter?” It is Tevye who in his fondness for Ahronchik has introduced him to Shprintze, and Tevye who, in his anger at Beilke for selling her soul to marry wealth, forgets that this is exactly the arrangement that he planned for Tsaytl long ago. Tevye knows that Beilke has sacrificed herself for his sake — yet it does not occur to him that she has done so because of the vision of magical riches that he himself has handed down to her.