Nevertheless, though the notion of trains running through Russia with almost no one in their third-class cars but Jews who tell each other stories may seem like an artificial literary convention, this is actually not the case. The Russia of Sholem Aleichem’s day, especially in the provincial Pale of Settlement, had a relatively small Christian middle and lower-middle class. The great bulk of the population belonged to either the peasantry or the landed aristocracy, and of the two groups, the first rarely traveled, and the second never traveled third class. Jews were often merchants, but mostly petty ones who preferred to travel as cheaply as they could — and the fact that Jews, when traveling, tend even today to talk nonstop to each other is something that can be vouched for by anyone who has ever taken a crowded flight to Israel.
Nor is this the only example in The Railroad Stories of the way in which our distance from the times may mislead us into thinking that Sholem Aleichem was deliberately exaggerating for literary or comic purposes. Take, for instance, the seemingly surrealistic plot of “The Automatic Exemption,” in which a father must run endlessly from draft board to draft board because a son who died in infancy still appears in the population registry; “the [Russian] government,” writes the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, “refused [in drafting Jews] to consider the fact that, owing to inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to emigrate abroad”; even the three hundred rubles that a lawyer tells the distraught father he will have to pay as a fine was the exact sum stipulated by Russian law for such cases! Or take the apparently farcical section of the story “High School” in which a Jew must get a Christian drunk so that he will agree to send his son, at the Jew’s expense, to a commercial school together with the Jew’s son. Here is Dubnow again:
In the commercial schools maintained by the commercial associations Jewish children were admitted only in proportion to the contributions of the Jewish merchants toward the upkeep of the particular school. In private commercial schools, however, percentages of all kinds, varying from ten to fifty percent, were fixed in the case of Jewish pupils. This provision had the effect that Jewish parents were vitally interested in securing the entrance of as many Christian children as possible in order to increase thereby the number of Jewish vacancies. Occasionally, a Jewish father, in the hope of creating a vacancy for his son, would induce a Christian to send his boy to a commercial school — though the latter, as a rule, offered little attraction for the Christian population — by undertaking to defray all expenses connected with his education.
This is not to say that there are not elements of farce in these stories, but they lie far more in the reaction of the characters than in the situation itself. Always a stickler for getting the details right (even the fabulous Brodsky of Tevye and “Go Climb a Tree If You Don’t Like It” was a real Jewish sugar magnate of that name who lived in Kiev), Sholem Aleichem became even more so after leaving Russia in 1906, for he was afraid of being thought out of touch with the world he continued to write about. The Soviet Jewish critic Max Erik quotes a revealing letter written by him to an acquaintance in the White Russian town of Homel at the time that he was working on these tales:
Perhaps you would consider doing something for me: I would like you to send me raw material from Homel, from Vitebsk, from Bialystok, from wherever you care to, as long as it is subject matter that I can use in my “Railroad Stories.” I have in mind characters, encounters, anecdotes, comic and tragic histories, events, love affairs, weddings, divorces, fateful dreams, bankruptcies, family celebrations, even funerals — in a word, anything you see and hear about, have seen and heard about, or will see and hear about, in Homel or anywhere else. Please keep one thing in mind, though: I don’t want anything imaginary, just facts, the more the better!
Two more examples of such (on our part) unsuspected factuality in these stories are of particular interest.
One concerns a matter of language. In the first of The Railroad Stories, “Competitors,” we are presented with a woman train vendor who, when her tongue is unleashed, turns out to be a stupendous curser — and by no means a rote one, but a talented improviser who can match every phrase she utters with an appropriate imprecation. One of a kind, no? No. In a chapter devoted to curses in his The World of Sholom Aleichem, Maurice Samuel writes of what he calls the “apposite or apropos” curse in the Yiddish of Eastern Europe:
The apposite or apropos curse is a sort of “catch,” or linked phrase; it is hooked on to the last word uttered by the object of the curse. Thus, if he wanted to eat, and said so, the response would be: “Eat? May worms eat you, dear God!” Or: “Drink? May leeches drink your blood!” “Sew a button on for you? I’ll sew cerements for you!” If the person addressed does not supply the lead, the curser does it for herself. “There runs Chaim Shemeral! May the life run out of him!” … “Are you still sitting? May you sit on open sores! Are you silent? May you be silent forever! Are you yelling? May you yell for your teeth! Are you playing? May the Angel of Death play with you! Are you going? May you go on crutches.”
Indeed, in his autobiography From the Fair, Sholem Aleichem describes his stepmother as being just such an “apropos curser” and confesses to having modeled several characters on her — one of whom is no doubt the woman vendor from “Competitors.”
Finally, there is the story “Elul,” whose ending, if we do not know what lies behind it, must strike us as rather forced. After all, it does not seem quite credible for an apparently normal girl, even if her father is a smirking bully, suddenly to kill herself just because a jilted and possibly pregnant friend has done the same. But there is a clue here, and that is Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanine, which the two girls have been reading in secret. All but forgotten today, Sanine was a literary sensation when it appeared in 1907 (the shopboy Berl’s “summary” of it, of course, is a hilariously garbled version of the story). Written during the period of Czarist reaction that followed the abortive Revolution of 1905 by an author who was himself a professed anarchist, the novel, with its curious combination of (for then) daring erotica, world-weary cynicism, and obsession with death, led to a wave of youthful suicides in Russia, comparable to that caused in Europe by The Sorrows of Young Werther over a century before. The times were ripe for it; they were what Tevye’s youngest daughter calls the disillusioned “Age of Beilke” as opposed to the idealistic “Age of Hodl”; and Etke, the daughter of the narrator, was patterned on cases of actual youngsters swept up in an adolescent death cult.