Sheyne-Sheyndl, too, her narrow provincialism notwithstanding, is a sympathetically drawn figure. (This is especially true in the 1910 edition, in which Sholem Aleichem tempered her shrewishness.) Laughably ignorant and no more aware of her inner motives than Menakhem-Mendl is of his, she is nevertheless the more discerning of the two, and her love for her husband, or, more accurately, her pride in his education and ingrained sense of wifely duty that serve her as substitutes for love, survive — at least for as long as she keeps writing him — her growing exasperation at his folly. Nor, despite her complaints about his absence, is it clear how much she wants him back; rather, the more the two of them protest their mutual longing, the more we suspect that their separation suits them both. As unchallenged queen of her domestic realm, Sheyne-Sheyndl, sufficiently aided by her parents to manage financially, hardly needs a bumbling consort to get in her way, and considering that Yehupetz is a short journey from Kasrilevke, it is remarkable that she never carries out her threat of going there. Although her gossipy news items from Kasrilevke, which start in Chapter 2, may appear calculated at first glance to entice her husband back, a considered reading of them suggests that they represent more her acceptance of his permanent absence and the consequent need to keep him informed.
Indeed this is more than just a suspicion. In a letter written by Menakhem-Mendl not to Sheyne-Sheyndl but to (in the guise of an acquaintance) Sholem Aleichem and published in Der Yid in April 1900, two months after the last exchange in “Millions,” Menakhem-Mendl actually returns for a Passover seder to Kasrilevke — and to a wife less than overjoyed to see him. Arriving the day before the holiday when Sheyne-Sheyndl and her compulsively proverb-quoting mother are at the height of their preparations, he is greeted in the language of her epistolary tirades:
“Why, damn your eyes!” she said to me. “A fine time you’ve found to come home! For years you rot in that sickbed, you live in every hole there is, there’s no revolting thing you don’t do, and of all the times to come creeping home you choose the day before Passover, when we’re busy with the cleaning and there’s not a moment to talk.”[6]
Menakhem-Mendl dashes off this letter to Sholem Aleichem the same day, so that there is no knowing how long he stays in Kasrilevke, but when next heard from in August 1900 he is in Yehupetz again, writing Sheyne-Sheyndl about his new life as a writer. Sholem Aleichem never returned him to Kasrilevke and left the Passover visit out of the 1910 edition.
It should be apparent by now that the textual history of Menakhem-Mendl is complex. As was the case with Tevye, Sholem Aleichem did not at first create Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl with the idea of a book in mind. “Londons,” the first round of their correspondence, was originally conceived as a finished product in itself, an epistolary short story to which no sequel was planned. As was also the case with Tevye, however, husband and wife took on a life of their own. They were liked by their audience; and Sholem Aleichem, who was in the habit of keeping successful characters in the wings for further use, brought them back for repeat performances in “Stocks & Bonds” and “Millions.” Meanwhile, he introduced Menakhem-Mendl into other situations as well, making him a character in two plays and in the second chapter of Tevye the Dairyman, where he talks Tevye into lending him money for a joint investment that goes down the drain. In addition, Sholem Aleichem began a new series of letters between Menakhem-Mendl and himself, of which that describing the Passover visit to Kasrilevke was the second. Among the last of these were three letters from America, written in 1903–1904.[7]
Menakhem-Mendl’s American letters were a follow-up to “Always a Loser,” the sixth and last chapter of the 1910 edition, at the end of which Menakhem-Mendl informs Sheyne-Sheyndl that he is setting out for the port of Hamburg and the New World. When it originally appeared in 1901, however, “Always a Loser” was written to Sholem Aleichem, as also were Chapters 4 and 5 of the 1910 edition, “A Respectable Profession” and “It’s No Go,” both published in 1900.[8] This was the reason that in 1903, when Sholem Aleichem issued his first edition of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl’s collected letters, Chapters 4–6 were not in it. They were added to the 1910 edition after being rewritten and readdressed to Sheyne-Sheyndl, for whom the author composed replies for Chapter 4 alone.
Finally, Menakhem-Mendl was given one more lease on life in 1913, when Sholem Aleichem started a new series for the Warsaw newspaper Haynt in which Sheyne-Sheyndl is written regularly by her husband, now working for a Warsaw paper himself, on the subject of Jewish, Russian, and international politics. These letters (which conclude with several from Vienna, to which Menakhem-Mendl goes to cover a Zionist congress) fill a book twice the size of the 1910 edition. Yet not only do they lack the latter’s madcap verve and verbal sparkle, they are a contradiction in terms, since a Menakhem-Mendl who holds a paying job as a journalist is by definition no longer a Menakhem-Mendl. Neither Haynt not Sholem Aleichem were particularly happy with the series, and it was discontinued before the year was out and omitted by the author from all editions of his collected work.[9]
Against such a background of improvisation, revision, addition and deletion of material, and multiple versions of the same texts and characters, it can be asked who the real Menakhem-Mendl is. Is he the man who reaches New York and returns from there to Warsaw, or the one last heard from heading for Hamburg? Has he or has he not been back to Kasrilevke? Has he blown Tevye’s money or is there no evidence that the two men even know each other?
Of course such questions, like all that confuse fiction with reality, have no answer. They would never arise had the episodes left out of the 1910 edition been mere manuscript drafts that Sholem Aleichem discarded, it being their previous publication that makes one feel that they have “really happened.” And yet this does not make it any less meaningful to ask whether the 1910 edition reflects sound literary judgment. Numerous Yiddish critics have felt it does not. Some, like Y. Y. Trunk, have claimed that the 1903 edition is superior, since the three chapters added in 1910 are of a farcical quality that fails to sustain, as Trunk put it, “the tragic rhythm” of the earlier letters. Others, like Moyshe Mezhritsky, have gone further by contending that even the 1903 edition mistakenly sought to create a book out of independent parts that do not add up to a greater whole. “The chapters [of Menakhem-Mendl],” wrote Mezhritsky, “are not organically bound to one another…. You can change the order of Menakhem-Mendl, putting the last chapter first, without it being any the worse off, because at the end of it the characters are no different from what they were at the beginning.”[10]
The same accusation of being narratively static has also been leveled against Tevye and Motl, the forward movement of which, too, seems at times to be obstructed by repetitive patterns of plot, language, and behavior. Nor, inasmuch as Sholem Aleichem could not have written as voluminously as he did without occasionally resorting to such stratagems, is the charge wholly without merit. Ultimately, though, it is unjustified. Menakhem-Mendl, certainly, does change in the course of his letters, which span several years. (We can gauge the passing of time in them by the age of his son Moyshe-Hirshele, who is barely speaking in Chapter 2 and already learning to read in Chapter 4.) Although he may struggle to sound as jaunty in the last paragraph of his last letter as he does in the first paragraph of his first, his desperation grows perceptibly greater all the time. The man who writes to his wife in Chapter 6, after being bamboozled by a transparent insurance scam, “But it’s as your mother says: once a loser, always a loser,” is not the same man who wrote in Chapter 2, following the dive taken by his stocks, “When all is said and done, you see, I know the market inside and out…. Brains, praise God, I have as much of as any investor.” His self-confidence and self-respect (more precisely, the facade of them, since at bottom he has none to begin with) have been badly eroded.
6
This story, titled
7
The plays in which Menakhem-Mendl appears are
8
“It’s No Go” was first published in
9
The complete text of these letters can be found in
10
Y. Y. Trunk,