As for Sheyne-Sheyndl, even if we do not interpret her silence in Chapters 5 and 6 as a decision to stop writing her husband (there is after all a more practical explanation: he is on the road and she has no address for him), we see her attitude toward him shift from semi-credulous hope to furious impatience and thence to open contempt. Like him, she still begins and ends her letters with the same rote formulas (real features of traditional Yiddish epistolary style that are comically contrasted by Sholem Aleichem with the actual content that they frame), but her belief in him, and in the prospect of his ever supporting their family, steadily shrinks.
The Israeli scholar Abraham Novershtern has written an essay pointing out, not only how rigorously Sholem Aleichem weighed the contents of the 1910 edition from a literary point of view, but how, in editing and arranging them, he gave them a dramatic structure that might be described (the image is mine) as funnel-shaped, since the more Menakhem-Mendl slides downward, the more his horizons close in on him.[11] Starting out in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, where he dreams of making millions in the futures market, he next unsuccessfully buys and sells shares in more provincial Kiev; then flops as a middleman working on commission; then fails as a writer, a “respectable profession,” as he puts it, but one that pays paltry sums; then, returning to small-town Ukraine, is made a fool of in the once but no longer reputable occupation of matchmaker; and finally is hoodwinked while peddling insurance in Bessarabia, a rural boondocks near the Rumanian border that makes Kasrilevke seem the center of the world. He has ended up considerably behind his starting point, and the lower the bar is set each time, the more crushing is his failure to clear it. What is left to try but America?
Although it would have been possible for Sholem Aleichem to readress Menakhem-Mendl’s 1903–1904 letters from New York to Sheyne-Sheyndl also, thus adding a seventh, American chapter to the 1910 edition, he had good reasons for not doing so. Between 1904 and 1910 he had been in America himself, and despite his personal disappointments there, he had seen what a land of opportunity for its Jewish immigrants it was. Even in 1903, he had had Menakhem-Mendl comment on the fundamental economic difference between the United States and Russia. On the one hand, writes Menakhem-Mendl, the immigrant to America takes any work, does things no one would dream of doing back home; why, he relates, he has just met a man, a respected Jew in the Old Country, who is proud to have found a job sorting dirty underwear in a laundry! Yet on the other hand, in America even a menial job like this pays well enough for a man to save — Menakhem-Mendl uses the Yiddishized English word onseyvn—and get ahead. Ot vos heyst a gebentsht land, “Now that’s what I call a blessed land,” he concludes in a tone midway between irony and amazement.[12]
Of course, one can be a Menakhem-Mendl in America, too, but with a difference, for here one’s failures are purely personal and in no way reflect the general condition. Even were he less of a shlemiel, Menakhem-Mendl could get nowhere in Russia, because there is no such thing there as upward mobility; he is indeed the stymied symbol of his class that the Marxist critics make him out to be, and his fantasies are his only alternative to accepting this. But who is to say what is fantasy in America? Ordinary people do make money there on the stock market, since it is not just a game for suckers, and Menakhem-Mendl’s harebrained scheme of a super-efficient chain of matchmaking bureaus with a centralized list of customers is harebrained only in Yehupetz. In America, with the help of an affordable bank loan, it just might work.
Menakhem-Mendl must therefore never make it to America, for whether he fails or succeeds there (and in his letters from New York he does succeed, launching the journalist’s career that eluded him in Yehupetz and that he is later to pursue in Warsaw), he either goes on being himself and ceases to be an archetype or becomes a new archetype and ceases to be himself. To be both the archetypal Jewish immigrant to America and himself, Sholem Aleichem had to invent someone else: Motl, Peysi the cantor’s son.
The “sunniest” of Sholem Aleichem’s major works, as it has been called, one in which the characteristically rambling, anxious voice of his protagonists yields to the direct speech of a high-spirited child, Motl, the Cantor’s Son has a simpler publishing history than Menakhem-Mendl; it too, however, bears the author’s typical stamp of multiple versions and interrupted composition. Part I, written under the influence of Sholem Aleichem’s 1906 visit to America, was serialized in 1907–1908 in the New York Yiddish paper Der Amerikaner. Twenty of its chapters were reprinted in book form in 1911; two others, “I Land a Swell Job” and “With the Emigrants,” omitted from the 1911 edition, have been restored in the present translation.[13] Part II, serialized in 1916 in the New York Yiddish paper Di Varhayt and in English translation in the New York World, was never finished. Sholem Aleichem was still writing it at the time of his death, and one can feel his health flagging as he wrote, the weekly installments growing shorter and more fragmentary, as if gasping for breath like Motl’s dying father in the book’s opening pages. Besides its seventeen completed chapters, several paragraphs were written of an eighteenth, tentatively titled Mir moofn, “We Moof [to a new apartment].”[14]
It is his father’s death in Kasrilevke, ironically, that makes Motl the most carefree boy in Jewish literature, for with it he has inherited the best of both worlds: a mother and an elder brother who still provide him with love and security, and a life unburdened by a patriarchal religion and its demands of strict decorum, long hours of study, and scrupulous attention to ritual observance. From the little we know about Peysi, Motl’s father, he would have enforced these demands rigorously, since as a synagogue cantor (and one, it would seem, of stern temperament) he is a foremost member of the religious establishment of the shtetl. Motl’s comic refrain of “Lucky me, I’m an orphan” is thus truer than a boy his age can comprehend. Emancipated from a tradition he is not weighed down by like his brother Elye, he is ready for the freedom of America before he even knows what or where it is.
Just how old Motl is when his father dies is, like the wanderings of Menakhem-Mendl or the number of Tevye’s daughters, a question of variant texts. In the present translation his age is mentioned in Chapter 1, where his brother calls him “almost nine,” in Chapter 4, and in Chapter 19, in which he tells us he is the same age as his friend Bumpy, who is “nine going on ten.” But although this is the wording of the posthumous 1920 edition of Motl edited by Sholem Aleichem’s son-in-law Y. D. Berkovits, his Hebrew translator and a Hebrew author in his own right, it is not that of the 1911 edition edited by the author himself. There, Elye calls Motl a “five-year-old” and Bumpy is described as “seven going on eight.” “Nine” was Berkovits’ emendation, based on his, and possibly Sholem Aleichem’s reconsidered, judgment that Motl, as revealed to us by his language and perceptions, is too mature to be only five or even seven. Sholem Aleichem himself was clearly aware of this problem, because elsewhere he wavered over Motl’s age, making him six and eight in other passages in the serialized version of Part I that were deleted from the 1911 edition, and casting him as a boy of twelve or thirteen in a 1915 outline for a film script.[15]
11
Avraham Novershtern, “Menahem-Mendl le-Shalom Aleikhem: beyn toldotha-tekstle-mivnehha-yetsirah,”
12
“Adieu: Der letster briv fun Menakhem-Mendlen,”
13
The reason for the omission of these two chapters in the 1911 edition of
14
These paragraphs appear in Shmeruk’s variorum edition, pp. 299–300, but have been omitted from the present translation. Although it is noteworthy that Sholem Aleichem planned to have Motl’s family move to a new apartment, apparently as another indication of its economic progress, only the first two of the extant paragraphs of
15
See Shmeruk, “Sippurei Motl ben he-hazan le-Shalom Aleikhem,” p. 315n. 24. Berkovits was extremely close to Sholem Aleichem and consulted him often when translating his work, so that it is quite possible that the subject of Motl’s age came up between them. In any case, I have accepted his emendation in my translation. It makes good sense, since a five-year-old Motl is not credible. For a brief discussion of how many daughters Tevye has, see the introduction to my translation of