It has been argued that these differences were deliberate and reflect the passage of time in the story, which some critics have viewed as either indeterminate or spanning a very long period.[16] A careful reading of the text, however, shows that it is neither and that approximately two and a half years elapse from beginning to end: some six months from the death of Motl’s father on the holiday of Shavuos in late spring to his family’s departure from Kasrilevke in autumn, soon after the High Holy Days; a year of traveling to New York, which is reached several days after Yom Kippur; and another year in New York, where summer has ended as the story breaks off. Moreover, even if we allow for Motl’s growing older — a boy of five-plus in Chapter 1 could indeed have turned seven by Chapter 19—the fact remains that it is in the book’s opening paragraphs, when Motl is youngest, that his language is most unlike a child’s. Conceivably, this could be explained by reading his narrative, or parts of it, as an adult recollection of childhood — a construction that, while it does not harmonize well with most of the text, is supported by a number of passages. (Most notably the lines in the chapter “On Solid Ground” in which Motl speaks of his friend Mendl from the vantage point of many years later.) Alternately, Khone Shmeruk has proposed that Sholem Aleichem might have begun the first chapter of Motl as a third- rather than first-person narrative and neglected to simplify its language when he made the switch.[17] One way or another, too much should not be made of such inconsistencies. Under the pressure of newspaper deadlines and bills to be paid Sholem Aleichem often wrote hurriedly, and the internal discrepancies resulting from this were not always eliminated in subsequent revisions.
Nor is the question of Motl’s age that crucial, because in the final analysis, it is not what he understands but what he sees and hears, often without understanding, that makes him our window on events. Although he is too young and buoyant to be worried about the things that trouble the adult world around him, he is also keenly curious, and our knowledge of this world and its complexities is the product of a partnership in which he observes and we interpret. It is only, for example, because Motl itches to “find out every secret in the world” that we overhear Pinye and Elye’s conversation in Kasrilevke about emigrating to America; but it is left to us to formulate what lies at the heart of the two men’s competitive relationship — namely, that while Elye prides himself on his enterprise and practicality, it is the absentminded Pinye who is the real innovator and initiator and Elye who gets dragged along behind him.
Motl and Pinye are natural allies. It is they, Motl tells us, who feel “made for America” and are sure they’ll “make it to the top there,” for they alone are sufficiently open to new experience to embrace it with both arms. Even before New York is reached, we know who in our party of travelers will Americanize the quickest, with the list headed by Motl, followed by Pinye, Elye, Brokheh, Taybl, and (although she will prove to have a resourcefulness of her own) Motl’s mother. Sholem Aleichem, a writer adept at making his main characters both believable individuals and representative types, was well aware that this reflected general categories. Young Jewish males, sociologically, were more eager to emigrate from eastern Europe than females, and less tradition-minded males like Pinye were the most so; upon arrival in the United States, acculturation proceeded in the same order. Unlike Elye, who continues to think in Old World terms, Pinye has cast these aside even before reaching “Ella’s Island.” It is he who supports going to work in a sweatshop as a first step up the economic ladder when Elye feels this is beneath his dignity; who throws himself into the garment workers’ strike that Elye holds back from; who first shaves off the beard that is a symbol of religious orthodoxy; who presses for going into business; who realizes that a corner stand is too small an operation; who grasps that aggressive advertising is the key to economic success in America. There may be something in him of Menakhem-Mendl, whose faith in the capitalist dream he shares, but Pinye understands the workings of capitalism as Menakhem-Mendl does not, and in him we see — although only in its earliest stages, since Motl, the Cantor’s Son breaks off before he can rise very far — the dream coming true.
Beginning with the writing of its first chapters, Sholem Aleichem intended Motl, the Cantor’s Son to be a saga of Russian-Jewish emigration to America in which Motl’s story would be continued through adolescence and into adulthood. His initial plan was for his hero to be a successful musician taking after his father, and the opening of Part I abounds in references to Motl’s musical talents. On his return trip from New York to Europe in 1907, however, Sholem Aleichem met aboard ship a young man, the son of Jewish immigrants to America, who was traveling to Europe to study art, and, much taken by him, converted Motl into a budding artist — a motif introduced for the first time in Chapter 17 of Part I, in which Motl tells us, “I’ve liked to draw since I was little.” As Dan Miron perceptively points out, the reason for this change was probably the author’s realization that, on a symbolic level, the character of Motl worked better if he did not follow in his father’s footsteps but rather struck out on his own in a creative field that, unlike music, was not traditionally Jewish.[18]
It is entertaining to speculate what would have become of Motl had his creator lived to keep writing about him. A well-known painter? A syndicated cartoonist? Perhaps even an animated filmmaker in Hollywood? Any of these would have been in keeping with Sholem Aleichem’s expansive sense of the prospects America held for its Jews, the historical acumen of which seems even greater in light of his own failure to do well there. (Motl itself was discontinued in 1908 because the editor of Der Amerikaner thought it boring!)
As for Pinye, who knows? “Prehzident,” which in his ignorance of constitutional law he believes himself eligible for, he will never be, nor as rich as his triumvirate of heroes, “Kahnegi,” “Rahknfelleh,” and “Vendehbilt.” But why not (if not a writer of lyrics for songs and Broadway musicals) president of his own large ad agency? He is still young, in his late teens or early twenties (Kasrilevke marriages take place at an early age — Elye’s when he has barely begun to grow a beard), and with his drive and a few years of night school, there is no reason why Pinye cannot go far.
Elye should do well as a small-time businessman. Despite his comic entrepreneurial adventures in Kasrilevke, he is too hesitant and brooding to take larger risks and has Brokheh at his side to see that he doesn’t. A nice “foinitsheh” store — after all, he already knows the business — seems a good bet, unless he ends up going into his father-in-law’s knish business.
16
Dan Miron, for instance (“Bouncing Back,” pp. 130–133), calls the time frame in
17
Shmeruk, “Sippurei Motl ben he-hazan,” p. 324. Shmeruk credits the Yiddish critic M. Viner with being the first to broach this theory.