Elye and even Pinye will always remain immigrants; they are too old to learn to speak English without an accent and this alone will mark them as first-generation Americans. Not Motl, however, who in a year or two will be indistinguishable from native-born New Yorkers his age. Already he is shooting marbles in the street; before long it will be stickball, handball, and off-the-stoop. He will become a Yankee, Dodger, or Giant fan; will finish P.S. 75 or 147 and go to Seward or Stuyvesant High; will spend long summer days at Coney Island. If he was nine in 1907, he may be sent to fight in World War I. He will be a young man during Prohibition; he will still be young when the Depression comes along. Too old to serve in World War II, he will be in his mid-fifties when he hears his first rock ’n’ roll and in his mid-sixties when John F. Kennedy is shot.
It is a bit of a shock to think of him this way. It is a shock to realize that his memories of Kasrilevke will become few and fuzzy; that although he will not forget his Yiddish, he will rarely or never speak it once his mother dies. In fact, had Sholem Aleichem lived to continue Motl’s story, he would have been confronted by a dilemma, because Motl will soon stop thinking in Yiddish. Would it have been feasible, from a literary point of view, to have him continue narrating in it? What psychological sense would this have made?
The rapid encroachment of English on Yiddish is a central theme in Part II of Motl. Put to comic effect there, it is nevertheless a reliable gauge of the speed with which Americanization is taking place. By contrast, one of the salient things about the book’s second half is how small a role Jewish tradition plays in it. Even in Part I, tradition fades increasingly into the background after Peysi the cantor’s death; although Motl grudgingly goes to synagogue to say the mourner’s prayer, it is not clear how long he keeps this up, and once the family is on the road, the only religious rituals we hear of are a single accidental prayer quorum in London and the Yom Kippur service aboard the Prince Albert. Yet in America there is not even that much. Though Elye, it would seem, still observes the basics of Judaism and says his morning prayers before going to work, only his mother attends synagogue services, and the cuffs Elye gives Motl for smoking on the Sabbath — an act strictly prohibited by Jewish law — are less noteworthy than Motl’s reaction to them. “It seems that if Peysi the cantor’s son is caught smawkink on the Sabbath, you’re allowed to beat him to death,” Motl declares, not with defiance or guilt (that we last see aboard the Prince Albert, when he hopes God doesn’t know he is dreaming of food on Yom Kippur), but with the precocious amusement of one who no longer understands how such things could matter to anyone. If Motl — who once told us in Kasrilevke, in one of his few expressions of visceral Jewishness, of his hatred for pigs — has not already eaten his first New York ham sandwich, can we doubt that this is only a matter of time?
Will he one day marry out of his people — something that, to his family and even to himself, is still unimaginable in 1907? Perhaps not, since the years when he is most likely to marry will be ones of low intermarriage rates for American Jews. If he does raise Jewish children, however, this will be strictly sociologically determined. Internally, there is nothing we can detect in him — no inelasticity of self, no allegiance to his father’s memory — to keep him within the Jewish fold.
This is why Motl, the Cantor’s Son is not so cloudlessly sunny a work after all — or rather, why its sunshine is that of the summer that ends three times in the book: with the departure from Kasrilevke, with the embarkation from London, and with the final breaking off of the narrative. Though his two stays in New York barely added up to two years, Sholem Aleichem was quick to intuit the full enormity of the transformation that Jews in America were about to undergo. He was not oblivious to the sweatshops, the tenements, or the eastern European atmosphere of neighborhoods like the Jewish Lower East Side; these things are featured in Motl, too. But more than most Jewish writers and intellectuals of his time, with their view of America’s immigrant Jewish community as either another chapter in the repetitive cycle of Jewish history or part of a worldwide struggle against an oppressive capitalist order, he understood that America was something radically new: a truly gebentsht land for its Jews, who in return for its blessings would gladly relinquish the rich ethnic particularity that all his writing was about.
Motl is the happy ending of the eastern European Jewish tragedy, the rise after which there is no longer any fall. But he is also the end of Sholem Aleichem’s world, his face lifted to the kiss that will kill it benignly at the same time that it is being murdered brutally in Europe. Even had Sholem Aleichem kept writing about him, Motl would have outstripped his creator, venturing into realms that Sholem Aleichem did not know and could not have followed him in without holding him back. Sholem Aleichem died before he could lose him, just as Peysi the cantor did.
The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl
Londons: The Odessa Exchange
To my wise, esteemed, & virtuous wife Sheyne-Sheyndl, may you have a long life!
Firstly, rest assured that I am, praise God, in the best of health. God grant that we hear from each other only good and pleasing news, amen!
Secondly, words fail me in describing the grandeur and beauty of the city of Odessa, the fine character of its inhabitants, and the wonderful opportunities that exist here. Just imagine: I take my walking stick and venture out on Greek Street, as the place where Jews do business is called, and there are twenty thousand different things to deal in. If I want wheat, there’s wheat. If I feel like wool, there’s wool. If I’m in the mood for bran, there’s bran. Flour, salt, feathers, raisins, jute, herring — name it and you have it in Odessa. I sounded out several possibilities, none of which were my cup of tea, and shopped along Greek Street until I hit on just the right thing. In a word, I’m dealing in Londons and not doing badly! You can clear 25 or 50 rubles at a go, and sometimes, with a bit of luck, 100. On Londons you can make your fortune in a day. There was a fellow not long ago, a synagogue sexton, mind you, who walked away with 30,000 faster than you can say your bedtime prayers and now he cocks his snoot at the world. I tell you, my dearest, the streets of Odessa are paved with gold! I don’t regret for a moment having come here. But what am I doing in Odessa, you ask, when I was on my way to Kishinev? It seems God wanted to deal me in. Listen to what He does for a man.
I arrived at Uncle Menashe’s in Kishinev and asked for the dowry money. “How come you need it?” he asks. “I need it,” I say, “because I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.” Well, he says, he can’t give me cash but he can give me a letter of credit to Brodsky in Yehupetz. “Let it be Yehupetz,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” That’s just it, he says. He’s not sure there is cash in Yehupetz. He can give me a letter of credit to Bachrach in Warsaw. “Warsaw’s fine, too,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” “But why go all the way to Warsaw?” he asks. “Suppose I give you a letter of credit to Barabash in Odessa?” “Make it Odessa,” I say. “As long as it’s cash.” “So how come you need so much cash?” he asks. “If I didn’t,” I say, “I wouldn’t be here.”
To make a long story short, he went round and round — it helped like cupping helps a corpse. When I say cash, I mean cash. In the end he gave me two promissory notes for 500 rubles, due in five months, a letter of credit to Barabash for 300, and the rest in banknotes to help cover my expenses.