Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

“When will the two of you stop yackety-yacking already?” calls my Golde from inside the house. “The borscht has been on the table for an hour and you’re still out there singing Sabbath hymns.”

“Well, well, well,” I say, “strike up the band! Our rabbis weren’t kidding about shivoh dvorim bagoylem —anyone can be a nincompoop, but being a woman helps. Here we are talking about the universe and all you can think of is your borscht.”

“You know what?” says my Golde. “Better my borscht without the universe than the universe without my borscht.”

“Mazel tov,” I say, “a philosopher is born before our eyes! It’s enough my daughters all think they’re a mental notch above the angels without you deciding to join them by flying head first up the chimney …”

“As long as you’re on the subject of flying,” she says, “why don’t you go fly a kite!”

I ask you, is that any way to talk to a hungry man?

Well, let’s leave the princess in her castle and get back to the young prince — I mean to the old priest, God rot his soul! As I was driving home near our village with my empty milk cans one evening, who should ride by in his iron buggy, that combed beard of his blowing in the wind, but His Eminence in person. Damn your eyes, I think, it’s just my luck to run into you!

“Good evening there!” he says to me. “Didn’t you recognize me?”

“They say that’s a sign you’re about to come into money,” I said to him, tipping my hat and making as if to drive on.

“Hold on a minute, Tevel,” he says. “What’s the hurry? I’d like a word or two with you.”

“If it’s a good word, why not?” I say. “Otherwise let’s make it some other time.”

“What other time did you have in mind?” he says.

“How about the day the Messiah comes?” I say.

“But he already has come,” says the priest.

“I believe,” I say, “that I’ve heard that opinion from you before. So tell me, Father, what else is new?”

“That’s just what I wanted to see you about,” he says. “I’d like to speak to you privately about your daughter Chava.”

That made my heart skip a beat! What business of his was my daughter? “My daughters,” I said to him, “don’t need to be spoken for. They’re quite capable of speaking for themselves.”

“But this isn’t a matter that can be left up to her,” he says. “It involves others too. I’m talking about something of great importance. Her whole life depends on it.”

“What makes you such a party to her life?” I say. “I should think she had a father to be that, may he live to a ripe old age …”

“So she does,” he says. “You’re certainly her father. But you don’t see what’s been happening to her. Your daughter is reaching out toward a new life, and you either don’t understand her or else don’t want to understand.”

“Whether I do or don’t understand her or want to is a story in itself,” I say. “But what does it have to do with you, Father?”

“It has a great deal to do with me,” he says, “because she’s in my charge right now.”

“She’s in your what?” I say.

“My custody,” he says, looking right at me and running a hand through that fine, flowing beard of his.

I must have jumped a foot in the air. “What?” I said. “My child in your custody? By what right?” I was beside myself, but he only smiled at me, cool as a cucumber, and said, “Now don’t go losing your temper, Tevel. Let’s talk this over calmly. You know I have nothing against you, God forbid, even if you are a Jew. You know I think a great deal of you Jews. It just pains me to see how stubbornly you refuse to realize that we Christians have your good in mind.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about my good,” I say, “because instead of telling me what you just did, Father, it would have been kinder to poison me or put a bullet in my head. If you’re really such a good friend of mine, do me one favor: leave my daughter alone!”

“Don’t talk like a fool,” he says to me. “No harm will come to your daughter. In fact, this is the happiest moment of her life. She’s about to be married — and to a young man any girl would envy her for.”

“My best wishes,” I say, pretending to smile, though I’m burning up like hellfire inside. “And just who, if you don’t mind my asking, might this young man of hers be?”

“You probably know him,” he says. “He’s a fine, upstanding fellow, and educated too, entirely self-taught. He’s in love with your daughter and wants to marry her. The only problem is, he’s not a Jew.”

Chvedka! I thought, feeling hot and cold flashes all over. It was all I could do not to fall right out of my wagon. I’d be hanged if I was going to show it, though, so I grabbed my horse’s reins, gave him a lash of the whip, and holakh Moyshe-Mordekhai —away I went without so much as a by-your-leave.

I came home — the house was a wreck. My daughters were sprawled out on the beds, crying into the pillows, and my wife Golde looked like death warmed over. I began searching all over for Chava. Where could she be?

But Chava wasn’t anywhere, and I saw I could save myself the trouble of asking about her. I tell you, I knew then what it must feel like to turn over in the grave! I had such a fire in my bones without knowing what to do with it that I could have punched myself in the nose — instead of which I went about shouting at my daughters and taking it out on my wife. I couldn’t sit still for a minute. When I went out to the stable to feed the horse and saw he had slipped a foot through the slats of his stall, I took a stick and began to skin him alive. “I’ll put the torch to you next, you moron, you!” I screamed. “You’ll never see a bag of oats again in your life! If you’re looking for trouble, you’ll get it: blood, darkness, death — all the ten plagues of Egypt!”

After a while, though, it occurred to me that I was flaying a poor dumb beast who had never hurt a fly. I threw him some hay, promised him the sun would rise again in the morning, and went back inside, where I laid my aching body down while my head … but I tell you, I thought my head would burst from trying so hard to figure things out! Ma pishi uma khatosi —was I really the world’s greatest sinner, that I deserved to be its most-punished Jew? God in heaven, mah onu umeh khayeynu —who am I that You don’t forget me even for a second, that You can’t invent a new calamity, a new catastrophe, a new disaster, without first trying it out on me?

There I lay as though on a bed of hot coals when I heard my wife Golde let out a groan that could have torn your heart in two. “Golde,” I said, “are you sleeping?”

“No,” she says. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” I say. “We’re ruined, that’s all. Maybe you have some idea what we should do?”

“God help us all if you have to ask me for ideas,” she says. “All I know is that she rose this morning a healthy, normal child, dressed herself, and then suddenly burst out crying and began to hug and kiss me without telling me why. I thought she had gone mad. ‘Chava,’ I asked, ‘what’s wrong?’ She didn’t say a word except to tell me she was going out to the cows — and that was the last I saw of her. I waited an hour, I waited two, I waited three … where could she have gone? She wasn’t anywhere to be seen. So I called the girls and told them, ‘Listen, I want you to run over to the priest’s and—’ ”

“But how, Golde,” I interrupted, “did you guess she was at the priest’s?”

“How did I guess she was at the priest’s?” she says. “So help me God! Do you think I’m not a mother? Do you think I don’t have eyes in my head?”