Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories

Apart from the three of us, there was another diner at the table, a man with red, jowly cheeks. I hadn’t the vaguest notion who he was, but he was no mean eater, because all the time that Podhotzur kept talking, he kept putting it away. You know what the rabbis say about shloyshoh she’okhlu , three men who eat at one table? Well, with someone like him you didn’t need the other two …

In a word, I’m being eaten at on one side of me and talked to on the other — and such talk it was, too, as went in one ear and straight out the other: construction contracts, tenders, specifications, government ministries, Japan … The one thing that interested me was Japan, because I took part in the Japanese war myself. That is, back then, when horses were in such short supply that the army was beating the bushes for them, some quartermaster came around to me, took my nag for a physical, measured him up, down, and sideways, put him through his paces, and gave him an honorable discharge. “I could have told you that you were wasting your time,” I said to him, “because it says in the Bible, yoydeya tsaddik nefesh behemtoy —a righteous man knows the soul of his beast, and Tevye’s horse was never meant to be a hero.” But you’ll have to excuse me, Pan Sholem Aleichem, for getting sidetracked. Let’s go back to our story.

Well, we wined and dined and asked the Lord’s blessing, and when we rose from the table Podhotzur took me by the arm and steered me into a special office that was done up like all get-out with guns and swords all over the walls and little toy cannons on the desk. He plumped me down on a sofa soft as butter, took two big, juicy cigars from a gold box, lit one for himself and one for me, sat down facing me, crossed his legs, and said, “Do you have any idea why I sent for you?”

Aha, I thought, now he’s about to talk turkey! I played innocent, though, and answered him, “How should I know? Am I my son-in-law’s keeper?”

“I have something of a private nature to discuss with you,” he says.

It’s a job for sure! I tell myself. To him, though, I only say, “If it’s something good, I’ll be happy to hear it.”

Well, he took the cigar from his mouth, did Mr. Podhotzur, and began to deliver a lecture. “You’re an intelligent man,” he says, “and so you won’t mind my speaking to you frankly. You know that I run a big business, and that when one runs a business as big as mine—”

This is where I come in, I thought — and so I said, interrupting him, “That’s exactly what the Talmud means by marbeh nekhosim marbeh da’ogoh! I suppose you’re familiar with the passage?”

You couldn’t say he wasn’t honest. “To tell you the truth,” he says with that little whinnying laugh, “I never studied a page of Talmud in my life. I wouldn’t know what a Talmud looked like if you showed me one.”

Do you see who I was up against now? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if God had punished him by making him an ignoramus, he would at least keep his trap shut about it!

“Well,” I said, “I thought as much. You didn’t look like much of a Talmudist to me. But why not finish what you were saying?”

“What I was saying,” he says, “is that with a business like mine, a reputation like mine, a public position like mine, I can’t afford to have a cheesemonger for a father-in-law. The governor of the province is a personal friend of mine, and I’m perfectly capable of having a Brodsky, even a Rothschild, as my guest …”

I swear, I’m not making up a word of it! I sat there staring at that shiny bald head of his and thinking, you may very well be palsy-walsy with the governor and have Rothschild over for tea, but you still talk just like a guttersnipe! “Look here,” I said, trying not to sound too annoyed, “I can’t help it, can I, if Rothschild insists on dropping in on you!” Do you think he got it, though? Loy dubim veloy ya’ar —it just sailed right by him.

“I would like,” he says, “for you to leave the dairy line and engage in something else.”

“And what exactly do you suggest that I engage in?” I asked.

“In anything you like,” he says. “Do you think the world is short of things to do? I’ll help you out with money, as much as you need, if you just agree to give up your cheesemongering. Come to think of it, I have an even better idea: how would you like to go pronto to America?”

And he sticks his cigar between his teeth again and gives me a shiny-headed look.

Well, you tell me: how does one answer a young whippersnapper like that? At first I thought, why go on sitting here like a golem, Tevye? Pick yourself up, walk through the door, shut it behind you, and holakh le’oylomoy —goodbye and good riddance! That’s how hot under the collar he made me. The nerve of that contractor! Who did he think he was, telling me to give up a perfectly good living and go to America? Just because Rothschild was about to ring his doorbell, did that mean Tevye had to be sent packing to the other side of the globe? My blood began to boil; I was getting angrier by the minute, and now I was good and mad at my Beilke, too. How can you sit there like the Queen of Sheba surrounded by a thousand clocks and mirrors, I thought, when your father Tevye is being dragged over hot coals to the whipping post? May I hope to die if your sister Hodl isn’t better off than you are! What’s true is true: she may not live in a castle full of gewgaws, but at least that Peppercorn of hers is a human being — in fact, too much of one, because he never thinks of himself, only of others. And the head on that boy’s shoulders … it’s not a shiny pot of wet noodles like some people’s … and the tongue on him … why, he’s solid gold! Try polishing him off with a quotation and three more come flying back at you! Just you wait, you Putzhoddur, you, I’ll let you have such a verse from the Bible that you’ll see fireworks before your eyes …

And having thought it all over I turned to him and said, “Look here, I don’t hold it against you that you think the Talmud is mumbo-jumbo. When a Jew sits in Yehupetz expecting Rothschild any minute, he can afford to keep the Talmud in his attic. Still, even you can surely understand a simple line of Scripture such as every Russian peasant boy knows. I’m referring, of course, to what Onkelos has to say in his Targum about what the Bible has to say in the Book of Genesis about Laban the Aramean: miznavto dekhazirto loy makhtmen shtreimilto …”

“I’m afraid,” he says, looking at me sideways like a rooster, “that that’s a bit over my head. What does it mean?”

“It means,” I say, “that you can’t make a fur hat out of a pig’s tail.”

“And what,” he asks, “am I supposed to understand by that?”

“You’re supposed to understand,” I say, “that I’m not being shipped off to America.”

Well, he laughed that whinnying laugh of his and said to me, “All right. If America is out, how about Palestine? Isn’t that where all the old Jews like you go to die?”

The minute he said that, I felt it drive home like a nail. Hold on there, Tevye, I told myself. Maybe that’s not such a weird idea. There just may be something in it. With all the pleasure you’ve been getting from your children, why not try your luck elsewhere? You’re a jackass if you think you have anyone or anything to keep you here. Your poor Golde is six feet under, and between you and me, so are you; how long do you intend to go on drudging?… And by the way, Pan Sholem Aleichem, you should know that I always had a hankering to be in the Holy Land. I would have given anything to see the Wailing Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the River Jordan, Mount Sinai, the Red Sea, the Ten Plagues, and all the rest of it with my own eyes. In fact, I was so carried away thinking of that blessed land of Canaan where the milk and honey flow that I had all but forgotten where I was when Podhotzur brought me back to it by saying, “Well, how about it? Why not decide pronto.”