Sholem Aleichem - Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son

So we are all going to America through Antwerp after all. I don’t care if we go through Hotzenplotz, so long as we get to America. Pinni and I are more eager to get there than the others. We know it’ll be wonderful there. Pinni complains to my brother Elyahu, “We are going and going — and not getting anywhere.” Elyahu responds, “ Nu, who’s holding you back? Go! Run! Fly!” Pinni says, “How can I fly when your mother wants to meet with every committee in the world?”

When my mother hears this, she says to Pinni, “If you’re so smart, tell me how to get to America without bedding?” Pinni is speechless, and he and Elyahu make up.

Our friend Pinni just can’t separate from us. The women can’t live without one another either. Oh, they squabble a lot, they needle one another and almost come to blows, but they soon make up. If not for my mother, my sister-in-law Bruche and Pinni’s wife Teibl wouldn’t be friends. They have flare-ups every day, usually my sister-in-law’s doing. She admits she’s a tinderbox. When a bad mood hits her, she’ll throw mud at anyone. But then in a moment she gets so soft, you can use her as a compress.

Bruche has been sparring with me ever since the wedding. She knows I don’t like her, but she thinks I laugh at her. She only imagines it. But if I so much as look at her, she imagines I’m laughing at her. I told you I like to draw and that my brother Elyahu hits me for it. Once I drew a foot, an enormous foot. I drew it with chalk on the ground. You should have seen the fuss people made! Bruche claimed it was her foot. Why would I draw her foot? She’s touchy about her feet because no one else has such big ones! She wears size thirteen galoshes. You should see those galoshes!

She tattled to my brother Elyahu, and he erupted as usual. “You’re drawing figures again? You’re up to your old tricks, drawing people again?”

From one foot it becomes a whole person, and from one person — people! My family can drive you crazy! I must admit that I love to draw figures more and more. An emigrant’s son gave me a colored pencil, the same boy who showed me how to do a governor and to do ventriloquism. I already told you about him. His name is also Motl. They call him Big Motl and me Little Motl. We’ve become good friends in a special way. After he gave me the pencil on the train, I gave him a drawing I’d made of him. It looked just like him, down to the fat cheeks. I made him promise not to show it to anyone, because if my brother Elyahu found out, I’d never hear the end of it. Don’t you know he went straight to my brother and stuck the drawing in front of his face?

“This has to be Motl’s work! Where is he, that figure-maker?” My brother went looking for me, but he couldn’t find me. I was hiding behind my mother, choking with laughter. There is no better place in the world to hide than behind my mother!

B.

Thank God we are now in Antwerp. We were bounced and jounced along the way and arrived all worn-out. But we made it! What can I say? This is quite a city! It doesn’t compare with Vienna, which is much bigger and maybe prettier and has more people. But Antwerp is as clean as can be. Why would that surprise anyone? They wash the streets, they polish the pavements, and they scrub the houses. I’ve seen for myself how they scrub them with soap — but not everywhere. For example, at the inns where all the emigrants stay, it’s the way it always was, which means they’re muddy and smoky, wet and slippery, crowded and noisy. In other words, they’re lively and exciting — excellent, just the way I like it. Our in-law Yoneh the baker hasn’t arrived yet, and neither has our neighbor Pessi and her gang. They’re still traveling, working their way through Germany. “Germany is Sodom!” say the emigrants, as they relate frightful stories. Our misfortune, with the bedding stolen at the border, is nothing compared to the misfortunes that the other emigrants tell us about.

At the inn we get to know a woman from Mezhbizh who is traveling alone. She’s not a widow — her husband is already in America, and she’s on her way to meet him. For a full year she’s been dragging around with her two children. She’s been everywhere — there’s not a city she’s overlooked. She’s fought pitched battles with every committee, and finally, after much trouble, she wound up in Antwerp. She wants to board a ship, but they won’t let her. Do you think it’s because she has bad eyes? God forbid — they’re strong and healthy. But she is a little touched in the head. When you talk to her, she speaks like a normal person, but every now and then she says something you have to laugh at. For example, you ask her where her husband is, and she’ll say, “In America.” “What’s he doing there?” She says, “He is the czar there.” So you say, “How can a Jew be a czar?” And she says in America it’s possible. What do you say to that?

Another bug has gotten into her head: she won’t eat! She tells us not to eat either, not to touch any dairy, because the dairy is not kosher. My mother asks her, “And how about the meat?” and she says the meat here is neither meat nor dairy. We all break out laughing, except for my mother, who’d rather cry. “It’s shameful to laugh at her,” she says, and bursts into tears.

“Again! You haven’t cried for a while! You want all of us to be sent back home on account of your eyes?” says my brother Elyahu, and in a split second my mother’s tears dry up.

My mother pities the woman’s two poor children more than she pities the woman. I don’t know why. The children seem really happy! When their mother talks nonsense, they giggle. I get to know them pretty well. They tell me the committees want to send them home, but their mother won’t go. She wants to go to America, to their father — the czar (hee hee hee!). The committees trick her and tell her they’re sending her by train to America (hee hee hee!). They convince her that a train goes from here straight to America (hee hee hee!).

C.

The wonders of Antwerp are not to be described! Every day new people arrive, most of them with bad eyes. They call it trachoma. America doesn’t let in people with trachoma. You can have a thousand sicknesses, you can be crippled, mute, and who knows what else, and you can get in, but not if you have trachoma. How do you get trachoma? You just do. You have no idea where you got it from. That’s what a girl here in Antwerp told me.

Her name is Goldele. She’s my age, maybe a year older. I’ll tell you a nice story about Goldele. We met at the Ezra. You probably don’t know what the Ezra is, so I’ll explain. The Ezra in Antwerp is like the Alliance in Vienna — it’s created for the emigrants’ benefit. The difference is that Alliance is a man’s name but Ezra sounds like a woman’s. You can tell because you call the Alliance a “he” and the Ezra a “she.” That makes it easy to figure out who’s who.

Anyhow, as soon as we arrived in Antwerp, we went straight to the Ezra, which is really very different from the Alliance. The Ezra throws people out but the Alliance doesn’t. A girl named Fräulein Zaichik sits there and writes everything down. You can go to her whenever you want and talk your heart out to her as much as you want. Everything you say, she enters in a book. She’s a very nice girl. She asked me my name and gave me a candy. But I’ll tell you more about Fräulein Zaichik another time.

Now I want to tell you about Goldele. She comes from Kutneh and arrived here last year with her parents, sisters, and brothers. It was Succos, after the High Holidays, and they were going to have a celebration that all Jews would envy. It wasn’t going to be anything extravagant, and they’d been knocked around like all the emigrants — but they had steamship tickets to America for the whole family, and they were going to leave on Succos. They were well dressed. Each of them had been given two shirts and shoes without holes. Now a year later all she has left is is one shirt and no shoes at all. If not for Fräulein Zaichik, she says, she would go barefoot. Fräulein Zaichik gave her a pair of her own shoes, still in good shape. She showed them to me. They were fine, but a little too big for her.