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

Pinni replies, “Absolutely, and what Jews! Real Jews!”

“Would you like to do a good deed?” the man says.

“For instance?”

“I have to observe the anniversary of a death in the family today and can’t leave home. I need a few men to make a minyan of ten. Is the lad a bar mitzvah yet?”

He means me. I’m quite pleased that he calls me a “lad” and thinks I’m a bar mitzvah.

We climb some stairs with him and enter a dark room. It’s packed with small, dirty children and filled with the thick odor of fried fish. There aren’t the necessary ten yet. He needs seven more. The man asks us to sit and runs out into the street to find them. He does this several times until he succeeds. In the meantime I get acquainted with the grimy children and peer into the stove where the fish are frying. Fried fish isn’t as bad as my sister-in-law Bruche makes it out to be. If they’d give me a piece of fried fish right now, I’d love it. I don’t think even Bruche would refuse it. We’ve hardly eaten all day. For several days we’ve been living on herring and radishes. In Whitechapel you can get good black radishes. The man would be doing us a favor if he’d offer us a bite to eat, but obviously he has no idea we’re hungry. How do I know? As soon as we finish the mincha prayer and polish off the kaddish, he thanks us for our trouble and leads us to the door. But my brother Elyahu stalls long enough to ask about a committee, glancing in the meantime at the fried fish and swallowing hard. The man has one hand on the doorknob and gestures with the other while telling us not such good news.

First of all, he says, the committee doesn’t exist. That is, there’s a committee, really several committees, but the London committees don’t hand out money so quickly. If you need help from a London committee, you have to do a lot of running around first, bringing papers and witnesses proving that you’re an emigrant going to America. The reason is that all the emigrants, and there are many here, only say they want to go to America. Once they’ve brought everything, they demand that the committee give them money for return fare home. The London committee doesn’t think highly of America.

And Pinni, a hothead, spouts his customary fiery Yiddish-Russian: “How is this possible? What right do they have to send us back? Aren’t they ashamed of themselves, living in such a civilized country—”

The man interrupts him and holds open the door. “You can complain as much as you want,” he says. “I’ll give you the address of a committee. Go there, and maybe you’ll find that it’s all right!”

C.

We leave the yahrtzeit with the odor of fried fish in our nostrils. We’re all really disappointed, but no one says anything except Bruche. She wishes them every ill in the world. She wishes they would choke to death on their fried fish that smelled a mile away.

My mother can’t stand it. “What do you have against them, poor honest folks?” she snaps at Bruche. “They live in a hell but still and all, when it comes to a yahrtzeit, they look to find a minyan .”

Bruche’s answer is, “Mother-in-law! Let them burn together with their yahrtzeit and their fried fish! They stop strangers and drag them into their house but can’t give the child so much as a little piece of fried fish out of charity.”

She means me. Not so long ago I was a bar mitzvah lad, and now I’m a child. But it’s nice that Bruche is looking out for me.

The six of us make our way to the committee. We thank the man for suggesting that we go by tram. But the London tram doesn’t like to stop to pick people up. No matter how hard you wave your arms, it keeps going. Running after it is useless — you won’t catch it. Luckily a clean-shaven Englishman takes pity on us. If you see a person with a clean-shaven face, know that he’s an Englishman.

He sees us waving our arms at the passing trams and shows us a place to stand in front of a church. And he’s right. In no more than a minute, a tram stops. The six of us get on, and off we go. The conductor comes over and asks us to buy tickets. What then happens, we come to understand only later.

Pinni asks him in Yiddish, “How much?” The conductor says, “Fife.” Pinni asks him again, “How much?” The conductor, becoming annoyed, again says, “Fife.” Pinni turns to us and says, “Do you hear that? He’s telling me to go whistle!”

My brother Elyahu goes up to the conductor and asks with the help of sign language, “How much does a fare cost?”

The conductor, now really angry, shouts, “Fife!”

Pinni starts to laugh and Elyahu, now also angry, says to the conductor in Yiddish, “Go fife yourself!”

The conductor pulls the cord to stop the tram and throws us all off in such a rage, you’d think we wanted to murder him and run off with his money purse.

It turns out that when we thought the conductor was telling us to go whistle, he was telling us the price of the ticket in English.

“ Nu, I ask you, shouldn’t London burn down?” says Bruche as we walk to the committee.

D.

At the London committee it’s just as lively as at all the other committees. The courtyard is filled with emigrants, like so much trash, and inside people are sitting around smoking cigars and saying to one another, “All right.” The difference is that while the German committees wear their whiskers curled up at the ends and speak German, the London committees have clean-shaven faces and say, “All right!” It’s a real show — the men are shaven, and the women wear wigs. Even the girls wear false hair and braided buns, have large teeth, and are so ugly they turn your stomach. Yet it’s they who are laughing at us, pointing their fingers and squealing so loudly, we’re embarrassed for them.

Two girls stop us in the middle of the street and accost my brother Elyahu, telling him to go to a barbershop. At first we don’t understand what that means, but now we know: going to a barbershop means getting shaved and cutting your hair. What strange creatures! They go around gobbling up fried fish in the middle of the street that you can smell a mile away, their mouths dripping grease, and they hate hair. Drunks there are plenty of, but they don’t sprawl all over the street as they do at home. The English don’t allow it. “It’s quite a country,” says Bruche, “but it refuses to burn down.”

“What good will it be if it does burn down?” asks my brother Elyahu, and gets an earful from her.

When Bruche wants to, she really knows how to put you down. Sometimes she gives you the silent treatment and doesn’t speak, but other times the words flood out and you have to either stuff your ears with cotton or run away as far as you can. Here’s what she said, word for word: “Why are you defending this accursed country with its black sky and shaven snouts and its dirty Whitechapel, its fried fish, old maids with braided buns, greasy dresses, paupers who drink ginger beer, conductors who tell you to go whistle, and Jews who have yahrtzeit and begrudge you a drink of water? A city like that should burn down!”

Bruche takes a breath, crosses her arms, and says, “London, why don’t you burn down?”

God in heaven! When will we ever get to America?

A.

Give us a mazel tov, we’re in America. Or they tell us we’re in America. We haven’t really set foot in America yet because we’re still in Castle Garden. Or that’s what it was once called — now it’s called Ellie’s Island. Why do they call it Ellie’s Island? Because it once belonged to someone named Ellie. Pinni is very angry at Ellie’s Island because they detain the poor people there but let the rich ones go the minute they get off the ship. He says that’s more like what you would expect from those Russian thieves than from this land of the free. Here everyone is equal. There are no poor, no rich. He spouts names like Columbus, Shakespeare, and Buckle and big words I don’t understand like civilization. He wants to write a song about them but has no ink, pen, or paper. My brother Elyahu tells him that if he doesn’t like this country, he can go back. You remember that these two are rarely of one mind? Whatever one says, the other says the opposite. “Summer and winter,” Bruche calls them, receiving a stern look from her husband, who calls her a cow and a busybody and other names not fit to repeat. My mother intercedes and tells her daughter-in-law that when cats fight, a person shouldn’t get in the middle because he might get scratched.