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

“With the help of the One Above, praised be His name!” My mother looks up to the sky. Then she adds with a deep sigh, “The living have made it here, but the one who lies in the earth has not.”

By this she means my father. Nowhere and never does she forget my father for as much as a moment.

B.

More enthusiastic than anyone is our friend Pinni. I hesitate to say it, but he’s going crazy. He plants himself with his face toward the ocean, raises his right hand in a fist, and proclaims:

“Listen, you asses, brutes, drunks, hooligans, and pogromchik s! We have you to thank for our being here in this free, fortunate land! If not for you and your persecution, cruel laws, and pogroms, we wouldn’t know about Columbus and Columbus wouldn’t know about us! You will wait a long time before we come back to you! Just as you never can see your own ears, you will never see us in your lives! One day you will look around and realize you had the people of Israel with you and didn’t know how to appreciate them! You will have a miserable end, just like old Spain. You will whine like dogs. One day you will miss us! There will not remain so much as a single Jew. You’ll call us back, but that’ll be the day!”

Who knows how long Pinni would carry on if Yoneh the baker didn’t lay a hand on his back and say, “Pinni! God be with you! To whom are you speaking? To the stones? Come! We’ll be late for the ferry! Or would you rather spend another night on Ellis Island?”

We gather our bundles and make our way to the ferry.

C.

But this is only a matter of speaking. We’re not allowed on so quickly. You forget, we’re carrying an extra burden on our hands — my friend Mendl. They’re not letting him out, but without him we won’t move. My mother says she won’t be able to rest in America if, God forbid, they send the orphan back, who knows where. Luckily we are to meet with a group of people called the Assembly of Guests that has a representative on Ellis Island, a fine man, very dedicated. It is to this man that we are directed. We tell him the truth about the boy. Of course we all speak at once.

The man cuts us off in the middle and suggests we choose one from among us to be our spokesman. After debating which one, we pick Bruche. Why Bruche? Because neither my brother Elyahu nor Pinni can stand to see the other speak without interrupting him. My mother speaks well but a bit too much, which is to say, once she starts talking, she’s soon telling the whole story about her husband and how he got sick and so on and so forth. No one wants to hear her out to the end. Bruche will make it short and sweet.

After Bruche’s brief account of Mendl’s situation, the representative gets down to work. He runs off to meet with different people, and after much trouble he brings my friend back to us.

D.

The representative takes hold of Mendl’s ear and gives him a stern lecture. “Remember, young man, we’re responsible for you, so make sure you behave yourself,” he says. “For two years you’ll be under our supervision. We’ll keep an eye on you. If you don’t behave as you’re supposed to, we’ll send you right back to where you came from!” Then he writes down his name and all of ours, the names of our friends and relatives and their addresses. And then we’re free to go wherever we wish and to do whatever we please.

You must think Mendl is affected by this. Not one bit. My friend Mendl is the kind of person whom nothing surprises, and that’s why I like him. Later, when I would think about my friend Mendl, about what he was and what later became of him, it really seems like God’s miracle. Only in a country like America can the lowly become great, the humble elevated, and even the dead brought to life. I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re still at the ferry.

E.

A ferry is a kind of boat on which you can put a horse and wagon and all your belongings and still cross the water. It’s long and wide enough for my friend Mendl and me to hold hands and to walk the length and breadth of it. My mother is occupied with our friends and family. They’re all chattering away, asking one another what’s new. Then she realizes I and Mendl aren’t there. She makes a fuss and assumes we’ve fallen into the water and drowned. The truth is we saw steps and have climbed to the upper deck — where we see an enormously huge iron statue of a woman. She looks like a giant mother. We’ve barely taken in this statue when we hear my mother’s screams, and my brother Elyahu is before us. He’s mad at us for frightening everyone. We don’t deny it. He would certainly have made us pay dearly for this, but just then my sister-in-law Bruche lets out an odd shriek, “Oy, mother-in-law, I’m sick!” and she goes into the same condition as on the ocean. Long live the Heissen tailor, who refuses to leave our side! He confronts Bruche and lectures her: “A grown woman like you should know the difference between an ocean and a little harbor. Feh, shame on you!”

Bruche protests. She doesn’t know it’s a harbor. She thought we were on the ocean again. Is that such a sin? Pinni says he can tell the difference between an ocean and a harbor simply by the smell. An ocean smells of fish, but in a harbor there are no fish. The Heissen tailor asks, “What makes you so sure?” Pinni answers that he wasn’t speaking to him and on principle hates arguing with tailors.

Moishe the bookbinder gets into it. He reproaches Pinni, saying he is now in America, not in Russia. America is a land of tailors. Here in America a tailor is as important as a landowner is at home, if not more so. In America tailors have a yoonyeh, which is almost like our tailors’ guild.

“We bakers have our own yoonyeh, ” Yoneh the baker puts in. “Our bakers’ yoonyeh is probably as big as the tailors’ yoonyeh .”

“At least say, ‘Forgive the comparison’!” Moishe the bookbinder interrupts him. A ruckus follows about which yoonyeh is bigger.

“In a few minutes we’ll be in Neveyork,” says Pinni to my brother Elyahu, in order to change the subject from yoonyehs, which is getting on all our nerves.

The city rises in front of our eyes, getting larger as we approach it. Ach! What a city! Ach! What tall buildings! They are cathedrals, not buildings! And windows! A thousand windows! If only I had a pencil and paper!

F.

Trrrach-tarrrerach — tach-tach-tach! Tach! Dzin-dzin-dzin-glin-glon! Hoo-hooooo! Fee-yoo! Ay-ay-ay-ay! And again— trachtarrrarach! Then comes the hoarse screech of a captured pig: Wheee! Wheee! Wheee! These are the sounds that greet us when we land in New York. As long as we were on water, we were calm, but the moment we are standing with both feet on American soil, we are overcome by panic.

The first to lose her composure is my mother. She looks exactly like a mother hen fearing for her chicks, spreading her wings and clucking in distress. She opens her arms wide and shouts, “Motl! Mendl! Elyahu! Bruche! Pinni! Teibl! Where are you? Come here!”

“God be with you, mother-in-law! Why are you shouting?” says Bruche, and my brother Elyahu adds, “Your screaming and yelling will get us chased out of America!”

“That’s ridiculous!” Pinni shoves both hands into his pockets and pushes his cap back on his head. “May the czar suffer as long as it will take for them to get rid of us! Do you forget that America was created by God in order to protect and shelter all those who are driven and persecuted, pushed around and humiliated, from every corner of the earth?”

The crush of people is enormous. Our friend Pinni has almost the same mishap he had when arriving in London — he’s stretched out on the street, soon to be trampled and stepped on. But this time he escapes with a mere blow to the side, strong enough to knock his cap off, which is caught up by the wind and deposited a distance off. This wastes several minutes and makes us miss the trolley car. But we don’t have to wait too long. Another one soon comes along, and we climb up with our bundles and grab all the empty seats. We’re off to the city.