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

“If that’s the case,” the boss responds, “you’re getting the sack, which means tomorrow you can stay home.”

C.

“I’d rather live on a piece of bread for three days than sell sausages,” says my brother Elyahu. Our friend Pinni does not agree with him. Pinni believes America is a free country and in America anything goes. And if you contradict him, he starts right in with his millionaires: Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller.

“How do you know these people?” my brother Elyahu asks him.

“How do I know what goes on in the Russian palace?” Pinni answers.

“Well yes, how do you know?”

“If you read as many novels as I do, maybe you would know too,” Pinni replies.

D.

Pinni is referring to the novels he reads at Moishe the bookbinder’s pushcart. They are printed in bad Yiddish and are thick and heavy, heavier than my mother’s Yiddish version of the Torah. Moishe lends them out and makes a living out of it, because maybe a hundred people can read one book. Mostly women read them. Women love romance novels. My sister-in-law Bruche reads them aloud every Shabbes afternoon, one after the other. My mother and Teibl love to hear her read. My mother falls asleep immediately, but Teibl listens and sighs. Sometimes she cries. She has a soft heart. If it weren’t Shabbes and if it were permitted, I’d draw with pencil and paper Bruche reading, my mother sleeping, and Teibl crying.

But I’m getting off the subject. We still don’t know how God sends a cure for a curse.

E.

First — about the curse. It surely is a curse that a young man like my brother Elyahu is unemployed. He can’t do what our friend Pinni does. In wintertime Pinni takes a shovel and cleans the streets of snow. My brother Elyahu says he would shovel the snow, but not out in the street.

“Did you expect them to bring the snow into your home?” Pinni exclaims.

It burns my brother Elyahu up that Pinni is so cheerful. “I suppose it makes you feel good to make jokes?” he says.

“Sure I feel good when I remind myself I’m in America, not in pogrom-land.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” says my brother Elyahu, and with a heavy heart he goes off to the Kasrilevka shul. And that’s where the cure comes for the curse. How? Listen to this nice story.

F.

I believe I once told you about the summer when we were living in London Whitechapel. At that time, as I said, a terrible pogrom and fire broke out in our beloved Kasrilevka. What they could steal, they stole. What they could smash, they smashed. The rest they lit a match to and burned down. Never mind the poor. Except for a few pillows, they had nothing to lose. They thanked God that they’d come out of it alive. Some were beaten, and some died of the beatings. Poor infants were torn apart by hooligans, and many more died of hunger. We aren’t talking of them, but of those who just yesterday were wealthy and who now are paupers, beggars, without a shirt on their backs, without a crust of bread. When you think about those once-rich people — so says our family — a shudder runs down your spine! Why doesn’t a shudder run down our spine when we think about the poor people and their poor babies? This I cannot understand, nor can my friend Mendl. He says the Kasrilevka Jews have this inclination that when a poor man dies of hunger, it’s nothing to feel bad about. But when a rich man becomes a pauper — they can’t get over it!

G.

Among our Kasrilevka rich was one Moishe-Noyach, who besides owning his own house with a courtyard and garden was simply rolling in money. Proof of this was that in summertime he used to walk around in his underwear, and over his underwear he wore a bathrobe. A poor man would never dare to be seen in his underwear. But people know immediately that he must be rich because he didn’t care who saw him. Everyone knew he had inherited from his mother three shops in the best spot in the market, and he always had a milk cow. The three shops brought in more than enough money for him to live on. His wife Nechama-Mirl (she was called Dechama-Birl, because she always had a stuffed nose) was able to draw out of the milk cow enough profit to meet all the household expenses. But so as not to bring down her luck with the milk cow, Dechama-Birl liked to complain that her “cow had lost her bilk and wouldn’t let herself be bilked.” She wasn’t fooling anyone in Kasrilevka. Everyone knew it was a lie. The cow never stopped giving milk. So just imagine all the ooh-has when a Jew like Moishe-Noyach ran off to America, naked and barefoot as the day his mother had him. Of course people pitied him. What could Moishe-Noyach do in America? He wouldn’t work in a shop, nor would his children. So the Kasrilevka synagogue congregation decided to make him the sexton of the Kasrilevka shul .

H.

In America a sexton is a job not to be sneezed at. In America a sexton lives better than a Kasrilevka houseowner. From yahrtzeit s alone you can become very rich. Yahrtzeit s are a big thing here. All year round no one has time to pray. “Time is money” is what they say. But when someone has a yahrtzeit, he drops all his business and runs to shul . And from shul he runs off to a Yiddish restaurant and orders a kosher meal because he has yahrtzeit . And because he has yahrtzeit, he tips the sexton generously. And how about a bar mitzvah? That’s when the sexton really cleans up. In our old home, when a boy turned thirteen, you put a tefillin on him and he had to pray every day. Here in America a bar mitzvah is a holiday. They dress the boy in a prayer shawl. They call him up to the bima like a bridegroom to read the Torah. He screeches out the haftorah like a young rooster. Then he lifts his hands and mumbles some sort of sermon he’s memorized, naturally in English, heaven forbid Yiddish. The rabbi, whose clean-shaven face makes him look like a Polish priest, then lays his wide-sleeved hands on the boy’s head and blesses him.

I.

In short, Moishe-Noyach has a good job. His only problem is that he has to go around to all the people who promised him money for yahrtzeit s and bar mitzvahs to collect his money, as well as dues from the members of the congregation and money for his salary. Nu, how does it look for a man who was not long ago rich to go collecting? His wife pours out her bitter heart to my mother. She says, “You can bedieve me, every tibe by husbad has to do tollecting bodey, it’s like he’s beeting the Adgel of Death.” I’m afraid none of you will be able to understand what she’s saying because of her stuffed nose, so I’ll translate: “You can believe me, every time my husband goes collecting money, it’s like he’s meeting the Angel of Death.” My mother suggests that her Moishe-Noyach hire my brother Elyahu as a collector. It would help him out, and my brother would earn a living. You can understand that Moishe-Noyach jumped at this plan eagerly.

My brother Elyahu resisted it at first, but our friend Pinni was there to give him a little push in his usual way: “I don’t understand your feeling that this is beneath you. How are you better than Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt? Now go do it!”

That Pinni, when he wants to, he really knows how!

J.

Who would have predicted that a small collecting job for a synagogue sexton would in time develop into a much bigger job, in fact two jobs? In one job my brother Elyahu collects for a furniture business, and in the other job our friend Pinni collects for an insurance company. I can see by your expressions that you don’t begin to understand what furniture or insurance means. Wait a bit, and I’ll explain everything.