Restoring Tevye's Reputation
STERN, J MICHAEL
Restoring Tevye's Reputation J. MICHAEL STERN On the one hand... but on the other hand... Zero Mo&tel as Tevye. Tevye the dairvman has been given a hum rap! What may be Sholem Aleichem's greatest...
...Tevye, of course, has no idea that he is funny...
...but he struggles with God's apparent reluctance to correct the injustices of Jewish life in Russia—and specifically, the calamities that befall Tevye...
...Tevye knows just what he is saying...
...But, how is it written: "Shall I conceal from Abraham"—do I keep any secrets from you...
...The quotations are not erudite...
...In "Hodl" Tevye misquotes from the Book of Kings...
...There God had said, "Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am about to do...
...In most of the Tevye stories, Tevye suffers grievous misfortunes...
...Thus, in "Tevye Strikes It Rich," Tevye cries out, "A person is only flesh andfish" instead of "flesh and blood...
...His second daughter, Hodl, marries a young revolutionary who is then sentenced to exile...
...His third daughter, Chava, falls in love with a gentile and leaves home secretly to marry him...
...When he is forced by government decree to leave his home, Tevye begins his narration of the events this way: In short what's your weekly Torah portion now...
...When Tevye quotes this passage, he says, "There is no voice and no money...
...Tevye's oldest daughter, Tseytl, rejects her father's choice of an arranged match and instead marries for love...
...Laban pursues Jacob in quest of the idols...
...In his rage, he cries out: '1 What is my trespass and what is my sin...
...In 1 Kings 18:29, when the prophets of Baal contend with Elijah, their imprecations go unanswered...
...I have reared and brought up children'—go, have them, be miserable, sacrifice yourself for them, toil day and night...
...Evidently, if He wants it that way, it ought to be that way...
...What may be Sholem Aleichem's greatest creation—certainly his best-known character—Tevye, Ls generally thought tu be biblically and talmud-ically ignorant...
...Acentral theme of the Tevye stories is the continuous change occurring in Russia and in its Jewish population—which is reflected in the lives of his daughters...
...He uses them with self-conscious understanding, heightening their effect with his Yiddish glosses that allude to his own situation...
...the proof is, if it should've been different, it would've been different...
...More often, the quotations are correct and are used as a running commentary on the story, weapons in his verbal battle with God...
...You want to tell Him how to run the world...
...He is powerless to stop these changes, and can only fight them in quotations and glosses that manifest the depth of his feelings...
...The entire quote, to which Tevye only alludes, is "i^ook not at the flask, but at what is thtrtin...
...These phrases from Genesis 12:1 allude to God's instruction to Abraham: "Get thee out from thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house to the land that I will show thee," the promised land...
...Genesis 18:17) when Sodom and Gomorrah were about to be destroyed...
...But like his horse, Tevye loo has reacted to externals, Chava's presence alone...
...And yet, really, why shouldn't it be different...
...In fact, Tevye is a self-conscious master in his use of quotations...
...I wouldn't tell it to anyone else...
...you can go around with your head uncovered or even upside down—but if you know what Rashi says, you are a man after my own heart...
...Get thee out"—I was told—you must go out, Tevye, "from thy country"—from your land, "andfrom thy kindred"—and from the village in which you were born and lived all your yean, ' 'to the land that I will show thee"—wherever your eyes will take you...
...But here, as part of Tevye's verbal battle with God, the phrase is used with bitter irony: God's mercy consists in making Tevye forget his earlier woes by bringing about a new and greater one—the marriage of Chava to a gentile...
...The Hebrew for "this too" is gam zu...
...What is left unsaid at this point is the theme of the stories about his daughters...
...Tevye updates the quotation to apply to his daughter Hodl, who has married a revolutionary...
...And that is no small thing to me...
...Tevye does not complete the quotation— from Isaiah 1:2: "/ have reared and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me...
...His misquotations are purposeful and usually made for laughs...
...One evening, Tevye meets the village priest, who informs him that Chava has left home to marry the Ukrainian clerk, Khvedke...
...is a quotation from Genesis 31:36...
...For the pain is great and the shame is greater...
...A principal translator of Aleichem's work into English, Frances Butwin, has dismissed Tevye's quotations this way: Usually his interpretation of what he is quoting is completely cockeyed...
...With bitter irony, Tevye misquotes: "Let-all who are hungry come in and be needy...
...When confronted, on the other hand, by his daughter's apostasy, his quotations argue for Jewish distinctiveness even as they reveal the depths of his suffering...
...The second quotation,'' What are we and what is our life?' is from a prayer that stresses man's lowliness as he stands before God...
...In the end they demonstrate the high value he consistently places on Jewish learning...
...But Tevye uses this phrase only with irony, as a protest to God...
...In any case, they never truly suit the context to which they are applied...
...In the story of Chava marrying a gentile, Tevye begins by talking to the author, Aleichem: What does the Lord do...
...Tevye's quotations are the often ineffectual weapons he uses in his struggle with the world and with God...
...His characteristic way of reacting to these blows is to express his bitterness toward God...
...I have a different portion: the portion of Lekh-lekha [Genesis 12-17...
...Although Tevye is not particularly learned himself, he does value learning...
...How is it said...
...By this allusion, Tevye implicitly compares the fate of his daughter, in the story he is about to relate, to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah...
...By these samples I do not mean to suggest that Tevye is a learned man...
...Here is Tevye reflecting on the fact that some people live in material plenty while others are near starvation: What's the point...
...That's the kind of Jew Tevye is...
...By adding, "wherever your eyes will take you," Tevye emphasizes that he knows full well how different his situation is from that of Abraham—not to the promised land but to wherever his eyes will take him...
...This too is for the best" is a quotation from the Talmud...
...When Tevye is liim-il u> leave I¦ ¦ > -.hlitl for good, he is confronted in the woods by Chava, who wants to speak with him...
...After Jacob and his wives and children depart for Canaan, Jacob's father-in-law Laban discovers that his household idols are missing...
...3> For citations and additional details, see Michael Stern, "Tevye's Art of Quotation," Prooftcxts 6", (1986...
...Perhaps he is also expressing his own ambivalence when he savs, "Don't look at what you're not supposed to...
...He avoids the encounter by whipping his horse on, hut the horse keeps looking back at Chava: "Ciddyup...
...For I hate a boor more than pork...
...That, we are told, is part of the humor...
...Another scholar, Dan Miron, argues that Tevye's "quotations are often comically distorted and even when they are correct, his translations and interpretations of them are hilariously wrong...
...he has left his new wife to go off on a mission and they hear nothing from him, nor does he send any money for his wife's support...
...Well, Tevye, it's a bum rap...
...Let all who are needy come in and celebrate the Passover...
...How different is Tevye's departure—hardly a repetition of the past...
...He is, after all, as it is said, "a God merciful and gracious...
...The second quotation in this passage (Shall I conceal from Abraham) alludes to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah...
...This misquotation of the talmudic expression is not made out of ignorance but is intended to stress his family's hunger and their need for sustenance...
...When Tevye learns that Hodl is going to leave forever with Feferl the exiled revolutionary, Tevye tries to reconcile himself with these words: "One might as well thank God for this, I think to myself...
...there is no limit to how much better things could be...
...Tevye has been unwilling to hear what she has to say...
...I sa> tip him, 'U...
...As the text tells us, "There is no voice nor any to answer...
...The answer is: "We were slaves"— that's the whole point of being Jews in the world...
...This too is for the besC—things could be worse...
...Tevye's choice of this particular quotation suggests two things: first, that he is protesting his own innocence before God in the matter of Chava's apostasy...
...Tevye finds his world undergoing continuous changes, generally for the worse...
...not at tht flask' — don't look, my genius, where you aren't supposed to...
...Finally, his daughter Beylke marries a wealthy man who is unfortunately an ignorant boor whose materialism alienates Beylke from her father...
...In Tevye's case, it is not God but the authorities who command him to a destination unknown, and he is without the comfort of divine guidance...
...Tevye turns this around, stating in effect that Jews remain slaves, and indeed have been created for no other purpose...
...Tevye never questions God's power...
...The patriarch Abraham does not know where he is going, but he is commanded by God to go and is assured of God's watchful protection...
...We were slaves" is another quotation from the Passover haggadah...
...In another case, Tevye misquotes this well-known passage from the Passover haggadah: ''''Let all who are hungry come in and eat...
...It is used by Tevye not for its humility but as a challenge to God for singling him out for misfortune...
...Thus by implication, the promise of redemption from this servitude is still to be honored...
...Tevye is likening his daughter to the prophets of Baal whose god does not respond to their prayers...
...He says to me: "Wait, Tevye, I will do something that will make you forget all your previous troubles...
...second, that he is placing the blame on another member of his household, Chava, just as it was another member of Jacob's household, Rachel, who was truly guilty of sin...
...In the Talmud, a certain Nahum is given the name Gamzu because whatever befell him, he would declare, "This too is for the best" [gam zu I'tova...
...Lord, " What are we and what is our life...
...He knows his source material well, and his quotations are quite accurate...
...The only flaw Tevye finds in Leyzer-Volf the butcher as a husband for his daughter Tseytl is his ignorance of Jewish books...
...At the beginning of the tales of his daughters, Tevye muses: "Modern children...
...Tevye of course quotes it in Hebrew and is making a pun based on the similarity of sound between the biblical koshev (answer) and kosef (money...
...When the material needs of his family are at issue, Tevye uses quotations to press his complaint against the social inequalities in God's world...
...He draws upon texts familiar to any observant Jewish man who attended synagogue regularly even if his formal education ended early...
...When Laban catches up with Jacob, Jacob becomes incensed: "What is my trespass and what is my sin that you should pursue me?' In fact, Jacob's wife Rachel has stolen her father's idols and has hidden them...
...Tevye is telling his horse that though it may look like the same Chava on the outside, she is not the same on the inside...
...Vayikra [Leviticus 1 -5...
...The quotation is from Pirkt Aiot, The Ethics of the Fathers...
...what kind of person am I that You bear me constantly in mind, have me in Your thoughts and let no misfortune, trouble or affliction pass me by...
...Tevye rushes home to find that it is true...
...There it is used to emphasize the contrast between slavery in Egypt and God's redemption of the children of Israel at the time of the Exodus...
...in what way have I, Tevye, sinned more than the whole world, that I am punished more than all other Jews...
...They come almost entirely from those parts of the Hebrew Bible read in synagogue on Sabbath and holidays, the Ethics of the Fathers, the prayer book, the High Holy Day liturgy, the Passover haggadah, and from talmudic phrases familiar because they had achieved the status of proverbial expressions...
...When Efraim the matchmaker proposes a husband for Hodl, Tevye reflects: "He understands the commentaries...
...one is not supposed to look at externals only...
...He permits himself to rebel only to the extent of giving a bitter twist to the original texts...
...In Exodus 34:6, the Lord says to Moses that He, the Lord, is "a God merciful and gracious...
...And so it came to pass, you ought to hear the story...
...What is my trespass and what is my sin...
...His daughter Shprintse, forsaken by a wealthy young man, commits suicide...
...The juxtaposition of a lofty phrase in Hebrew or Aramaic with a homely Yiddish phrase which is supposed to explain it but has no bearing on it whatever—that is the gist of Tevye's humor...
...To me an ignorant man is a thousand times worse than a rogue...
...What he lacks in knowledge, he makes up with chutzpah— misinterpreting, misquoting and simply making up what arc supposed to sound like quotations from the holy writings...
...Tevye despises Pedotser, the wealthy man who married Beylke, for boasting of his lack of learning...
...The god of the revolutionaries also is silent...
Vol. 14 • December 1989 • No. 7
