Yiddish Folktales

by Beatrice Weinreich

  “In that case,” said the minister, “why is it that you Jews don’t follow the majority in today’s world? Why do you insist on being a minority among the nations?”

  The rabbi thought for a while, then he said, “In the palace, I followed the majority because I knew that you were here. What was in doubt was which room you were in. But we Jews have no doubts about where we are in the world. And that’s why we don’t accept conversion and remain a separate people.”

  135

  He Has Only One Weakness

  The Ksav-soyfer, a son of the Khsam-soyfer, was, like his father, the head of a large yeshiva.

  One day a father came to the Ksav-soyfer to get some information about a young man who had been proposed as a husband for his daughter. The Ksav-soyfer said, “Yes, he’s a fine young fellow. He has only one weakness. He doesn’t know how to play cards.”

  The man was astonished. “Rabbi,” he asked, “is that a weakness?”

  The rabbi replied, “Yes. If one who doesn’t play cards doesn’t know how to play, it’s not a weakness. But when one who does play doesn’t know how, then that’s a weakness.”

  136

  The Rabbi Shows Respect for His Shoemaker

  The story is told that the humble Rabbi Akiba Eyger once sent a note to his shoemaker asking him to return the boots he had been given for repair. He addressed the shoemaker as follows: “To the Most Holy Revered Great Scholar …” The shoemaker, thinking the rabbi was mocking him, was offended and hurried to him to complain. The rabbi’s reply was of the utmost simplicity: “How can you think I meant to mock you? Letters to me are addressed that way all the time.”

  137

  Evening the Score

  Once upon a time there was a great famine in the land of Israel. Three men were sent abroad to raise funds for the needy. One was the Holy Shelah, Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz; the other was his assistant; and the third was a shoykhet, a ritual slaughterer of cattle and poultry.

  When they arrived on this side of the sea, they rented a horse and wagon and traveled from town to town and from city to city, gathering alms for the starving. In order to keep the wagon driver from knowing where they kept the money, two of them—the Shelah and the shoykhet—drilled a hole in a floorboard of the wagon and poured the coins into it. But they drilled too deep, so that the money went in on one side of the floorboard and fell through the other side.

  At last they had gathered a goodly sum and were planning to return home. As they approached the border, they went to take the money from its hiding place. To their horror they found not so much as a single coin left.

  Suspicion immediately fell on the shoykhet. Well, there was no way for him to go back and begin collecting again, so with a heavy heart the poor man made his way home. There the case was investigated, and it was concluded that it must have been he who took the money. And so he was condemned to have an ear cut off and was barred from his profession. And it was done.

  So he became a homeless wanderer. One day in the course of his travels he went into a store where the shopkeeper was already waiting on a customer. The shoykhet did not want to disturb them, so he took a chair near the wall to wait his turn. As he sat, he heard them making a mistake in the bill. He went up to the shopkeeper and his customer and, apologizing for his interference, pointed out that such-and-such a mistake had been made in the bill. They added it up once more, and it turned out that he was right.

  The owner of the shop was a widow, so she asked the shoykhet to work for her as a bookkeeper. And that’s what happened. He settled down there.

  When some time had passed, the shopkeeper came in one day all dressed in her holiday finery and said, “I’m a widow and you please me. I’d like for us to be married.” He thought she was making fun of him—after all, she was a very rich woman.

  To make a long story short, they were married. Of course, now everything changed for him. Now he was well fed and well dressed, and he had a gold watch and chain like a rich man.

  It turned out that the Shelah went once again on a fund-gathering trip. On the evening before Passover, he asked people in the town where he happened to be staying to recommend a household that strictly observed the dietary laws—in which he could spend the holiday. Everyone said he should go to the house of such-and-such a man, that is, to the former shoykhet, because no one was more pious or kept a more kosher home.

  The Shelah inquired at the house if he might stay there over the holiday. “We would be honored to have you,” said the former shoykhet, whom the Shelah did not recognize. The shoykhet, on the other hand, recognized the Shelah. He set aside a room for the holy man and furnished it with everything needful.

  On the night before Passover, the shoykhet bought a bottle of smelling salts and sharpened his slaughtering knife. Then he went into the Shelah’s room and said in a commanding voice, “Now, come and lie down.” The Shelah was terribly frightened, but the shoykhet shouted, “There’s no help for it. You can’t possibly fight me. Lie down; I’m going to tie you up.” The Shelah begged for a little time so he could say vide, his final confession of sins, and the shoykhet agreed. Then he tied him, one hand to one foot, the way one binds cattle, and so tightly that the Shelah fainted dead away. With that the shoykhet let him sniff the smelling salts, and the Shelah slowly came back to consciousness. He said to the shoykhet, “I see that you didn’t kill me. So what was the point of all that?” The shoykhet reminded him of all that had happened. And he had worried, said the shoykhet, that a man as holy as the Shelah might come before the Seat of Judgment having committed the great sin of defaming an innocent man. And so he had contrived for the Shelah to do penance in this world.

  138

  Reb Leybele of Mir goes to the Marketplace

  In the town of Mir, once a famous center of Torah scholarship, there lived Reb Leybele Mirkes, a naïve soul who studied Torah day and night and knew nothing at all about business. It happened one day that as he was studying in his chamber, the door opened and his wife said angrily, “Why don’t you become a businessman? We’re getting poorer with every passing day.” Reb Leybele tried to reason with her, explaining, “You can’t teach this old dog new tricks.” But she wouldn’t listen. Seeing that he could not pacify her, he had no choice but to do what she wanted. He made one condition, however: “I’ll travel to buy the goods, but you’ll have to sell them.” She agreed to his proposal.

  The town seethed with excitement when they learned that Reb Leybele had decided to go traveling on business. No one could believe that a man who had never been anything but a scholar, and who hardly knew what a coin looked like, would be able to conduct business.

  Since there were no trains in those days, Reb Leybele bought a horse and wagon and hired a driver. He took a packet containing ten thousand rubles and started off one morning. He had spent the night in prayer and Torah study, and had asked the Lord to make his journey prosper. In the morning at dawn he had gone to pray with the congregation, and after reciting his prayers, he had spent half the day studying various texts, as was his usual habit. Then he ate breakfast, after which he recited blessings. Finally, and with great difficulty, he got into his wagon which, as if it were teasing him, moved ever so slowly out of the town.

  As he traveled, Reb Leybele interrupted his journey at every prayer time so that he could join whatever congregation was near. And he studied Torah texts as well, which of course doubled the time he spent in each village.

  When he came at last to the great fair in the town of Zeleve where he was to buy goods, he went to the home of the local rabbi. There he wanted to discuss a difficult passage in a volume by the Rambam, Maimonides. The rabbi, seeing that Reb Leybele had come to Zeleve on business, interrupted to tell him that the fair had closed down long ago. Reb Leybele was not at all disturbed. “Ah well,” he said, “there’ll still be goods to buy.” Wondering what sort of man this was, the rabbi bade him farewell.

  Reb Leybele went into town and called on various brokers. Since the particul
ar cloth he asked for had sold out at the fair, they all urged him to buy red cloth of the sort used to trim hats and the seams of officers’ trousers. No more than nine ells of that cloth were ever used during a year in Reb Leybele’s town of Mir. But the brokers talked fast and hard, and in the end he bought ten thousand rubles’ worth of red cloth. His business done, he climbed into his wagon and started back to Mir.

  When he got home and displayed his bargain cloth, his wife scolded him bitterly. “What have you bought?” she shouted. “Have you gone completely out of your mind?” Reb Leybele replied, “Do you think there’s only a black god in heaven? There’s a red god as well.”

  Everyone was surprised when Reb Leybele was summoned to nearby Neshviezh, to the home of Count Radzivil. There the servants told him that the count, having read a minister’s report regarding troops, had ordered the minister to buy red uniforms for the whole regiment, soldiers as well as officers. That is a lot of red cloth, and the entire order was indeed filled by Reb Leybele Mirkes. This transaction made him rich for the rest of his days.

  139

  Napolean the First and the Jewish Officer

  At the Battle of Austerlitz, where Napoleon acquired his great fame, he sat on his horse and watched through his field glasses while the Austrian troops died like flies. So he commanded that a white flag be run up as a sign of truce, and he called for any of his officers who could speak German to be brought before him. Naturally most of those who presented themselves were Jews, who, knowing Yiddish, felt confident they could speak German.

  The officer whom Napoleon selected was a middle-aged man with a son serving with him in the same regiment. Napoleon sent all the others back to the battlefront and told the officer to sit down. He himself sat at a table and wrote a letter to the Austrian general reproving him for letting his soldiers die in such numbers instead of surrendering.

  When the letter was done, he put it into an envelope which he did not seal. “I know you’ll read the letter on the way,” he said to the officer, “so go ahead—you might as well do it now.”

  The officer took the letter and read it, then said to the emperor, “Your majesty, my son is serving with me. Permit me to say farewell to him before I leave.”

  “What’s this?” Napoleon rose from his desk. “Are you afraid that you won’t return from the mission?”

  The officer replied, “I’m certain the Austrian general will have me beheaded.”

  Napoleon said, “Mark my words: if he beheads you, I’ll mass my full army, take Vienna, and behead the whole population.”

  For a moment the officer was silent. Then he said, “I’m amazed at the concern you have for a Jewish officer. But I must say that no matter how many heads you lop off in Vienna, you won’t find a single one that fits back on my shoulders.”

  140

  Napoleon in Vilna

  It is said that Napoleon happened to pass through Vilna on Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the Jewish month of Ab, a day of fasting and mourning. There he visited a synagogue, where he saw Jews seated on the floor and weeping. Curious, he inquired why. Of course he was told that they were mourning for the destruction of the Temple and praying for it to be rebuilt in Palestine.

  Napoleon laughed. “And is this the way you mean to retake Palestine? Here,” he said, pointing to his sword, “this is the way to retake Palestine.”

  141

  Nafol tipol: Napoleon, You Will Fall

  When Napoleon drove through Kozhenits, he heard that the town had a pious man who was known as the Preacher of Kozhenits. Napoleon was curious to meet this saintly figure and to question him about his war with Russia. He consulted his officers, and it was decided that he should disguise himself as an ordinary person. If the Preacher of Kozhenits recognized him, it would be proof that he had extraordinary powers.

  So Napoleon disguised himself as an ordinary general and went to visit the Preacher of Kozhenits. The Preacher, of blessed memory, was the child of his parents’ old age and had been sickly all his days. He was so weak that he studied Torah lying in bed, but the moment Napoleon came into the house, the Preacher got to his feet and recited the blessing one makes over royalty. The emperor was amazed and said, “It’s true I am the emperor. But how did you recognize me in the uniform of an ordinary general?”

  The Kozhenits Preacher replied, “It’s because your guardian angel came in with you, and I recognized him at once.”

  So Napoleon questioned the Preacher regarding his war with Russia. The holy man said, “You’d do well to harness your carriage and head toward Paris at once, because soon it will be too late.”

  Napoleon said, “If it happens that I am triumphant in my war against Russia, I’ll have you hanged over the town gate.” Then he left in a rage. No sooner had he gone than the Preacher took down the Book of Esther and, chanting the text, read the words Nafol tipol, “Thou shalt surely fall,” from which he deduced the meaning, “Napoleon tipol, Napoleon, you will fall.”

  142

  The Cantonist’s Mother and Nicholas the First

  When I was a boy of ten or eleven, my greatest delight in the winter season was to sit with the graybeards near the warm stove in the study and prayer house as the Eyn Yankev [a popular collection of Talmudic stories and commentaries] was being read. This occurred in the interval between late afternoon and evening prayers, and sometimes it happened that the reader did not come, or came late. Then and on some Saturday nights, the graybeards would tell tales. One of these old men was fascinated by Czar Nicholas the First, and his cronies teased him for constantly telling stories about Nicholas. Still, when he started on one of his tales, like this one, they listened with pleasure.

  Nicholas used to enjoy disguising himself in peasant’s clothing or worn military uniforms and wandering about to see what was going on and hear what was being said about him. Many an unwary person was ruined because he didn’t guard his tongue in the presence of the disguised czar.

  On one of these excursions through his villages in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the czar and his entourage entered a forest to hunt. Nicholas, dressed like a common soldier in a ragged coat, took a wrong turning and lost his way. It was evening. A light snow had begun to fall which grew heavier and heavier until it turned into a true blizzard. Fortunately for Nicholas, he noticed a gleam of light and followed it until he arrived at an inn run by an old Jewish widow. When the woman saw the exhausted, frozen soldier, she snatched up a broom and brushed the snow off him, removed his torn greatcoat, and settled him at a place on the stove to warm himself. Then she turned to brew him a cup of chicory. All the while that she was cleaning him up and cooking for him, she repeated, “Oh, my boy. You’re absolutely frozen.”

  There were peasants already sitting in the room. When they saw the ragged, shivering soldier, they began to call down fire and brimstone on the czar—Czar Nicholas. Their complaints were the old ones: that all the czar ever did was skin them alive, enslave them, draft them into the army forever. And so on, and so on.

  The widow, however, defended the czar and made excuses for him. She argued that peasants weren’t smart enough to know who was the one truly responsible. She pointed out that even if the czar were an angel, he wouldn’t be able to help them because his noblemen kept him ignorant. “I can’t believe,” she insisted, “that one chosen by God to be czar is a bad man. Just don’t forget—he’s God’s annointed.”

  The peasants didn’t agree with her and became increasingly excited. They used her own case as an example: Whoever heard, they asked, of taking away the only son of a woman as old as she was? But she held stubbornly to her view that the czar was absolutely not responsible for drafting her son into the army. She felt sure that if the czar knew what her situation was, he would send her son home. As she talked, she handed food and drink to her “little boy,” as she called the frozen soldier.

  When all the peasants had left the inn, she prepared a soft place for Nicholas to sleep and gave him a warm quilt. And so it was her amazing
luck to have Nicholas the First himself spend the night as her guest. In the morning when her “boy” had had a bit of herring for his breakfast and washed it down with a cup of chicory, he said, “Granny, how did it happen that your one and only son was taken away?”

  “It’s because I’m a poor widow and I have no one to take my part. The rich pay to keep their sons out of the army. So when the czar’s khapers* come to our villages, they pay no attention to the cries of the poor. They grab even such sons as mine—even an only son. It does no good to complain.”

  “Granny,” said the czar, “why didn’t you go to the provincial capital and complain to the governor?”

  She replied, “Ah, my dear, I went there. It was very, very hard for me to get to him. But at last I succeeded in presenting my petition and the rural district’s certificate of judgment that my son was an only child. I begged him to give my son back to me. And he promised to do it. But, my boy, you see how it is. It’s been more than half a year and my son isn’t back yet.”

  She heaved a sigh, shook her aged head, and said, “No, my boy, it’s hard to get justice if you’re poor and old.”

  Nicholas asked her for a piece of paper, but she had none. So he tore out the endpaper of the Book of Psalms he found on one of her shelves and wrote a few words on it. He handed her the sheet and told her to take it to town and give it to the bailiff. He would send it where it ought to go, and her son would certainly be returned to her.

  She looked at him, amazed. “Ah, my boy, what good is your bit of paper? If the governor himself, though he promised, didn’t help me, then certainly you can’t. At the most, the bailiff will laugh at your note and at me for bringing it.” But Nicholas insisted that his paper would help. He said that if she got a horse and sleigh, he would ride part of the way with her to the bailiff.