by Aaron Lansky
And that’s just the beginning. In short, we have no shortage of titles, only of time. It takes a good translator the better part of a year to translate a single book, and thus far, after scouring the United States, Israel, England, Canada, and South Africa, we’ve identified just a half-dozen first-rate Yiddish translators. But the literature is there, as is the need, as are the English readers, so we’re determined to try. Our goal is to publish at least two or three new titles every year. We have every reason to believe that we can continue to dazzle and inspire English readers with newfound Yiddish treasures for decades to come.
27. The Valise at the Bottom of the Sea
My grandmother was sixteen years old when she emigrated to America. She came alone, carrying with her a single cardboard valise packed with all her life’s possessions—a few books, clothing, a goose-down pillow, a pair of Shabbos candlesticks, and a photograph of her mother and father, whom she would never see again. At Ellis Island she was met by her older brother, who had preceded her to America. On the ferry to Manhattan he took her suitcase and flung it overboard. “You’re in America now,” he told her, “it’s time to leave the Old Country behind.”
I was thirty years old when I heard this story for the first time, and my initial reaction was one of outrage. How could my great-uncle have done such a thing? But with the passage of time, I’ve come to take a more philosophical view. If checking our baggage at the gate was the price of admission to America—where we are more free, more welcome, and more accepted than in any other place or at any other time in Jewish history—then maybe it wasn’t such a bad bargain after all. Nor is it too late to make amends. My grandparents and, to a lesser extent, my parents thought of themselves as newcomers in America. I, on the other hand, am American through and through—so comfortable in my Americanism that I have no compunction about going back to dredge the harbor to reclaim what was lost.
The valise itself, of course, is long gone, buffeted by the currents, buried beneath a century of silt and sand at the bottom of the sea. So I’ve had to content myself with collecting a million-and-a-half Yiddish books instead. Between their covers the voices of my grandmother’s world can still be heard.
I have no illusions, though. I don’t believe, because Yiddish books are now safe, that we’ll all start speaking Yiddish again. The social circumstances that gave rise to the Yiddish language no longer prevail for most Jews. But I do believe that we have much to learn from Yiddish books, just as Jews have always learned from the texts of the past. Moreover, although Yiddish literature itself is likely finite, I believe that its spirit and sensibility can still inspire new Jewish literary expression, in English and other languages.
Is such continuity really possible? In Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Port-noy’s Complaint, the young American-born protagonist concedes that he has “twenty-five Yiddish words to [his] name—half of them dirty and the rest mispronounced!” For some, that may have seemed the end of the line. But consider this remarkable scene from Patrimony, Roth’s 1991 memoir, in which his father is slowly dying of a brain tumor, and he, Philip, inquires about his tefilin, the leather phylacteries worn by Jewish men at morning prayer:
“Who’d you give the tefillin to?” I asked him.
“Who, nobody.”
“You threw them out? In the trash?”
“No, no, of course I didn’t.”
“You gave them to the synagogue?” I didn’t know what you did with tefillin when you no longer wanted or needed them, but surely, I thought, there would be a religious policy for discarding them, overseen by the synagogue.
“You know the Y?” he said to me.
“Sure.”
“Three, four mornings a week when I could still drive over there, I’d swim, kibitz, I’d watch the card game. . . .”
“And?”
“Well, that’s where I went. The Y. . . . I took the tefillin in a paper bag. The locker room was empty, I left them . . . in one of the lockers.”
Maybe it was just revealed to him in a flash . . . the understanding that where his tefillin would come to no harm, where they would not be profaned or desecrated, where they might even be resanctified, was in the midst of those familiar Jewish bellies and balls. Perhaps what the act signified was . . . a declaration that the men’s locker room at the local YMHA was closer to the core of the Judaism he lived by than the rabbi’s study at the synagogue—that nothing would have been more artificial than going with the tefillin to the rabbi . . . Yes, the locker room of the Y, where they undressed, they shvitzed, they stank, where, as men among men, familiar with every nook and cranny of their worn-down, old, ill-shapen bodies, they kibitzed and told their dirty jokes, and where, once upon a time, they’d made their deals— that was their temple and where they remained Jews.
Resanctified at the Y. What Roth’s dying father intuitively understood, and what Philip Roth the writer recognized, was that there are two sides to Jewish life, the holy and the everyday, and that our identity resides not in one or the other, but in the give-and-take between the two. Remember the traditional Jewish proverbs, in which sacred Hebrew texts were played off against common Yiddish? Somehow the juxta-position of the two was more deeply Jewish than the Hebrew alone. The same is true of Roth’s father’s tefilin: Moving them from the synagogue to the locker room creates a scene infinitely richer in its Jewish evocations than would have been the case had the tefilin never left the shul at all. It doesn’t matter whether the author knows twenty-five words of Yiddish or twenty-five thousand: As long as he can recognize shul and Y for what they are, opposite but equally authentic aspects of Jewish identity, the spirit of Yiddish literature lives on.
It is one of my few regrets that, having passed up a life of scholarship, I’ve spent more time collecting Yiddish books than I have reading them. Of the titles I have read, my personal favorite remains Tevye der milkhiger, Tevye the Dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem—one of the books handed to me by Mr. Levine from his grandfather’s bookcase during my first trip to the Lower East Side so many years ago. Published serially between 1895 and 1916, Tevye was a perennial favorite among readers, as attested by the scores of pallets loaded with Sholem Aleichem’s Complete Works in our warehouse. When, several years back, the Yiddish Book Center convened an international panel of scholars to choose the “One Hundred Greatest Works of Modern Jewish Literature,” Tevye was everyone’s first choice. It has been translated into thirty languages, it was the basis of an important 1939 feature film by Maurice Schwarz, and later it gained worldwide fame through its adaptation to stage and screen as Fiddler on the Roof.
Which, for better or worse, is where I first made its acquaintance. I was fifteen years old when my parents insisted on taking me and my brothers to see a production of Fiddler at the Melody Tent on Cape Cod. It sounded boring (as did most things Jewish when I was that age), and we beseeched them to drop us off at a nearby go-cart track instead—until my mother mentioned that the lead role of Tevye would be played by Leonard Nimoy, so well known to us as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock. As I recall, Nimoy made a first-rate Tevye—not so surprising when you consider his Yiddish origins. At the time, however, I only knew about his Vulcan yikhes, and my brothers and I spent the whole first act elbowing each other and whispering wisecracks: “Hey, where are his ears?” “Illogical, Lazar Wolf.” “Beam me up, Golda!” But by the second act we were enthralled. True, Fiddler on the Roof is a long way from Sholem Aleichem’s original stories; but it was the first inkling I had that Yiddish literature existed, it was the single most Jewish story I had ever encountered, and in a word, I was smitten.
What is it exactly about Tevye, a rural dairyman blessed with five beautiful but rebellious daughters, that strikes us as so quintessentially Jewish? Is it because of his attachment to tradition, as Fiddler on the Roof would have us believe? Hardly. Although Tevye is an observant Jew, he is constantly “twisting biblical quotations this way and that” as he struggles to keep up with the changes around him. He finds himself, in fact, b
reaking with tradition, or at least stretching it, more often than he defends it.
Is it because he’s a great Jewish scholar? Tevye would be flattered to hear you say so. He likes nothing more than to quote from high-sounding Hebrew texts. But on closer examination, his sources are mostly rudimentary: the Bible, the prayer book, the Ethics of the Fathers, the kinds of things that, in Tevye’s day, any kheyder yingl, any elementary-school student, would have been expected to know. It’s only we, with our even weaker Jewish knowledge, who are impressed. When Tevye does offer up Hebrew quotations, more often than not he mis-translates them into Yiddish.
Is it because he lives in Anatevka, a warm, loving, tight-knit shtetl? Only on the stage. In the original stories, he and his family live a long way from Anatevka, in the countryside, where they’re surrounded by Ukranian peasants, with no other Jews for miles around.
So what is it about Tevye that makes him seem, as he puts it, “a yid shebiyid, a Jew’s Jew”? Answer that question, solve that riddle, and we begin to understand what makes Yiddish literature seem so Jewish, and why even now the books we’ve found remain so compulsively readable and relevant.
The basic plot outline is well known. Each of Tevye’s five daughters forces him to confront a different challenge of the modern world. The oldest, Tsaytl, forgoes an arranged match and marries for love. The second, Hodel, falls in love with a revolutionary and ends up following him into exile in Siberia. The fourth daughter, Shprintse, who along with her younger sister was omitted from Fiddler, becomes infatuated with the nephew of a rich man, apparently becomes pregnant, and when disavowed by her boyfriend’s family, commits suicide by drowning herself in a pond outside Tevye’s home. The last daughter, Beyle, rejects her older sisters’ idealism and marries for money; her wealthy husband is as old as Tevye himself, and he tries to get his new father-in-law out of the way by giving him a one-way ticket to Palestine. There are two more stories at the end of the series, in which Tevye talks his way out of a pogrom, only to be expelled forever from his native home.
But it is the middle daughter, Chava, who presents Tevye with the greatest challenge by running off with a bookish peasant named Fyedka Galagan. The story is not so much about intermarriage (hardly a burning issue in the Ukrainian countryside in 1906) as it is about the lure of universalism: True to her name (Chava is Hebrew for Eve), she seeks to move beyond Jewish specificity and embrace the universality of all mankind. Her act not only breaks her parents’ hearts, it also challenges the future of Yiddish literature itself: If all people really are one, then why continue living apart and writing in a provincial language such as Yiddish?
As Tevye knows full well, Chava is a highly intelligent and forceful young woman, and the logic of her position is not easily refuted. Consider, for example, this exchange, when Tevye catches Chava and Fyedka together for the first time:
I asked Chava, “What was Fyedka doing here?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“What do you mean nothing?”
“We were just talking.”
“What business have you got talking with Fyedka?”
“We’ve known each other for a long time,” she said.
“Congratulations!” I said. “A fine friend you’ve picked for yourself. . . . His father,” I said, “must have been either a shepherd or a janitor or else just a plain drunkard.”
To this Chava answered, “Who his father was I don’t know and don’t care to know. All people are the same to me. . . . God created all men equal.”
Tevye has no effective response. He begins quoting from Hebrew sources, as is his wont, but Chava, who can hold her own in an argument, will have none of it:
“Marvelous!” she cried. “Unbelievable! You have a quotation for everything. Maybe you also have a quotation that explains why men have divided themselves up into Jews and Gentiles, into lords and slaves, noblemen and beggars?”
Interestingly, it’s not Tevye with his highbrow Hebrew who breaks the impasse, but his wife, Golda, with her decidedly heymish, earth-bound Yiddish:
“Maybe you’ve done enough jabbering out there,” my wife Golda called out from inside the house. “The borsht has been sitting on the table for an hour and he’s still out there singing Sabbath hymns.”
“Another province heard from! No wonder our sages have said, ‘The fool hath seven qualities—A woman talks nine times as much as a man.’ We are discussing important matters and she comes barging in with her milkhiger (dairy) borscht.”
“My milkhiger borsht,” said Golda, “may be just as important as all those important matters of yours.”
“Mazl-tov! We have a new philosopher here, straight from behind the oven. It isn’t enough that Tevye’s daughters have become enlightened, now his wife has to start flying through the chimney right up into the sky.”
“Since you mention the sky,” said Golda, “I might as well tell you I hope you rot in the earth.”
Tell me, Mr. Sholem Aleichem, what do you think of such crazy goings on on an empty stomach?
“My milkhige borsht may be just as important as all those important matters of yours.” When the rational, scholarly, masculine, Hebrew side of Jewish tradition fails, the heymish, workaday, down-to-earth, feminine, Yiddish side prevails. In the end, Golda suggests, it’s borscht, more than Hebrew quotations, that will hold the Jewish people together.
Except that borscht alone is no more than ethnicity, and we soon see that it, too, is not enough to keep Chava at home. The next day she elopes. When Tevye finds out, from his nemesis, the local Russian Orthodox priest, he returns home, steps out to the barn, and blind with rage, beats his poor, tired horse. Why? “Because he was standing there with one foot on the other side of the slats,” Tevye tells us. In other words, he beats his horse for doing the same thing he did: straddling the fence, trying to have it both ways, tradition and change, Hebrew quotations and Yiddish reinterpretations. The price of Tevye’s homemade synthesis was too high to pay; his daughter is gone for good.
Eventually Tevye returns to work, to “mayn bisl milkhigs,” but he can’t get Chava out of his mind. And then one day, as he rides alone through the woods, Chava runs out to meet him. In Fiddler, and even in Schwarz’s film, she is wearing the bright costume of a Ukrainian peasant. In the story she’s dressed just as she always was: “not her dress, not one hair on her head has changed”—meaning that she didn’t need to leave Jewishness to embrace universalism. She begs her father to listen to her. Tevye is torn, he’s tormented, but when she reaches for the horse’s bridle he breaks free and leaves her alone by the side of the road.
All the rest of the way, as I drove, I thought I could hear her running after me, calling, “Listen, father, listen to me.” A thought crossed my mind, “. . . Will it hurt you to stop and listen to her? . . . I blamed myself . . . “Stubborn mule, turn your wagon around and go back and talk to her, she is your own child.” And peculiar thoughts came into my mind. “What is the meaning of Jew and non-Jew? Why did God create Jews and non-Jews? And since God did create Jews and non-Jews, why should they be segregated from each other and hate each other, as though one were created by God and the other were not?” I regretted that I wasn’t as learned as some men so that I could arrive at an answer to this riddle.
Then a remarkable thing happens. Tevye knows that Chava and Fyedke have left the village and moved to Kiev, a cosmopolitan city. After much soul-searching, he decides to join them. Since Kiev lies outside the Pale of Settlement and is thus off-limits to Jewish habitation, Jews refer to the city by the code name Yehupetz. After making Sholem Aleichem promise not to laugh at him, Tevye continues:
I put on my Shabbos gabardine as though I were going away on the train, going to see them. I walk up to the ticket window and ask for a ticket. The ticket seller asks me where I want to go. “To Yehupetz,” I tell him. And he says, “There is no such place.” And I say, “Well, it’s not my fault then.” And I turn myself around and go home again, take off my Sabbath clothes and go
back to work, back to my own cows and my horse and wagon. As it is written, “Each man to his labor—The tailor to his shears and the shoemaker to his last.”
Even when Tevye is finally ready to accept the logic of Chava’s position—that all people really are equal and should not have to live separate one from the other—even when he’s finally ready to join his daughter and son-in-law in Kiev, the non-Jews won’t let him go, since Yehupetz is no more than a Jewish fiction and the real Kiev is a city where Jews are not allowed. So he gives up on the idea, returns home, hangs up his Shabbos clothes, and returns to his dairy business, to the everyday Jewish fold. But his lack of culpability is small comfort. His daughter has carried Jewish values to their logical extreme, she’s left his home and gone where he can’t follow, and he therefore regards himself as an abject failure. “I see that you are laughing at me,” he tells Sholem Aleichem.
. . . Don’t forget what I asked you. Pasekh shin sha—be silent as the grave concerning this. Don’t put what I told you into a book. And if you should write, write about someone else, not about me. Forget about me. As it is written: “V’yishkhakeyhu—And he was forgotten.”Oys Tevye der milkhiger—No more Tevye the Dairyman!
Of course, Sholem Aleichem does write about him. And although Tevye’s personal tragedy is beyond recompense, in our eyes he is anything but a failure. If Jewishness was and is the product of a constant dialectic—between the holy and the everyday, male and female, Hebrew and Yiddish—then Tevye has the distinction of embodying these competing elements within himself. He may be too blind with grief to recognize the fact, but it is precisely that relentless interior debate that made him so quintessentially Jewish.
Much has changed in the hundred years since “Chava” appeared. Most of the old legal restrictions on Jewish settlement are gone. Nowadays I can go to the train station or log onto the Internet and buy a ticket to pretty much anywhere. Which means there are no more excuses: If I want to move beyond the Jewish sphere, no non-Jew is likely to stand in my way.
