Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

know that thou fearest God, seeing thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me.” Tevye knows perfectly well where the phrase he is quoting comes from (the highly dramatic chapter is not only read once a year on the Sabbath like the rest of the Pentateuch, it is chanted a second time as a special selection for Rosh Hashanah)—but this does not keep him from putting it in the mouths of Czarist officials telling Jewish applicants to keep their hands off Russian schools!
    Here too, it must be stressed, there is nothing particularly original about his method: Jews have been “deconstructing” biblical texts in this way practically since the Bible was written, and the vast corpus of rabbinical exegesis known as the midrash is based precisely on the enterprise of pouring new wine into old Scriptural bottles. Though these reinterpretations are not generally humorous, there is definitely a creative playfulness in the activity of midrash
per se
, which was, one might say, the ancient rabbis’ chief form of recreation—and to this day, if one has the good luck to be among a group of knowledgeable Jews who are in a “midrashic” mood, one can witness this fascinating interplay of encyclopedic recall and wit in which biblical and rabbinic texts are caromed around and off each other as though they were billiardballs. Tevye is not quite in this league, but it is one he aspires to, for a religiously educated Jew in the traditional culture of Eastern Europe belonged to a universally recognized aristocracy of the spirit, regardless of his economic status. The riches Tevye dreams of are a mirage; yet the opportunity to rise above his station by a vigorous display of a body of knowledge that, while not large, he is in total command of, is a subjective and objective reality that he exploits to the utmost, and sometimes a bit beyond.
    How, though, can this reality be translated into English? Theoretically, the translator has four choices:
    1. He can give Tevye’s quotations in English instead of in Hebrew.
    2. He can give them both in English and in Hebrew, the latter transliterated into Latin characters.
    3. He can give them only in Hebrew (as in the original Yiddish text).
    4. He can omit them entirely.
    I have in fact utilized all these approaches. In some places, where a quotation of Tevye’s is neither especially striking nor crucial, and where leaving it out does not adversely affect the tone or the significance of his remarks, I have done so. At a few points in the text I have translated his quotes into English, sometimes retaining the Hebrew as well and sometimes deleting it. In the great majority of cases, however, I have chosen Option 3 and, like the Yiddish text, given only Tevye’s Hebrew, translations of which will be found in the glossary and notes at the back of the book. Though this may be the solution that seems at first glance to be the most inconvenient for the English reader, I preferred it for several reasons.
    The first of these is that many of Sholem Aleichem’s Yiddish readers also failed to understand some or all of Tevye’s quotes. Sholem Aleichem had a mass audience, much of it composed of working men and women with little or no religious education, and if they did not mind being stumped by Tevye’s Hebrew, neither need the English reader today.
    Secondly, most of the characters in
Tevye the Dairyman
—in fact, nearly all of them—are simple Jews themselves who complain that they can’t follow Tevye’s quotations, from which they keep begging him to desist. For the English reader to be told what thesemean at the same time that Tevye’s family and acquaintances are baffled by them would create a rather odd effect.
    Thirdly, translating Tevye’s Hebrew in the text itself almost always results in the wrong tone, since the biblical and rabbinic passages that he cites have an archaic sound in English, which is not at all the case in the original. On the contrary, even when a Yiddish speaker did