Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor’s Son

"Sholem Aleichem was born in 1855 in Ukraine and he is among the three founding fathers of Yiddish literature of the 19th century. He is undoubtedly the greatest Jewish humourist. He is unique in his ability to document and enliven the lives of millions of Jews who lived in the little towns and villages in Eastern Europe, the shtetls. He is most well-known for writing the story on which Fiddler on the Roof was based, but he has many other characters that are vivid and unique, but also symbols for certain prototypes of Jewish society at that time. When I was eight years old my father entered my room one day, and I remember that he had an untypical smile—a little embarrassed and exposed—and he gave me a small red covered book and said, “Read it, this is how it used to be over there.” I don’t know how, but I felt that he had given me a gift that would reveal something about his childhood, in a small Galician town. My father rarely spoke about his childhood, and he gave me Sholem Aleichem to speak for him, to tell me his own story. The book was called Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son. I inhaled it, driven by deep curiosity and passion to know my father as a child. And really he gave me the key not only for his own childhood but to a whole reality that I knew nothing about. “I remember the shock—every child has their first dead and for me it was the characters of Sholem Aleichem” I was a first generation Israeli, the Israeli of the early 1960s—young, daring, militant, facing the future, and very reluctant to look back at the Jewish diaspora of Sholem Aleichem. But for me the book was an open channel to be simultaneously in Israel and with the diaspora. I read all six volumes of stories by Sholem Aleichem—as a child today would read Harry Potter . I discovered a whole reality, codes, a language, professions. What did I know about people that drew water from wells? About matchmakers? About non-Jews that surrounded the shtetl? Of the air of mystery and danger that enveloped the Jews there? Since I was the only child in my class who knew about Sholem Aleichem, it became an intimate secret for me since I realised quickly that reading Sholem Aleichem was not cool enough. Then one day on Holocaust Memorial Day, we were ordered to come in black trousers and white shirts and stand upright and listen to the clichés of the schoolmaster that meant very little to us—the number six million is not understandable for a child. It takes one Anna Frank to bring up the horror. Suddenly, on the boiling asphalt of the school yard, I understood that the victims are all people I know very well from the stories of Sholem Aleichem. I remember the shock. I was sure that shtetl life existed in parallel to my life—every child has their first dead and for me it was the characters of Sholem Aleichem. The story Menachem Mendel is a fascinating one. Menachem Mendel is a young Jewish man who leaves his wife and children behind in the shtetl and he goes to the big city to make big money—he is a person of great dreams and no talent for reality. He is so naïve, and maybe even stupid and definitely a fantasist. Whatever he tries, someone cheats him; but he keeps writing letters to his wife filled with dreams and illusions, and we see the catastrophe coming. She, the wife, is down to earth, sober, the expert of reality, feeding, dressing, caring for the children. She is warning him again and again of his drunkenness for fast enrichment. To me the stories of Sholem Aleichem are always about the Jew who suffers first and foremost from the fact that he has no home, who does not find a place for himself—always a foreigner. This is the real tragedy of Jews—as a collective and as individuals—that we never really felt at home in the world, though Israel is meant to be that home. It is so heart-breaking to think that after 70 years of sovereignty we still do not have this solidity of existence that we so need. When I write for children I write as me but from a different place in myself. I try to look for the channel from me today to the child I was, to the childhood of my children. I will tell you a story: when my eldest son Yonatan was three years old, I put him to bed one night and I mentioned that this night—the 21st of December—is the longest night of the year. I covered him, kissed him good night, and went to do my things. At five in the morning he burst into our bedroom, agitated, crying that the night is over, and only then did I understand what it is to be a child and not to know that the sun will rise again. For him the night was eternal….the sun rising is such a triumph! Since then, when I write for children, I want to be in this fragile point, not knowing if the sun is rising tomorrow—that everything can surprise you. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I always ask parents to read stories every night to children before bedtime, and when I write my stories I think of this family moment when parents and child are together and the child cuddles with the father or mother who reads the story and sometimes these stories can give place and legitimacy to things that do not exists in that family—a certain language, humour, imagination. Even babies can recognise the “voice of the story” transferring them to another sphere that is different from their everydayness. When my father read to me, suddenly I was able to grasp a sparkle of my authoritative father as a child. For a child the night can be frightening: darkness, shadows, things look different, and they are alone while everyone else is active. Maybe the child gets a glimpse of life before he came into the world. Nights are also dreams and nightmares and the child cannot understand why the parent does not come in to protect him. I want the story to be a kiss on the cheek of the child before he goes off for the journey of the night."