Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories

"He’s probably my favourite Yiddish writer, and I think his impact on Jewish culture and the Jewish way of life is incalculable. He did not begin as a humorist, I think he wanted to cast himself as a great fiction writer, like Zola, like Balzac, like Dickens. He wanted to write these great novels… Oh yes, he did and he continued to write them, but they’re not very good. He discovered pretty early on, luckily, that his métier was taking over the voice of a common character and letting that character speak, and become the monologuist of the story. He adopted the pseudonym of Sholem Aleichem, which means “Hi there!” as a way of indicating what kind of a writer he was, that he was going to adopt this popular voice. As a humorist he saw that the situation for Jews was actually becoming very dire. This was a time of tremendous revolution and transformation in Europe in general and it hit the Jews very hard. There was a great migration, not just from towns to cities but to America. There were wonderful ideological and nationalist movements and there was a great cultural ferment, but there were also pogroms, and the beginning of anti-Jewish violence and anti-Jewish ideology in a much more serious way than had existed before. For him, as a father, he saw this generation gap widening between himself and his own children and what their ambitions were. He saw that Yiddish was going to be threatened by upward mobility, that Yiddish itself was going to be devastated, and he was going to be made irrelevant as a writer by the very forces to which he was giving life. And he turned this into humour. As one of the critics said, he creates the nightmare from which he then awakens. It’s the good and the bad. The Americanization of Tevye was obviously the opportunity of bringing it to a much broader audience. It became a really beloved musical, it’s acted by schoolchildren and was translated into many languages. It did popularize what would otherwise have lain dormant. But at a tremendous cost, because that is not really Tevye. To me, he functions as the first standup comic… It is, but when you read him on the page he really is a standup comic. He is speaking to Mr. Sholem Aleichem so that they have formed a kind of magic circle, a cultural island, within a sea of change. They are this stable unit, Mr Sholem Aleichem is the audience but he is a very important audience because he is the entrepreneur who is taking these heavy monologues and publishing them. It’s an extremely complicated work in the way it is fashioned. It seems simple and straightforward — the man telling the story is so amiable and so forth — but it is one of the most perpetually fascinating texts because of the various levels of interaction between the character and the listener and in relation to the devastation that he is describing. The trajectory of the plot is totally downward from the first story to the end, it becomes more and more tragic. He is bereft of everything that was important to him. But he remains a speaker. He is the one who keeps reinterpreting all that happens, and it’s through his eyes that you see this. So, in a sense, nothing is taken away from him because he is the one who has the last word. I think Jewish readers began to see themselves in this model. They would quote him. They would see themselves as a people who — as long as they were in possession of the narrative — it didn’t really matter all that much what happened. I hope so."