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Read Tevye The Dairyman And The Railroad Stories (1996)

Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (1996)
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Author
Hillel Halkin
Genre
Fiction
Rating
4.17 of 5 Votes: 5
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ISBN
0805210695 (ISBN13: 9780805210699)
Language
English
Publisher
schocken
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Tevye The Dairyman And The Railroad Stories (1996) - Plot & Excerpts

Sholem Aleichem, a Yiddish idiom which basically means, “Hey, what’s up?” is the pseudonym of Sholem Rabinovich, who has been heralded as the Jewish Mark Twain and who, in my opinion, favorably deserves the comparison. I became interested in reading this book when I learned it was the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof, one of a precious few Broadway musicals my stomach is strong enough to endure. The novel runs just 131 pages, made up of eight episodes written and published over a twenty-three year period, from 1894 to 1917. As an episodic novel, or a novel told in a cycle of short-stories, it is exemplary. Each episode manages to both build on the previous installments and still remain self-sustaining unto itself. The episodes happen in real time. That is to say, if five years have passed since the publication of the previous episode, Tevye is five years older at the onset of the next one, so that by the end of the novel Tevye has aged twenty-three years since the first, just as the author has aged twenty-three years, and, theoretically, just as the reader has aged. How effortlessly Alecheim sustains the narrative over such a span is one of the interesting things about the novel, for me. Tevye’s maturation seems seamless, natural, and believable. The reader can sense throughout the narrative that Tevye is changing, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, and not necessarily in response to major events in the plot, but just as a matter of course, because he is aging.Tevye as a character and as a narrator becomes a joyous treat. The narrative mode is a series of monologues in which Tevye directly speaks to Sholem Aleichem, who apparently writes the stories down at a later date. This makes the voice conversational, homey, colorful, and occasionally digressive. The style is easy to read and quickly absorbing, as the reader feels as if he is listening to an old man spinning a clever yarn. The effect is that we think of Tevye, and not necessarily the author, as an entertaining storyteller. Tevye fancies himself a scholar and constantly misquotes scripture or quotes it humorously out of context. “Tevye is no woman,” is the most often repeated phrase in the novel, humorous because, as Ryan pointed out to me, if Tevye had been more inclined to behave “womanly,” he might have avoided the misadventures that provide the basis of the plot. But Tevye, like many men, is only superficially a misogynist. The most compelling aspect of the story is his powerful, constant affection for his daughters and his unflinching pursuit of their happiness.Aleichem, like Twain, uses humor as a means toward social criticism, and like Twain avoids ideological preachiness or scathing bitterness. His satire is warm and compassionate with a firm eye to the story. However, none of the sentimentalism of the musical is found in Tevye the Dairyman. Injustice, ignorance, and even death take important roles in the tales, and while the novel is far darker and more human than the musical, Aleichem’s triumph is the harmony with which he mingles comedy and tragedy, and the befuddled amusement with which his protagonist relates all his sad experiences. Despite his many flaws and sorrows Tevye’s good-will, humor, and charm ultimately carry the day. A tremendous short novel.

Don't read the intro. I always read the introductions, and have found them useful/interesting about 10% of the time.This book is a series of short stories, maybe 25, that take between 10 and 25 minutes each to read. It is composed of two parts - the stories from one narrator, Tevye the dairyman, mostly about his daughters, and the stories from a train-rider relating what various passengers have told him. All of the stories are written in a very conversational style, as if you were sitting next to someone and actually hearing them talk to you. I haven't thought too deeply about how Aleichem accomplishes this conversational feeling, but thinking about it now, some of the elements I saw were the frequent use of apositives, asides that aren't really relevant, and side dialog from the narrator about the act of telling of the story. This conversational style is fun and novel, but it wore on me as a reader and by the end of the book I was kind of sick of it. I enjoyed the first stories from Tevye. They are focused on a similar cast of characters and I think I prefer getting to know people over a series of pages rather than jumping from new cast to new cast every new story. The railroad stories were less enjoyable. Some of them were just pointless or ended stupidly, which is kind of part of the joke (sometimes the train-rider got bad stories, so the reader gets them too). In general they just weren't very compelling or funny, despite the fact that the stories were popular and are known for the latter attribute. I did learn a little about Jewish culture and history, both from the stories and introduction, so if you are interested in such things this book would be more meaningful to you.Overall I'd say skip it, unless you are very keen on building your Jewish culturedness / literature awareness.

What do You think about Tevye The Dairyman And The Railroad Stories (1996)?

The story behind Fiddler on the Roof. Fidder has long been one of my top 10 or so movies, for the scenery, the music, the cultural flavor, and the story itself, but I had never ready the story, or stories, behind the story.Tevye sings in the movie, "I have five daughters." And in one of the short stories of Aleichem, he does. In another, he has six. But, there's only actual stories about five.The two daughters not included in the movie have even darker stories.One gets a marriage proposal from a rich Jew, a widow's son. Be still, Tevye's and Golde's beating hearts! But, his uncle rescinds it. The daughter, Shprintze, soon thereafter kills herself.Beilke, the last, actually marries a rich Jew. But, this social climber wants to wipe out traces of his family history -- and hers. Tevye refuses to go to America, but, in this story, is ready to go to the Holy Land. And, Golde is dead by this time.The final story, the "pogrom" story, is a bit darker than the end of the movie, too.Translator Hilkin says all five daughters' stories play off some aspect of Tevye's attempts to cope with modernizationThe stories show Aleichem as a good short story writer. But, there's no threads between them, and I doubt he would have been a good novelist.(Note: I didn't read much of, or get much into, the Railroad Stories.)
—Socraticgadfly

This collection of short stories is really two separate collections put together: the Tevye the Dairyman Stories, and the Railroad Stories. The first set comprises the short stories that were the inspiration for the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. Written over a span of twenty years, these stories offer fragments of Tevye's life as he comes to terms with the changing times and the growth of his daughters. The Railroad Stories do not feature Tevye, and are instead a disjointed collection of narratives it seems Sholem Aleichem has collected on his many travels by railroad throughout Europe. There's no overwhelming theme to these collected stories, except perhaps koyl yisro'el khaveyrim ("all Jews are brethren") -- wherever you go, a Jew is a Jew.I was surprised to find that Tevye's world in these stories is so different from what is portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof (the play and the movie). For one thing, society is much more varied, and there are Jews on all levels and in all sorts of roles, not only in the shtetl living as peasants. Secularization plays a much more significant role in these stories than the play/movie would suggest, and Tevye finds himself straddling the gap between the religious and secular world even more precariously. Speaking of precarious, though, there's a noticeable lack of any fiddling; the image of the rooftop fiddler, Halkin's introduction explains, actually comes from a Marc Chagall painting. Perhaps the most colorful element of this collection is the language used. I really have to commend Halkin's translation -- it does a marvelous job of capturing the "feel" of Yiddish as I remember my grandparents speaking it. Halkin also does a great job of navigating the blended Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Hebrew to craft a translation that keeps the essence not only of the meaning, but of Sholem Aleichem's famous wordplay and colorful turns of phrase. I don't read nearly enough Yiddish to be able to read the original and offer a line-by-line comparison to endorse the translation more fully, but this translation certainly had the right "feel," and evokes images of the world that so many immigrant Jews left behind to move to America (and elsewhere) at the turn of the last century. No wonder Sholem Aleichem received such a warm reception here when he emigrated!
—Rachel

So who is this Shalom Aleichem and how dare he rip off Fiddler on the Roof? Couldn't he at least come up with some original material?What?! Oh. I see. I'm being told that... I understand. If you read "Today's Children" and a few other stories in this volume you'll get the core stories of Fiddler on the Roof with lots of extra details. It's great! Tevye in the original Shalom Aleichem (pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich) has a bit more vinegar, drinks a good bit more, and throws around the nonsense Talmud with even greater abandon than he does on film. He's dirtier, and poorer too. But the spirit that actor Chaim Topol brought to the film's character is still spot on. Shalom Aleichem's Tevye is a man with a good heart and a world of troubles, who will endure this world's trials with sharp humor. The words he speaks and the attitudes he cultivates are his survival secret and Shalom Aleichem's magic. Was Shalom Aleichem the "Jewish Mark Twain"? Yeah, I think it fits.Sometimes the details are almost too much. I imagine that the endless detail of the originals was a valued part of the experience in 1890 or 1900 when first published. The same leisurely pace in 2012 is occasionally tiresome. I didn't read every story, or even every word of some of the stories that I did read, but I enjoyed the experience. Like any American Jew who has seen Fiddler on the Roof more than once, and who has never read much of Shalom Aleichem, I could only read these stories with the film version playing in my mind, helplessly noticing when the text overlapped the film (really, vice versa), and when it ran off in its own playful direction.Watching the hash Tevye makes of Hebrew phrases (presented in transliteration) is one of the special delights for those who know a little Hebrew, but not being able to do so takes away little from the overall pleasure. Having recently re-watched Fiddler on the Roof, now a basic cultural artifact of American Jewish life, with my children it was a delight to return to the source material and experience Shalom Aleichem's world in three dimensions and high definition.
—Miles

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