Tevye, the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem
Translated with an introduction by Hillel Halkin.

About the Book
This volume combines two of Sholem Aleichem’s finest collections of stories, Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories. The first collection, which is the inspiration for the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, consists of eight stories, written between 1894 and 1911. The stories, which are narrated by the protagonist Tevye, recount key episodes from the dairyman’s life: the marriages of four of his daughters, his economic ups and downs, his encounters with anti-semitism and his final exile from his village. The second collection is a series of very short stories, each of which is told to a traveling salesman by a fellow passenger on a train.

The two collections share much in common. They both deal with the issues, experiences and anxieties that were central to Jewish life in Russia at the turn of the century. This period was a time of intense political, social and cultural change throughout Russia, and especially for Russian Jews. Jews were subject to increasingly harsh and capricious residency restrictions: they needed permits to live in cities and large towns, they were forbidden to settle in rural regions, and were subject to expulsion from their villages if they did not own their homes or if their villages were reclassified as towns. In addition, pogroms became more frequent and more violent.

While it was a period of intense political and economic hardship for Russian Jews, it was also a period of dynamic cultural, intellectual, and political excitement and innovation. As more Jews moved into the cities, they came into contact with the new intellectual, cultural, social, and political developments of the period. Many young Jews joined Marxist and revolutionary organizations. Others formed their own Jewish Marxist and Zionist movements. Still other Jews took part in the mass migration to the United States and the smaller migration to Palestine. The oppression, the mobility, and the encounter with new political and social ideas challenged and transformed the traditional Jewish culture that had dominated Jewish rural life in Russia during the prior century. Both Tevye, the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories deal comically and poignantly with the impact of political change, anti-semitism, social, economic and geographic mobility on Jewish life.

Both sets of stories also showcase Sholem Aleichem’s literary talents. His narrators are master storytellers and stand-up comedians. The characters that his narrators describe are both unique personalities and recognizable types. Above all, his use of language is magical and transformative. His characters use language to take control of their own experience, even when history seems to be spinning out of control. Most importantly, both sets of stories are very funny! Like the original audiences of these stories, you may find yourself laughing out loud along as you read these tales.

About the Author
Sholem Aleichem is the pen name/alter ego of Shalom Rabinovich. Rabinovich was born in 1859 in Pereyaslav, a small town in Russia. He was the son of a successful merchant and received both a traditional Jewish education and a Russian high school education. He worked as a Russian tutor and later as a government-appointed Rabbi. Rabinovich began his writing career by writing in Hebrew and Russian as well as in Yiddish, often under a variety of pseudonyms. In 1883, he wrote a satire of local politics for a Yiddish publication in St. Petersburgh, using the name Sholem Aleichem. Following this debut, Rabinovich began to publish more satires and humor pieces in Yiddish under the name of Sholem Aleichem. However, for many years, he did not abandon his other pseudonyms entirely. In fact, he would often publish scathing and hysterical public exchanges between Sholem Aleichem and his opponents, characters who were also creations of Rabinovich himself. Over time, the name and persona of Sholem Aleichem became so popular that they overtook the identity of Shalom Rabinovich. He began to make public appearances on the lecture circuit as Sholem Aleichem and eventually used the name in his private life as well.

Shalom Rabinovich/Sholem Aleichem was one of a group of authors who were trying to construct a new Yiddish literary tradition by applying the literary strengths of “high” European literature to subjects that were compelling and familiar to Yiddish speakers. The results of this literary project were vastly successful. Between 1883 and his death in 1916, Sholem Aleichem wrote more than forty volumes in Yiddish. He performed throughout Russia to packed audiences and his serialized sketches and columns were read avidly by thousands of Yiddish speaking Jews. In 1905, after experiencing a severe pogrom in Kiev, Sholem Aleichem left Russia and spent the rest of his life in Europe and the US, returning to Russia only for brief tours. He died in New York in 1916.

Questions for Discussion
It is difficult to anticipate which of the stories will be the most compelling for any particular reader or group. So rather than focusing overly much on individual stories, most of the following questions raise issues that are relevant to many stories in the collections.

General Questions

• One of the most striking features of these stories is the comic, often hilarious treatment of truly tragic plots. Take, for example, the scene in which Tevye’s neighbor informs him that his gentile neighbors have decided to have pogrom (p.120-22).
  

  Where else does Sholem Aleichem use this strategy?
  Why do you think Sholem Aleichem treated these subjects comically?
  How do you imagine his contemporaries would have responded to this strategy?
  How did you respond?

• All of the stories in the two collections are monologues in which one character tells the story to a listener (or listeners) who are also characters within the story. In Tevye, the Dairyman, Tevye tells the stories to Sholem Aleichem who is a fictionalized version of the author. In The Railroad Stories, passengers tell their stories to the traveling salesman who then records the stories and his encounters with the storytellers in the stories themselves.

  How is the monologue different from other forms of first-person narration?
  How are the “listeners/recorders” portrayed in the stories?
  What function do they play?
  Why do you think Sholem Aleichem chose this form?

• David Roskies, a professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary states that “Sholem Aleichem’s characters use language . . . as a protective shield, as a surrogate for action, and as a veritable code of survival.” (“Laughing off the Trauma of History,” Prooftexts 1:2 (1982): 54)
  What do you think Roskies means here?
  

  Do you agree with this description?
  Do you think of this use of language as being particularly Jewish?
  Is it a strategy that other politically disempowered groups use?
  Is it a strategy that works in “real life” or only in literature?

• Sholem Aleichem was an urban, well-educated, Russian-speaking Jew who, over the course of his career, devoted more and more time to writing in Yiddish about Jews from the shtetls. Both during his lifetime and after, Sholem Aleichem’s portraits of shtetl Jews were incredibly popular and were very influential in shaping many readers’ perceptions of Jews and Jewish culture. (Think how many people picture characters and scenes from Fiddler on the Roof when they think of turn-of-the-century Jewish shtetl life).
  

  How does Sholem Aleichem portray rural Russian Jews?
  Why do you think this portrait was/is so appealing to many Jews?

Tevye, the Dairyman

• When Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick wrote Fiddler on the Roof, they borrowed the image of the Fiddler on the Roof from Marc Chagall’s paintings as a metaphor for the balancing act that Tevye must sustain in order to survive.

  How does the Tevye of Tevye, the Dairyman keep his balance?
  Are his strategies successful within the framework of the stories?
  Are they convincing as survival strategies in the “real world?”

• In this period in Russia, and elsewhere, women were beginning to demand greater equality and more control over their own destinies. This early feminist movement challenged the authority of men as leaders of their households and masters of their families’ destinies, and generated anxiety around issues of gender and power.
  

  Where do these issues arise in the Tevye stories?
  How does Tevye, a man surrounded by women, portray the women in his life and his interactions with them?
  Do you think that Tevye’s description of, and attitude toward his daughters, wife and female customers and acquaintances mirrors Sholem Aleichem’s or are there clues that Sholem Aleichem is using Tevye strategically to comment on the relationship between men and women?

• In the stories of “Hodl,” “Chava,” and “Shprintze” the courtship/marriage of each of Tevye’s daughters provides the opportunity to explore one of the social changes that challenge Tevye’s way of life.
  

  What are these changes?
  Which proves to be the most tragic?
  Which of these stories, if any, resonate with contemporary Jewish culture?

• Sholem Aleichem wrote “Tevye Strikes it Rich” as an independent story and later decided to incorporate it into a series of stories which became Tevye, the Dairyman.
  

  Do the stories in Tevye function as individual stories or as chapters in a book? Does Tevye change over the course of the stories?
  Do his methods of coping with his family and the world around him change?
  How does the penultimate chapter (the original version of the collection ended here) “Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel” relate to the other stories in the collection?
  How does this story shape the “plot” of the book?

The Railroad Stories

• In his essay, “Journey to the Twilight Zone,” (In Image of the Shtetl. Syracuse University Press, 2000) Dan Miron suggests that the theme of miscommunication unites each of the stories in The Railroad Stories.
  

  Do you agree that “miscommunication” is the unifying theme?
  If so, why do you think this theme was so important to Sholem Aleichem?
  Are there other themes that connect some or all of the individual stories?

• The motif of traveling companions telling stories is a very old one--- it dates back at least to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Since then, many authors have taken advantage of the storytelling opportunities provided by the situation of strangers, thrown together for an extended period of time, with nothing to do but talk. In writing The Railroad Stories, Sholem Aleichem is contributing to, and transforming this tradition.
  

  How would you describe the environment of the train compartment?
  Is it a private place or a public place?
  Are the people who talk to each other strangers, intimates or something in between?
  Is the train a place of mobility and freedom or is it static and closed?
  How does the setting of the train contribute to the stories?

• At the time when Sholem Aleichem was writing these stories, Russian Jews were often in forced or coerced motion. They were subject to ever-changing regulations that required residence permits for cities and large towns; they were victims of pogroms that destroyed their homes and livelihoods; and many were part of the mass migration to the United States and the smaller migration to Palestine. At the same time, Jews were being increasingly identified/constructed by non-Jews as rootless or landless.
  

  Are the Jews in these stories “wandering Jews?”
  How do these historical circumstances add to or affect the meaning of the stories’ setting? Do travel and mobility have a different resonance for you today?

• In the three stories, “The Slowpoke Express,” “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah,” and “The Wedding that Came without its Band,” the train itself plays an important part in the story.
  

  What function does the train play in these stories?
  How does Sholem Aleichem use the image of the runaway train and the train that arrives on time but without its carloads of pogrom mercenaries to talk about the precarious situation of Jews in Russia in this period?

• Sholem Aleichem became ill with a very severe form of tuberculosis while traveling on a speaking tour throughout Russia.

  He had to get off the train at Baronovich station and was rushed to a hospital where he thought he might die.
  How does this biographical fact affect your understanding of the story entitled “Baronovich Station?”

For Further Reading
The Best of Sholom Aleichem, edited by Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse.