Authors: Sholem Aleichem, Sholem, Hillel Halkin
ISBN-13: 9780805210699, ISBN-10: 0805210695
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: October 1996
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Hillel Halkin is an award-winning translator and a writer whose most recent work is Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel.
Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations.
And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.
With his supple, intelligent translation, Halkin makes accessible the poignant short stories by the legendary Yiddish humorist Sholem Rabinovich (18591916), who wrote under the nom de plume ``Sholem Aleichem,'' a Yiddish salutation. As Halkin elucidates in his introduction, Tevye's self-mocking but deeply affecting monologues (which inspired the play and film Fiddler on the Roof satisfy on several levels: as a psychological analysis of a father's love for his daughters, despite the disappointments they bring him; as a paradigm of the tribulations and resilience of Russian Jewry and the disintegration of shtetl life at the twilight of the Czarist Empire; and as a Job-like theological debate with God. The 20 Railroad Storiesthe monologues of a traveling salesman and his fellow Jewish travelersdepict Jewish thieves and arsonists, feuding spouses, draft evaders, grieving parents and assimilationists. Like the eight Tevye tales, these unprettified stories of simple people and their harsh realities summon a bygone era, but their appeal and application are timeless. Bringing both groups of tales together for the first time in English, this first volume in Schocken's Library of Yiddish Classics series is an auspicious event. (July)
Introduction | ||
Tevye Strikes It Rich | 3 | |
Tevye Blows a Small Fortune | 20 | |
Today's Children | 35 | |
Hodl | 53 | |
Chava | 69 | |
Shprintze | 82 | |
Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel | 97 | |
Lekh-Lekho | 116 | |
To the Reader | 135 | |
Competitors | 136 | |
The Happiest Man in All Kodny | 143 | |
Baranovich Station | 152 | |
Eighteen from Pereshchepena | 163 | |
The Man from Buenos Aires | 166 | |
Elul | 177 | |
The Slowpoke Express | 184 | |
The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah | 186 | |
The Wedding that Came without Its Band | 194 | |
The Tallis Koton | 199 | |
A Game of Sixty-Six | 207 | |
High School | 217 | |
The Automatic Exemption | 229 | |
It Doesn't Pay to Be Good | 238 | |
Burned Out | 247 | |
Hard Luck | 255 | |
Fated for Misfortune | 259 | |
Go Climb a Tree If You Don't Like It | 269 | |
The Tenth Man | 274 | |
Third Class | 279 | |
Glossary and Notes | 285 |