Do You like book 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
