BONUS EPISODE: Dara Horn

On Tevye the Dairyman

Award-winning author Dara Horn is also a professor of Jewish literature. In discussing the Tevye story, she went into a deep dive, explaining each of the daughters’ marriages as a confrontation with a different political challenge to Russian Jews. I was riveted and wanted to share with you as well!

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• Transcript

  BONUS: Dara Horn on Tevye the Dairyman

  Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
  Hi again, welcome to the very first Five Books Bonus Edition. In my conversation with award-winning author Dara Horn, I tapped into her professor mode and was fascinated by a deep dive she went into about the Tevye story. It didn't quite fit into the episode, but I'm guessing you'll be as riveted as I was, so I'm going to share that with you as well.

  Enjoy.

  Dara Horn:
  As English language readers, we come to this expectation of literature as being something that is supposed to be redemptive. Right? It's like the main character is supposed to be saved. Right? If that doesn't happen, the main character is supposed to have an epiphany. If that doesn't happen, the main character is supposed to have a moment of grace. 

  These are all really Christian terms. None of that stuff happens in Yiddish literature. Like no one's ever saved, obviously. No one ever has a moment of grace. No one ever has an epiphany. Like it's just instead these characters just keep on enduring. I mean, it's this master class in resilience. And with what Sholem Aleichem does in this book is it takes you through this, like, history of the Jews in the Russian Empire. And it goes from the 1890s until the last episode he writes is like in, I think it's in 1913 or 14. It's like, but I mean, it takes you through like the first Russian Revolution, the first Russian Constitution. And each of the daughters' marriages is a confrontation with a different one of these political challenges to Russian Jews.

  I could go on with this. I've taught this before. As you can tell, I give lectures about this. So maybe I'll stop now. But there's a lot of, there's so many pieces to it that are so misunderstood. I could even just briefly say like the Chava episode. Suffice it to say that at the end of the Yiddish book Chava is abandoned by her non-Jewish husband and returns to her family.

  I am curious, if you just take us through the daughters, what are their historical problems that they're — 

  Yes. Okay, sure. So the first daughter is Hainte Kikinder, the Today's Children is the name of that chapter about Tzeitel. And that's actually the one that the play, Fiddler on the Roof is most loyal to the book. That's the one where she wants to marry this man that she loves instead of this arranged marriage. And then he manages to fool his wife by having this, pretending to have this dream.

  In the book, it's a little more ambiguous. Like is she actually fooled or does she know that? Because there's also, there's an implication that Lazar Wolf, that he's an abuser, that he killed his first wife, not that he killed his first wife, but there's some hints that this is a dangerous marriage. And then also there's sort of this running joke through that episode, which is that this is an impossible match because Tevye is a dairyman and this guy is a butcher and the milk and meat can't go together. There's like a lot of pieces to this.

  But that is really more about sort of a more generic, like, generation gap, you know, that the young people don't want to do these traditional marriages anymore. That is like sort of a common story that you find happening in other cultures also, that this is a traditional culture where there's a traditional arranged marriage and that's young people rebelling against that. That part is very common.

  The second story about Hodel is about this, how the communist movement seduced young Jews and then destroyed their lives, right? Because Feferl, they gave him a different name in the play, Perchik, or whatever, I forget what his name is in the play. But Hodel’s husband is a communist. And at the end, he is apprehended by the czarist authorities, he’s sent to Siberia. She then follows him to Siberia. I mean, this is an absolutely tragic story about this communist movement that seduced Jews basically in the hope of a better life, of more freedom, and then ate them alive. 

  The last line of that chapter is Tevye says to Sholem Aleicham as he says goodbye to Hodel forever, as she's leaving to join him in Siberia, where she's not even going to see him, she's just going to be near him where he's in prison. And he's never going to see her again. And he says, “Sholem Aleichem, let's talk about something more pleasant. Do you have any news about the cholera epidemic in Odessa?” And that's the relationship with the Jews with Communism. It's this romance that ends up being an abusive marriage.

  The Chava story sold out print runs when it was published in 1905, I think it's 1905. Tsar Nicholas III had what he called the one-third plan for the Jews of the Russian Empire, where what he was going to do is he was going to kill one-third of them, convert one-third of them to Christianity, and then force one-third of them to emigrate to America. The convert one-third to Christianity piece, one of the ways this was done was by having people who were, through the church, were seducing young Jewish women into the church. That's what that episode is about. I mean, this is not, you know, we think of it — it was presented in the Broadway play for an audience of American Jews who have many intermarriages among them, as a, this is an intermarriage. That's not what this is. There's no such thing as intermarriage. The Jewish woman converts Orthodox Christianity. She's kept in the priest's custody in the book. Like, she's a prisoner in the home of the priest. This is like, she's a catch for the priest.

  So that's the third chapter. I mean, Shprintze, this is another, it's after there's this massive stock market crash, and there are all these wealthy people who are, oh, and there's a pogrom in Kiev, and there are all these people who are trying to get out of Kiev. And so the wealthy Jews of Kiev come to their dachas, their country homes in this area where Tevye is living. And then one of them seduces Tevye's daughter, Shprintze. Seems, you know, it seems pretty clear between the lines that he gets her pregnant. But then Tevye thinks this is going to be a marriage, he doesn't even know about this pregnancy. But really this young man has just taken advantage of his daughter. And that's sort of this collapse of this Jewish community after these pogroms in Kiev, which Sholem Aleichem happened to have survived a pogrom in Kiev, which was supposed to be not where you're supposed to have a pogrom, right? This is like a sophisticated city. 

  I mean, I could keep going. Bielke, the last daughter, she does what her father always wanted and marries a rich man. He's this like new money, he loses his fortune in the Russo-Japanese war. So she married him only for the money and then he doesn't have any money, and they end up having to run away from his creditors to America. And they become like slaves in a New York City sweatshop. It's a really tragic, tragic story.

  Yeah, it's really bad. I could keep going, but I'll stop.

  I think we're all going to look at the play and all of the adaptations much differently after hearing that. Thank you.