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Book Review  by Ida Nasatir

Tevye's Daughters by Sholom Aleichem 

September  1949—Ida Nasatir, book review—Tevye's Daughters by Sholom Aleichem—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 11:  One frequent complaint of persons (some of whose best friends are Jews, mind you) is that Jewish people dramatize their misfortunes excessively...It's just another erroneous ethnic accusation. Indeed, the Jew accepts the most tragic facts with a sense of resigned humor, as though his people's calamities were beyond the pale of ordinary human experience and truly fit for the laughter of the gods. That attitude is reflected sharply in Jewish literature and it is one of the finest aspects of the humor of Sholom Aleichem.  The humor in Sholom Aleichem is always subdued, a bittersweet tincture of quiet laughter. In Tevye's Daughters, the Lord wanted to be good to Tevye the Dairyman so he blessed him with seven daughters. And what kind of  daughters. Meek, ugly, sickly creatures? No. Beauties—everyone of them—charming and high spirited, like young pine trees.  For all his Talmudic knowledge, for all his shrewdness, and in spite of the intensity of his parental love, the girls are lost to him. Tzeitl spurns the rich butcher, and runs off with a poor working man, to bear him children in happy poverty. Hidel follows a revolutionary student so that she may be near him while he serves a prison term. Another daughter, jilted by the son of a bourgeous rich family, kills herself. Beilke submits to an arranged marriage with an old merchant, a profiteer, and lives in miserable luxury. All these Tevye forgives and understands. But Chava, the most beloved of all, marries a Gentile, and that Tevye cannot accept. For his religious principles are the core of this large-hearted, dreaming, impractical old man, and so Chava ceases to exist for him, except as a wistful, hurting memory in his heart. A leading figure of the Jewish literary renaissance of the 1900s, Aleichem wrote with passionate love for the Jewish religious tradition; at the same time he edged his stories with the skepticism that was sweeping European Jewry. He became the spokesman and critic of an entire people. When Tevye mangled a Biblical quotation, when he bemoaned his everlasting poverty, or quarreled with God (whom Tevye loved so well he could risk familiarity), Jewish readers could recognize both the story and its bite.  Though his stories may seem mere half-sad, they are actually incisive portraits of European Jewish life. Through Tevye's irony, they underline the weaknesses of that life: "I was...asking questions of the Almighty and answering them myself...I wasn't worried about God so much. I could come to terms with him...What bothered me was people." Few writers have ever earned the love of thier people as has this man, whose real name was Samuel Rabinowitz, and who chose to call himself Sholom Aleichem ("peace be unto you.") His stories, published in paper booklets, were passed from hand to hand among European Jews. When he died in the Bronx in 1916, more than 100,000 people lined the streets of his funeral procession. He had said: "let me be buried among the poor, that their graves may shine on mine, and mine on theirs."