Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem

Author:Sholem Aleichem [Aleichem, Sholem]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9780307795243
Publisher: Schocken
Published: 1894-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE HAPPIEST MAN IN ALL KODNY

The best time to travel by train is … shall I tell you? In autumn, right after Sukkos.

It’s neither too hot nor too cold then, and you needn’t look out all the time at a gray sky sobbing on a gloomy, sulking earth. And if it does rain and the drops strike the window and trickle down the steamy pane like tears, you can sit like a lord in the third-class car with a few other privileged souls like yourself and watch a distant wagon as it labors in the mud. On it, covered with a sack and folded nearly into three, huddles one of God’s creatures who takes out all his misery on another of God’s creatures, a poor horse, while you thank the good Lord that you’re in human company with a solid roof over your head. I don’t know about you, but autumn after Sukkos is my favorite time to travel.

The first thing I look for is a seat. If I’ve managed to find one, and better yet, if it’s by a window on the right, I tell you, I’m king. I can take out my tobacco pouch, light up as many cigarettes as I please, and look around to see who my fellow passengers are and which of them I can talk a bit of business with. Usually, I’m sorry to say, they’re packed together like herring in a barrel. Everywhere there are beards, noses, hats, stomachs, faces. But a man worth knowing behind the face? Sometimes there isn’t even one … Yet wait a minute: look at that queer fellow sitting by himself in the corner—there’s something special about him. I have a good eye for such types. Show me a hundred ordinary men and I’ll pick out the one oddball right away.

At first glance, that is, the person in question was a perfectly unremarkable-looking individual of a type that’s a dime a dozen, what we call where I come from a “three-hundred-and-sixty-five-days-a-year Jew.” The one strange thing about him was his clothes: his coat was not exactly a coat, the frock beneath it was not exactly a frock, the hat on his head was not exactly a hat, the skullcap under it was not exactly a skullcap, and the umbrella he held in his hand was not exactly an umbrella, although it was not exactly a broomstick either. A most unusual getup.

What struck me most about him, though, was not what he was wearing but rather the animation with which, unable to sit still for a minute, he took in his surroundings on all sides—and above all, the jolly, lively, radiant expression on his blissful face. Either, I thought, his winning number has come up in a lottery, or else he’s made a good match for his daughter, or else he’s just enrolled a son in the Russian high school that the boy had the luck to get into. A minute didn’t pass without his jumping from his seat,

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