Tevye the Dairyman Family Quotes
How we cite our quotes: Story Number.Paragraph
Quote #1
With a little help from God, there I was penniless, poor as a beggar, with a wife and kids, starving to death three times a day, not counting suppers, may it not happen to any Jew. […] all I got was half a ruble a day, and not every day at that. Just try to feed, kayn eyn horeh, a houseful of hungry mouths, may they stay healthy... (2.3)
So… does Tevye love his family? Accept them as a necessary burden? Secretly wish to be free of them? Is "starving to death three times a day" meant to be a joke about how much they complain about the lack of food or a self-insult about how every meal is a reminder of Tevye's inability to provide?
Quote #2
"Say now," I said, "can you be Boruch-Hersh Leah-Dvossi's son-in-law?"
"You got that right," he said to me. "I am a son-in-law of Leah-Dvossi's and my wife's name is Sheyne-Sheyndl, Boruch-Hersh Leah-Dvossi's daughter. Now do you remember who I am?"
"Be quiet a minute," I said. "I believe your mother-in-law's grandmother Sora-Yente and my wife's aunt Frume-Zlate were cousins, and if I'm not mistaken you are the middle son-in-law of Boruch-Hersh Leah-Dvossi's." (3.9-11)
Feel free to LOL at the names, since this is meant to be a huge joke about how crazy entangled all these small-village family relationships would get.
Quote #3
"If you want to know, I can barely pull together a hundred, and there are eighteen holes to fill with it. First of all, I have to marry off a daughter—"
"Listen to me," he said, "that's the point I'm making! When, Reb Tevye, will you have another chance to put in a hundred and take out, God willing, so much that you will have enough to marry off your daughter and then some?" (3.35-36)
Money is really tied in up every other thing in this book—check it out here, for example, as Tevye is already allocating money he totally hasn't actually made yet to pay for one of his daughters' dowries.
Quote #4
I always argue with my Golde: "Golde," I say, "you are sinning! We have a midrash —"
"Who cares about a midrash?" she says. "We have a daughter to marry off, and after that daughter, kayn eyn horeh, there are two more, and after the two—three more, may no evil eye befall them!"
"Ah, don't worry your head about it, Golde! Our sages also prepared us for that. We have a midrash on that too—" (5.2-4)
(Okay, so first, a little Shmoop brain snack for ya. Midrash is the tradition of rabbis writing explanations—sometimes really long, really creative and imaginative, and always deeply philosophical explanations—of Torah verses. Basically, taking a small snippet from the Torah and figuring out a whole thing about its meaning and relevance to Judaism.) Anyhoodle—here are a couple of different takes on duty. Tevye wants to look dutiful. He worries not just about religious, but about looking like he is religious to others. Golde, meanwhile, is more concerned about actually getting the duty done.
Quote #5
[Perchik] ate at my house, and in exchange he tutored my daughters. As it is said: An eye for an eye—a slap for a slap. He became like a member of our family. The children would bring him a glass of milk, and my wife made sure he had a shirt on his back and a pair of mended socks. We started calling him Fefferl, the Yiddish version of the Russian Perchik [which means "little pepper"], and it is safe to say we all loved him as one of our own. (5.40)
So here, this reads as just a cutesy-poo thing that they kind of semi-adopt this guy. But check it out in context with the part in Story 8 where Tevye says he had to hire someone to recite the kaddish for the dead Golde because he has no male children to perform this religious rite for her. That kind of kicks the meaning of this adopted son up a notch, right?
Quote #6
[…] when it came time to say goodbye, they were all wailing—the mother, the children, and even Hodl herself. […] I alone was like steel and iron. That's easy to say, steel and iron. Inside I was more like a boiling samovar, but for anyone to see it—feh! Tevye is not a woman. […] Well, that was too much for me. I could no longer control myself. I remembered this same Hodl when she was still a baby and I held her in my arms…in my arms… Forgive me, Pani, for acting like a woman. I must tell you what sort of daughter Hodl is! You should see the letters she writes. She is a gift from God! She is right here…right here…deep, deep…I cannot begin to say it… (5.146-153)
Wow, that's pretty moving, no? Are we getting a new little window on Tevye's relationship with his family in all that love and pride and sadness or was all this deep feeling apparent before? Or—given that he's evidently getting pretty stage-y with his gestures—is he maybe just performing his grief for an appreciative audience?
Quote #7
I told no one of my seeing Chava, and I spoke to no one of her, and I asked no one about her, although I knew quite well where she was and where he was and what they were doing. But they could croak before I'd let anyone know. My enemies would never live to see me complain. That's the kind of person Tevye is! (6.109)
Gee, way to make your daughter's disinheritance all about yourself, Tevye.
Quote #8
"Either you are playing dumb or you are an oaf, although you don't look like one. If you were an oaf, you wouldn't have dragged my nephew into this mess, inviting him for Shevuos blintzes and tempting him with a pretty girl. I won't get into whether she is really your daughter. He fell in love with her, and she with him. It's possible she is a very special child and means well, I won't get into that. But you mustn't forget who you are and who we are. You are a man of learning, so how can you even consider that Tevye the dairyman, who delivers cheese and butter to us, could be our in-law?" (7.125)
Let's just set aside that grossness this dude is implying about Shprintze (which we don't even totally get—is he saying that she is secretly a prostitute?). Ahronchik's uncle is clearly trying to protect his family, even if it seems questionable to us. The uncle is able to draw powerful boundaries around his family. Why is Tevye unable to do this—why does his family seem to ooze out into the world without his protection? Is it his relative poverty? Is he an ineffective father? Or is this actually a good thing for his daughters (well, not Shprintze so much)?
Quote #9
"And the heartache that gnaws at me to this very day when I remember what she did to me and for whom she forsook us? […] She is no longer my daughter! She died long ago!"
"No, she didn't die, and she is your daughter again as always. Because from the first minute she found out we were being sent away, she decided they would send all of us, she too along with us. Wherever we go—so Chava herself said—she will go. Our exile is her exile." (9.66-73)
So, context for this: Chava saying that she'll go wherever they go is almost straight from the Hebrew Bible Book of Ruth, when widow Ruth decides to leave her people and return to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law: "wherever you go," she says, "I will go […] Your people shall be my people" (Ruth 1:16-17). But Chava reverses the story of Ruth by leaving her adopted people to go back to her birth people.