Novel
Tevye the Dairyman
טבֿיה דער מילכיקער
Sholem Aleichem · 1894
Synopsis
Tevye, who delivers milk and cheese to the summer visitors of Boiberik, near the big city of Yehupetz, tells the author his life story over the course of several encounters. He became a dairyman thanks to two rich ladies, lost in the forest, whom he had brought back to their home; then his daughters marry one after another outside the customs, the eldest to a tailor, another by following a banished man to Siberia.
Context
The model for Tevye was a talkative milkman met in the summer of 1894 near the dachas of Boyarka, where the writer's family spent the summer. The cycle comprises eight stories, collected in book form in 1911 and completed by a last one in 1914; a fragment written the same year appeared shortly before the author's death. Yehupetz is the name these stories give to Kiev. The writer himself drew a play from the cycle, first performed in 1919 by Maurice Schwartz.
Who it is for
Monologues in Yiddish that Tevye addresses to the author; each tale can be read on its own. In French, Edmond Fleg's translation renders Tevye's language through the speech of the Jews of Alsace.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the cinema in Yiddish (1939), Hebrew (1968), English (1971) and Russian (2017), it inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof, first staged on Broadway in 1964.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.