Shalom Aleichem’s story Hodl is set in Tsarist Russia. Hodl is the name of one of the 6 daughters of Tevye, a religious Jew who works as a dairyman. He lives in the village of Yehupetz. Through Tevye and his daughter Hodl, Shalom Aleichem depicts in a humorous and satirical way the traditional Jewish life and the changes that take place in the mentality of the younger generation, heading in new directions. Tevye becomes the voice that exposes what the younger generation seems to fail to see—their revolutionary actions carry idealistic aspirations.
The story begins and ends in a witty way— the narrator of the story Tevye addresses directly the author of the story Shalom Aleichem, as Shalom Aleichem seems to give in a humoristic way some independence to Tevye so he would be able to speak to the author when no one else seems to listen to him. The author himself becomes the audience, the one who is asked and willing to listen. The narrator of the story Tevye is well versed in the Torah, and quotes witty passages from the Torah. His wife however prefers to ignore this and focus on the issue at hand, what she regards as the more practical aspect, which is finding suitable matches for marrying their daughters. Tevye describes Hodl, his second daughter, as “prettier than a picture”. She knows Yiddish and Russian, “and swallows books like hot cakes”. In terms of the education of Jews in tsarist Russian, he points out that Jews are not allowed to attend Russian universities, “Why, a cow can sooner jump over a roof than a Jew get into a Russian University! Al tishlakh yodhko: they guard their schools from us like a bowl of cream from a cat”. Furthermore, he meets a young man named Pertchik, nicknamed Peppercorn. The narrator is irked at the idea that this suitor thinks of himself as a “student” , which was an “unsuitable” role for a Jew given the constraints that the Russian society imposed on the Jewish youth. This was something unlikely, a rather idealistic aspiration even for those who had the intellectual abilities to study.
As such, in their first meeting, there is a dialogue between Tevye and the young man who also replies through witty answers—he explains that he is a “human being”, his family is the “human race”, and he is a “child of G-d”. This description serves a dual purpose. It is a witty answer for Tevye who is concerned in finding out this young man’s origins, but perhaps it is also an indirect criticism at the Russian society which does not grant the same equal rights to Jews as to Russians limiting the choices of Jewish students to pursue a higher education. Therefore, the young man who would be able to excel appears as an idealistic character. Then the young man identifies himself as the son of the cigarette maker. Furthermore, Tevye invites the young man to his house for supper. Tevye says that he enjoys talking to this young man because, “I’ve always liked a man I can have a Jewish word wit; here a verse from the Bible, there a line from the Talmud, even a bit of philosophy or what-have-you; I can’t help being who I am”. In terms of an occupation to earn a living, the young man tutors children. Then, he would come to Tevye’s house to eat where he would also tutor Tevye’s daughters. Tevye nicknamed the young man “Peppercorn” for his looks and “wanderbird” for his custom of disappearing without a word. The young man holds to certain principles that strike Tevye. Peppercorn believes that a rich man is worthless, but a beggar and a workingman are important. Moreover, he informs Tevye that “money was the source of all evil”. Tevye’s reaction is to describe this as “talking like a madmen” (p. 58). This ideology that is presented here is something that is emerging in the traditional Tsarist society of the time, that is the emergence of Marxism ideology, which stresses the role of the working class and criticizes the bourgeoisie.
Another character that makes its appearance is Efrayim the matchmaker who approaches Tevye about a match for his daughter to a bachelor from Boiberik. The matchmaker is symbolic of traditional values in Judaism, where a matchmaker’s role is to be the intermediary in arranged marriages, as young men and woman are not supposed to date directly. After meeting the matchmaker, on the way home, Tevye spots his daughter holding hands with Peppercorn, something that again is not acceptable behavior for those who are not married to each other in a traditional society. When Tevye confronts them, he finds out they are engaged and they’re going to get married. Tevye remarks that Peppercorn has taken an unconventional approach as he became engaged to Tevye’s daughter without the use of a matchmaker and without an engagement party or notifying his future in-laws. They’ve done this in secret. Peppercorn tells Tevye the only reason he tells him this is they’re about to be parted, he is leaving to a secret place that is “confidential”, which worries Tevye and would like to protest, though he ends up having to conform to this choice. Moreover, the couple foregoes the traditional customs of the time in terms of matchmaker, engagement and marriage ceremony. Tevye describes their wedding ceremony with “A funeral would have been jollier” (p.62). Within hours after the wedding, Tevye takes his son-in-law and his daughter to Boiberik where they have to part ways as Peppercorn is leaving to a place that he does not want to disclose. In the description of the relatives who say goodbye to Peppercorn, there is a youngster who is described, “wearing his shirt down over his pants and looking more like a Russian than a Jew”. Tevye seems to be more practically inclined in his reaction— “I do believe, Tevye, I told myself, that you’re married into a gang of horse thieves, or purse snatchers, or housebreakers, or at the very least, highway murderers….”. His daughter’s description of them is that “they were the best, the finest, the most honorable young people in the world, and that they lived their whole lives for others, never giving a fig for their own skins (…) that one with the shirt hanging out; he comes from a rich family in Yehupetz—but not only won’t he take a penny from his parents, he refuses even to talk to them” (p. 63). Moreover, Tevye adds, “Why, with that shirt and long hair, all he needs is a half-empty bottle of vodka to look the perfect gentleman”. His daughter praises her husbands’ relatives and friends because they’re the “working class”. Yet, the storyline continues to be tense as she still does not want to reveal her husband’s whereabouts. Tevye’s daughter foregoes giving an explanation to her father based on her belief that “it’s not something you can grasp with just your head (…) You have to feel it—you have to feel it with all your heart!”. This tension that exists between the father and his child reflects the new trends that are emerging in tsarist Russia—on one hand the young are seeking changes in their society and are willing to defy tradition and their family’s expectations, on the other hand, their aspirations are not practical and they seem idealistic, and they carry negative consequences as evident from the outcome of the relationship between Hodl and Peppercorn. Eventually, Hodl does confess to her father that her husband ended up in prison. Tevye is depicted as a loving father, as his heart aches for his daughter.
During the holiday season of Succot, Hodl receives a letter from her “jail bird”. Tevye would like to find out the contents of the letter but he does not inquire as he himself puts it “If she wasn’t talking, neither was I; I’d show her how to button up a lip. No, Tevye was no woman; Tevye could wait…”. As she approaches her father, Hodl tells Tevye she is saying goodbye to him “forever” (p. 65). Tevye thinks she may want to kill herself like a Jewish girl had done when she fell in love with a Russian peasant boy whom she was not allowed to marry. As a result, her mother died and her father went bankrupt, while the peasant boy found someone else instead to marry. Hold informs her father she will be joining Peppercorn who will be transferred from jail and sent to Siberia. She leaves the night after Hoshanah Rabah, while her entire family cries for her departure. Though up to this point, Tevye did not cry because he did not want “to behave like a woman”, in the end he does cry for his daughter. Upon his daughter’s departure, Tevye ends with an invitation to the author Shalom Aleichem to talk about “something more cheerful”, such as a question if he has “any news of the cholera in Odessa”. The choice of Hodl to follow her husband to Siberia is symbolic of the fact that the young generations was very much influenced by the revolutionary ideas that emerged in tsarist Russia and they embraced these ideals in spite of the fact that it meant they had to leave their parents’ homes and their existence.
In the story entitled Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Bashevis Singer, the main character of the story is Yentl, the daughter of a rabbi from Yanev. Yentl appears as a traditional character who faces a gender and identity crisis, and who takes an unconventional approach to defy the expectations that a traditional society has for a young woman—to be a housewife and a mother. Instead, she seeks to liberate herself from these expectations by taking the path that young men are expected to take, she pursues advanced Talmudic studies disguised as a young man.
After the death of her father, Yentl refuses to get married because a voice inside her tells her “What becomes of a girl when the wedding’s over? Right away she starts bearing and rearing. And her mother-in-law lords it over her.” The expectations Yentl describes of a woman in her social milieu are to sew, to knit, and to cook. Instead, she favors activities that are expected of males. Along with her father, she studied the Torah, Mishnah, Gemarah, and Commentaries as if she was a boy. Her father would tell her “Yentl—you have the soul of a man” (p. 149). She says that her physical description also resembles that of a man as she was “tall, thin, bony, with small breasts and narrow hips”. At times, Yentl would dress in her father’s clothes while he was sleeping, and she says she looked like a “dark, handsome young man”. Furthermore she describes her decision to pose as a man based on the fact that “she had not been created for the noodle board and the pudding dish, for chattering with silly women and pushing for a place at the butcher’s block. Her father had told her so many tails yeshivas, rabbis, men of letters! Her head was full of Talmudic disputations, questions and answers, learned phrases. Secretly, she had even smoked her father’s long pipe” (p. 150).
Moreover, Yentl sells the inheritance from her father, and she wants to head for the yeshiva in secret, disguised as a young man in spite of the expectations of others of her as a woman—“the neighborhood women tried to talk her out of it, and the marriage brokers said she was crazy, that she was more likely to get a good match right here in Yanev”. Instead, without anyone knowing, she dresses up as a man and leaves for Lubin, where she introduces herself as a male student by the name of Anshel.
On the way, she stops at an inn with young men who were journeying to study with famous rabbis. Here, she meets a yeshiva student, Avigdor, who studies in a yeshiva of 30 students in Bechev and is in his fourth year. Avigdor tells Anshel that the people of the town provide board and food for the students. This was a traditional practice of the Jewish community, to support the education of young men in Torah studies. Avigdor describes to Anshel how he was engaged with Hadass, the daughter of the richest man in town, Alter Vishkower, but the father broke the engagement because of rumors.
When Yentl alias Anshel arrives in Bechev she received boarding one day a week at the house of the rich man. Anshel and Avigdor become study partners in the yeshivah and close friends. Avigdor does not suspect Anshel of not being a woman. Even more, no one else in the community realizes that she is disguised as a male. Furthermore, Avigdor would like Anshel to marry Hadass the girl he loves while he will have to marry Peshe, a widow. While at Hadass’s house, Anshel finds out from Hadass that the reason her father broke the engagement with Avigdor was he had a brother who committed suicide by hanging himself. After the arrangements for his marriage were made, Avigdor did not come anymore to study in the yeshiva and Anshel studied alone. Even though he is disguised as a male, Anshel still fosters feelings associated with his identity as a female—she falls in love with Avigdor. When she takes off her male clothing, she sees herself as a girl in love with Avigdor. A this point, she realizes that the Torah’s prohibition “against wearing the clothes of the other sex” has consequences as “Even the soul was perplexed, finding itself incarnate in a strange body.” Yet, when Yentl dresses back as Anshel and goes to the house of Hadass, Anshel tells Hadass “he” wants to marry her. And so he proceeds with the deception and will be marrying her.
Yentl’s actions denote an identity crisis. When Avigdor hears about Anshel’s engagement with Hadass, he comes to the study house to congratulate Anshel. Furthermore, he confesses to Anshel that he is still in love with Hadass and cannot forget her. At this point, they begin again to study together and their bond is compared to the one between Jonathan and David. Yentl herself is surprised that her deception continues and no one discovers this. When both get married, it is rather ironic that Hadass treats Anshel well while Peshel misteats Avigdor. It seems that Anshel, even though he is a woman, is better at fulfilling the role as a husband. Yet, Anshel is tormented due to the ruse she has to keep up with.
During the holiday of Pesach, Anshel and Avigdor leave together on a trip to Bechev where Anshel tells his secret to Avigdor that he actually is a woman whose name is Yentl. To prove it, she undresses herself in front of Avigdor. Then she proceeds to tell him the whole story. She explains that the reason she dressed as a man was that she did not want to waste her life with what women do, whereas she married Hadass for his sake so that Avigdor would divorce Peshel and then marry Hadass. In terms of her gender, Yentl describes herself as “neither one nor the other”, and he wants to go away to another yeshiva to study instead where no one would know him/her. Then they proceed to discuss in Talmudic arguments how Anshel can be divorced of Hadass, and the narrator comments that “Though their bodies were different, their souls were of one kind”, and as they proceed further debating, “All Anshel’s explanations seemed to point to one thing: she had the soul of a man and the body of a woman” (p. 165). Avigdor advises Anshel to simply send Hadass a divorce without other explanations. As Hadass receives the divorce papers, Avigdor returns to the town feeling ill and Peshe asks for a divorce to which he agrees to.
Since there is no explanation for the divorce, the town comes up with rumors and theories as to why these matters would’ve happened in this manner, such as maybe Anshel was converted to Christianity, or perhaps he found another woman, he may’ve come to be possessed by evil spirits since he never went to the bathhouse or the river, or maybe he had done penance for some sort of transgression. Tevel the musician comes up with a more plausible hypothesis that Avigdor never forgot Hadass and that Anshel divorced Hadass so that Avigdor could marry her. Avigdor married Hadass, and they had a baby boy, who was named Anshel.
The drama of this story depicts issues that may confront women living in a traditional society. There is the question of gender identity and the conflict of the role of women expected in a traditional society and the actual role that women are willing to assume when they have different aspirations. In a traditional society that has well defined boundaries for the role of the women as wives and mothers, the main character forges an identity, which depicts this tension. In her male disguise, Yentl proves that she is able to fulfill the role of a man when it comes to education and, except for her biological restraints, she is able to excel without any of the males whom she interacts with on a daily basis suspecting she is actually a female. Her character shows that she is able to establish a bond with a member of the opposite sex and she possesses intellectual abilities that enable her to study Torah at an advanced level. At the same time, a tension still remains in the end as she cannot fulfill the role of the husband and she is tormented by her choice, defining herself as “neither one nor the other”.
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