The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son

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Taken together, Sholem Aleichem’s three great semicomic works, Tevye the Dairyman, The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl, and Motl, the Cantor’s Son, might be said to compose a right triangle. The sides of the right angle are formed by Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl, which meet each other squarely. Motl joins the two obliquely. The trio bounds Sholem Aleichem’s fictional world.

Each moves along a geographical line. Tevye shuttles back and forth from his native village of “Boiberik” to the nearby Ukrainian capital of Kiev, called “Yehupetz” by Sholem Aleichem. Boiberik is even closer to “Kasrilevke,” the town in which Motl grows up and the wife and children of Menakhem-Mendl live. We encounter Menakhem-Mendl, however, mainly in Yehupetz before he heads for America, which is also the destination of Motl and his family. And it is in Yehupetz that Tevye and Menakhem-Mendl — quite literally in a chapter of Tevye the Dairyman—run into each other, while it is from Boiberik-Kasrilevke that Tevye and Motl set out and in New York City that Motl and Menakhem-Mendl (although only in one version of his story) end up. These three points are the physical coordinates of Sholem Aleichem’s fiction, and nearly everything he wrote takes place in them or the intermediate space between.

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