Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (Penguin Classics)
With all the talk today about the survival of Yiddish, there continues to be a big demand for the work of beloved Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. Fortunately, some of Aleichem’s best work was newly translated last year to celebrate the writer’s one-hundred-fiftieth birthday in February 2009. Tevye, the Dairyman and Motl, the Cantor’s Son brings together not only “Tevye,” the story on which the famous Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof is based, but also two other novels that combine the shtetl story with the immigration drama of leaving home and coming to America. Dan Miron’s brilliant introduction to this book will bring in new readers and also make Fiddler fans revisit the stories they thought they knew. And you have to read them aloud: the torrents of earthy curses (“May you grow like an onion with your head in the ground!”) and the mushy endearments; the kvetching and the grandiose lies; the competition for who is more miserable. Aleichem remains the great humanist, the most popular Yiddish writer ever; he’s often and appropriately called the Jewish Mark Twain. --Hazel Rochman