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not know the meaning of a Hebrew verse, the feeling it suggested to him was generally the warm, homey one of religious rituals and synagogue services that he knew well.
    Finally, as far as Jewish readers are concerned, modern Jewish history has ironically reversed the composition of Sholem Aleichem’s public. Once he was read by Jews who knew more Yiddish than Hebrew; today he is mostly read by those who, if they know any Jewish language at all, know more Hebrew than Yiddish. It is my hope that many such readers who cannot read Sholem Aleichem in the original will nevertheless be able to enjoy Tevye’s Hebrew wordplay in this English translation.
    For those who cannot, there are two consolations. One is the glossary, which the reader is free to consult not only for the meaning and pronunciation of Tevye’s Hebrew quotes, but also for explanations of historical references and Jewish customs that may elude him. The other is the fact that there is no need to skip over the Hebrew quotations just because one does not understand them. Read them aloud; savor them; try saying them as Tevye did. There is no way to reproduce in print the exact sights, smells, and tastes of Tevye’s world, but a bit of the sound of it is in these pages.
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    Though there is only one Tevye, there was also only one Sholem Aleichem, and, as readers of the twenty
Railroad Stories
will notice, as prolifically creative as he was (the first posthumous, incomplete edition of his work ran to twenty-eight volumes!)—indeed, it would seem, as a prerequisite for such productivity—there are in his work certain basic themes and situations that occur again and again. Thus, one is reminded by the story “Eighteen from Pereshchepena” of the comic scene between Tevye and Layzer Wolf in which the two carry on a single conversation that each thinks is about something else; by the narrator’s attitude toward women in “HighSchool” of Tevye’s antifemale posturing; by Berl Vinegar’s fast-talking of the priest in “The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah” of Tevye’s handling of Ivan Paparilo in the pogrom scene of “Lekh-Lekho,” etc. Even Tevye’s rampant quotationism has its parallel in the narrator of “Burned Out”—who, however, is even less of a “scholar” than Tevye and wildly throws Hebrew phrases about without always knowing what they mean. Such recurrent elements served Sholem Aleichem as modular blocks out of which he was able to construct an amazing variety of characters and plots.
    Although
The Railroad Stories
, first assembled in book form in 1911, are contemporary with the
Tevye
episodes, their composition was not widely spaced like that of
Tevye
but rather concentrated in two intense bursts of activity, one in 1902 and one in 1909–1910. In the first period were written “High School,” “The Automatic Exemption,” “Burned Out,” “Fated for Misfortune,” and, though it was later slightly revised to form the collection’s closing story, “Third Class.” With the exception of “It Doesn’t Pay to be Good.” which dates from 1903, all the other stories belong to the second period. It was only then, indeed, that Sholem Aleichem decided to write a book of tales all told to or overheard by a traveling salesman on a train, which explains a fundamental difference between the 1902–1903 series and the 1909–1910 one; for in the latter group trains and train rides are generally intrinsic, whereas in the former they are not. The 1902–1903 stories, in other words, were not originally written with railroads in mind, to which they were adapted after the fact by the simple device of adding a brief descriptive opening paragraph placing them on a train. As for the order of the stories in the book, it was determined by Sholem Aleichem himself. While it does not strictly reflect the sequence in which they were written, it does have a chronological basis, the first eleven tales dating from 1909–1910, the next five from