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commercial school—though the latter, as a rule, offered little attraction for the Christian population—by undertaking to defray all expenses connected with his education.
    This is not to say that there are not elements of farce in these stories, but they lie far more in the reaction of the characters than in the situation itself. Always a stickler for getting the details right (even the fabulous Brodsky of
Tevye
and “Go Climb a Tree If You Don’t Like It” was a real Jewish sugar magnate of that name who lived in Kiev), Sholem Aleichem became even more so after leaving Russia in 1906, for he was afraid of being thought out of touch with the world he continued to write about. The Soviet Jewish critic Max Erik quotes a revealing letter written by him to an acquaintance in the White Russian town of Homel at the time that he was working on these tales:
    Perhaps you would consider doing something for me: I would like you to send me raw material from Homel, from Vitebsk, from Bialystok, from wherever you care to, as long as it is subject matter that I can use in my “Railroad Stories.” I have in mind characters, encounters, anecdotes, comic and tragic histories, events, love affairs, weddings, divorces, fateful dreams, bankruptcies, family celebrations, even funerals—in a word, anything you see and hear about, have seen and heard about, or will see and hear about, in Homel or anywhere else. Please keep one thing in mind, though: I don’t want anything imaginary, just facts, the more the better!
    Two more examples of such (on our part) unsuspected factuality in these stories are of particular interest.
    One concerns a matter of language. In the first of
The Railroad Stories
, “Competitors,” we are presented with a woman train vendor who, when her tongue is unleashed, turns out to be a stupendous curser—and by no means a rote one, but a talented improviser who can match every phrase she utters with an appropriate imprecation. One of a kind, no? No. In a chapter devoted to curses in his
The World of Sholom Aleichem
, Maurice Samuel writes of what he calls the “apposite or apropos” curse in the Yiddish of Eastern Europe:
    The apposite or apropos curse is a sort of “catch,” or linked phrase; it is hooked on to the last word uttered by the object of the curse. Thus, if he wanted to eat, and said so, the response would be: “Eat? May worms eat you, dear God!” Or: “Drink? May leeches drink your blood!” “Sew a button on for you? I’ll sew cerements for you!” If the person addressed does not supply the lead, the curser does it for herself. “There runs Chaim Shemeral! May the life run out of him!” … “Are you still sitting? May you sit on open sores! Are you silent? May you be silent forever! Are you yelling? May you yell for your teeth! Are you playing? May the Angel of Death play with you! Are you going? May you go on crutches.”
    Indeed, in his autobiography
From the Fair
, Sholem Aleichem describes his stepmother as being just such an “apropos curser” and confesses to having modeled several characters on her—one of whom is no doubt the woman vendor from “Competitors.”
    Finally, there is the story “Elul,” whose ending, if we do not know what lies behind it, must strike us as rather forced. After all, it does not seem quite credible for an apparently normal girl, even if her father is a smirking bully, suddenly to kill herself just because a jilted and possibly pregnant friend has done the same. But there is a clue here, and that is Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel
Sanine
, which the two girls have been reading in secret. All but forgotten today,
Sanine
was a literary sensation when it appeared in 1907 (the shopboy Berl’s “summary” of it, of course, is a hilariously garbled version of the story). Written during the period of Czarist reaction that followed the abortive Revolution of 1905 by an author who was himself a professed anarchist, the novel, with its curious