Welcome to the Tikva podcast on great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Eric Cohen.

Our subject today is one of the great stories of modern Jewish literature called Tevia blows a small fortune.

The name Tevi is probably familiar to many,

and as is his author, his inventor, his creator, Shoham Alechem, one of the great geniuses of

literature in general and certainly modern Jewish literature. And we're really privileged today

to have a conversation about this story with our old friend, Professor Ruth Weiss. Professor,

thanks for being here. I am so glad to be here, especially on this subject. So maybe the best thing to do is give us a little bit of background on who Sholomelecham was, and where this particular story, Teviah Blows a small fortune, fits into his work. Well, Sholam al-Ajim, as you said, is one of the great modern Yiddish writers,

I would say, one of my very favorite Yiddish writers, one of my favorite modern writers. And what

makes him really interesting, among other things, is that he was the first modern Jewish writer

to define himself as a humorist.

So he had great ambitions to be a great modern novelist.

Of course, he knew what the modern novel was.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy.

He read French novels in Russian translation. So he wanted to be a great novelist, and he tried his hand

at it. But he realized early on that this was not his mitye, and I think he understood it from a couple

of angles. One had to do with the language. He tried writing in Hebrew, but then decided that basically he was a Yiddish writer.

And he understood that as a Yiddish writer, you had to do what Yiddish could do.

And he felt that the strength of Yiddish was that it was now at its peak.

It was a language that had developed in Europe for hundreds of years, and now in Eastern Europe, it was really fully developed.

So what years are we talking to?

1859 to 1916.

And I would say that he began to realize these things in the 1870s and 1880s.

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