Another thing that occurred to me…Tevye is a poor milkman, but I’m assuming he makes a living delivering dairy supplies to his community. Now, Tzeitl was to have married Lazarwolf, and in fact, Tevye announced it quite publicly in the bar. What would it have done to his credibility as a businessman to have reneged on that agreement, especially with the richest man in town?
In the book there were six/seven daughters? I’m going to have to look for those stories.
That’s why the dream. It wasn’t just to convince Golde, it was to give a layer of legitimacy to the reneging of the betrothal. It’s made obvious that the dream was made public, since at Tzeitl and Motl’s wedding Yente vents her bitterness (since it was the match she made with Lazarwolf that was cancelled) by saying that her late father told her that Golde’s late Grandma Tzeitl was a liar.
Also, Yiddish is for jews of central-eastern-northern Europe. The jews from Italy, Spain (sefarad) and Portugal speak Sefardita. If I ever win the lottery I’d love to become a linguist so I can study all that stuff for real 
I’ve never heard the term. The fact that Italian/Iberian (as well as many North African, and possibly Greek and Turkish) Jews speak what I generally know as Ladino or *Spaniolit * is, of course, true. Is this (Sepharadita) a different name for them, that I am unaware of?
There is a legend that when Mark Twain was introduced to Sholom Aleichem, the latter said “People say I’m the Yiddish Mark Twain,” to which Twain replied “And people say I’m the American Sholom Aleichem.”
True or not, it’s a cute story.
Personally, I’m partial to the version they did on The Electric Company:
*Every time he has to climb a ladder
Halfway up his teeth begin to chatter
Then his heart begins to pitter-patter
So he comes back down.
High on rooftops, fiddlers should beware
Just call him Fiddler on the Chair.*
It’s been a long time since I read the stories: I did thumb through a couple before writing this, but I don’t pretend complete expertise.
On Yiddish (the common language): He would certainly speak Yiddish; that would be the language of the Jews speaking together. Whether he could read or write Yiddish, that would depend on what kind of education his parents could have afforded. IIRC, some of the stories are set as letters from Tevye to Mr Sholem Aleichem (in Yiddish) which implies that he could read and write in Yiddish.
On Hebrew (the language of the Holy Books): Studying would have been oral, textbooks were costly, so he might or might not read Hebrew. He would certainly not know modern conversational Hebrew – that’s a later revision of the language. He would have been taught prayers and bible quotes in Hebrew; in my quick thumb-through, he quotes (or misquotes) Rashi, a biblical commentator. One of the running jokes, in story, play, and movie, is how he mangles them: he’s sort of a walking example of “a little learning.” His longing for studying with the learned men every day is his dream, and doesn’t mean that he had studyed much in the past. The goal of learning was very important, but the families financial situation would presumably have restricted him. At the other extreme, the character Lazar-Wolf in the story clearly hasn’t studied anywhere near as much as Tevye.
ASIDE: I only have English translations of the stories that are in the form of letters from Tevye to Sholem Aleichem, when he mangles biblical texts, I don’t know if he’s quoting in Hebrew or transliterating into Yiddish. If he’s quoting in Hebrew, then he could obviously read and write it.
On Russian: This would be the language for dealing with the non-Jews. Since Tevye (and the one daughter) obviously do deal with non-Jews, they do speak Russian. I don’t think that the example of Isaac Asimov (quoted from Wikipedia by Wendell) is pertinent: he left Russia at age 3, so not knowing Russian isn’t indicative of much. The evidence from the stories, play, and movie is that he did speak Russian. Whether he could read and write Russian, however, is a different issue: the movie chose to make a point of saying no, he can’t read or write Russian. The play (and I think the stories) don’t address the question.)
My feeling: The character Tevye of the stories is reasonably well-educated, even if he misremembers (or misuses) bits. He is also a great story-teller, as the stories are told in first-person narrative. I think it most likely that he could speak at least Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish; that he coudl read and write Hebrew and Yiddish, but unresolved whether he could read or write Russian.
Don’t forget that Russian and Hebrew have two different alphabets (apparently, Yiddish uses the Hebrew alphabet). So it isn’t like you could phoentically “read” Russian if you could read Hebrew or Yiddish like you can read Spanish if you know the English alphabet and speak Spanish.
To my understanding, it’s a modified Hebrew alphabet, with additional letters representing the vowels, rather than the vowels being either understood or represented as diacritics.
Yes and no. You’re right that Yiddish dropped the diacritics and uses existing letters as vowels; but they are existing letters – there are no letters in Yiddish that do not also exist in Hebrew (even if they are used slightly differently)
C K Dexter Haven writes:
> I don’t think that the example of Isaac Asimov (quoted from Wikipedia by
> Wendell) is pertinent: he left Russia at age 3, so not knowing Russian isn’t
> indicative of much.
You misunderstood what I wrote. Asimov’s parents could read and write Russian. Asimov would have learned to read and write Russian if his family had not left Russia. Asimov learned to read and write Yiddish because that was the language that his family spoke nearly all the time at home in Russia (and perhaps some when they came to the U.S.). There was apparently a lot of interaction between the Jewish and the non-Jewish population. Asimov probably heard some Russian spoken outside his home in the three years before his family moved to the U.S., but he didn’t hear enough of it to learn much in that time. My point was exactly that the Jewish population in that area mostly did learn to speak and read Russian in addition to learning to speak and read Yiddish at home. This is actually a very common experience in most of the world. The Jewish population of that area were mostly bilingual. I’ve heard claims that most of the population of the world is bilingual, speaking both a home language and another language that allows them to speak to the dominant ethnic group of their country.
Ah, sorry, Wendell, I misunderstood your point.
And I’ll add that my wife’s grandmother was from a well-off family from a part of Poland near the Russian border (the territory switched ownership several times over the centuries between Russia and Poland). She arrived in America (prior to WWI) speaking Yiddish, Polish, Russian and French (the language of the well-to-do.)( She learned English immediately she arrived here. So, yes, it was (and still is) fairly common to speak different languages for different situations.