Chapter 4 HODL’S CHOICE: THE JEWS AND THREE PROMISED LANDS The old man’s sons had different worth: The first was very bright from birth, The second, not the sharpest tool, The third one was a perfect fool. —P. P. Ershov, The Humpbacked Horse Tevye the Milkman had five daughters. (He mentions seven in one place and six in another, but we meet only five, so five it will have to be.) Tsaytl rejected a wealthy suitor to marry a poor tailor, who died of consumption. Hodl followed her revolutionary husband, Perchik, into Siberian exile. Shprintze was abandoned by her empty-headed groom and drowned herself. Beilke married a crooked war contractor and fled with him to America. Chava eloped with a non- Jewish autodidact (“a second Gorky”) and was mourned as dead, only to return, repentant, at the end of Sholem Aleichem’s book. Chava’s story is not particularly convincing (most of those who abandoned their fathers for Gorky never came back), but it is not altogether implausible because many Jewish nationalists (including such giants of Zionism as Ber Borokhov, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda) started out as socialist universalists and worshipers of Russian literature. Most of them never returned to Tevye’s house and Tevye’s God the way Chava did—in fact, they tended to be more explicit in their rejection of his “diaspora” ways than their Bolshevik cousins and doubles—but they did return to a kind of Jewish chosenness that Tevye would have recognized. (And of course the more readily Tevye would have recognized it, the more explicit they tended to be in their rejection of his diaspora ways.) It seems fair to propose, therefore, that Chava’s homecoming