AMOSOZ
221
There is a subtle, elusive connection in this story between Jews and
music, between music and soul. At first glance it seems that the story
employs, through Bronze's perspective, a shopworn body of anti-Semitic
cliches: the Yids are raucous, they smell of garlic, they are exploitative and
greedy, whiny, cowardly, feeble, bootlicking. But the conclusion of the
story turns everything upside down: the bequeathing of the violin and the
transmigration of the melody turn Rothschild into the heir of the soulful
person hidden behind the fayade of a crude coffin-maker. "Rothschild's
Fiddle" does indeed recall some of the flavor of Hassidic tales, as Bronze
himself is reminiscent of the myth of the hidden just man.
The reader is asked to transform Bronze's recurring complaints about
"losses" twice: a comic transformation and a tragic one. The comic transfor–
mation has to do with the fact that the tongue-tied Bronze always includes
on the debit side of his ledger, not just real losses, but also unrealized income.
After all, it was a real river, not just a little stream. You could go fish–
ing there, sell the fish to merchants, clerks and the buffet manager at
the station, and then bank the proceeds. You could sail along it from
one estate to another playing the fiddle, and all sorts of people would
pay you. You could set up in the barge business again-that was bet–
ter than coffin-making. Finally, you could raise geese, slaughter them
and send them to Moscow in the winter. Probably the down alone
would bring in ten roubles a year. But he had let the grass grow under
his feet and done none of this. The money he had lost! If you added
it all up-fishing, playing the fiddle, keeping barges, slaughtering
geese--what a packet he'd have made!
The tragic transformation contains Chekhov's great innovation, in both
his stories and his plays: removing the ancient barrier between comedy and
tragedy; canceling the strict convention that "low" characters, crude and
ignorant types, necessarily belong to the comic realm-at best they are
sometimes thrown into pathetic distress-while the tragic dimension is
reserved exclusively for the "noble." Only the noble, the enlightened, are
able "to take arms against a sea of troubles," to derive from their suffering
a comprehensive conclusion about fate, the human condition, the existen–
tial absurd, or the hidden flaw in their own character, because of which they
were doomed to fall.
Yakov Ivanov, alias Bronze, rises, at the point of his death, to the
heights of tragic awareness. Beyond his own pointless life, in his clumsy
and ignorant way, he thus sketches the human condition:
