Rothschilds Geige

A short story, published in 1894. The poor Jewish flute-player of the title bears the same name as the famous banking family — a bitter joke in itself. The story is short and undivided, so it is given here as one episode, nearly complete. The English keeps very close to Chekhov's words and follows, with revisions, the public-domain translation by Constance Garnett. Yakov's contempt for Rothschild is part of what the story judges; his insults are reported here rather than repeated.

The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost nobody but old people, who died so seldom that it was positively annoying. In the hospital and the prison very few coffins were needed. In a word, business was bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been a coffin-maker in the chief town of the province, he would certainly have had a house of his own, and people would have called him Yakov Matveich; but here in this wretched little town people called him simply Yakov, and his nickname in the street was, for some reason, "Bronze"; and he lived in poverty like a common peasant, in a little old hut with only one room, in which he, his wife Marfa, the stove, a double bed, the coffins and his bench and all his things were crowded together.

Yakov made good, solid coffins. For peasants and working people he made them to his own size, and they were never wrong, for there was no one taller and stronger than he, even in the prison, though he was seventy. For the gentry and for women he made them to measure, and used an iron yard-measure for the purpose. He was very unwilling to take orders for children's coffins, and made them straight off without measuring, contemptuously, and when he was paid for the work he always said:

"I don't care for trifling things, I must confess."

Besides his trade, the fiddle brought him in a little. At weddings in the town there was usually a Jewish orchestra, conducted by the tinsmith Moisei Ilyich Shakhkes, who took more than half the takings for himself. As Yakov played very well on the fiddle, especially Russian songs, Shakhkes sometimes invited him to play in the orchestra at a fee of fifty kopeks a day, besides presents from the guests. When Bronze sat in the orchestra, he first of all perspired and his face turned crimson; it was hot, and there was a suffocating smell of garlic; the fiddle squeaked, the double-bass wheezed close to his right ear, and the flute wept close to his left.

The flute was played by a red-haired, lean Jewish man, with a whole network of red and blue veins on his face, who bore the name of the famous millionaire Rothschild. And this confounded fellow contrived to play even the merriest tunes plaintively. For no apparent reason Yakov little by little became possessed by hatred and contempt for Jews, and especially for Rothschild; he began to find fault with him and abuse him in unseemly language, and once even tried to beat him; and Rothschild was offended, and said, looking at him ferociously: "If I did not respect you for your talent, I would have sent you flying out of the window long ago."

In Chekhov, Yakov's abuse is given in the coarse words of the time; this retelling leaves them out.

Then he began to cry. And because of this Bronze was not often asked to play in the orchestra; he was only sent for in case of extreme necessity, when one of the Jews was missing.

Yakov was never in a good humour, as he always had to put up with terrible losses. For instance, it was a sin to work on Sundays or saints' days, and Monday was an unlucky day, so that in the year there were some two hundred days on which, whether he liked it or not, he had to sit with his hands in his lap. And only think what a loss that meant! If anyone in the town had a wedding without music, or if Shakhkes did not send for Yakov, that was a loss, too. The police superintendent was ill with consumption for two years, and was wasting away, and Yakov was impatiently waiting for him to die; but the superintendent went away to the chief town of the province for treatment, and died there. There was a loss of ten roubles at least, since the coffin would have been an expensive one, lined with brocade.

The thought of his losses haunted Yakov, especially at night; he laid his fiddle on the bed beside him, and when all sorts of nonsense came into his mind, he touched a string; the fiddle gave out a sound in the darkness, and he felt better.

On the sixth of May of the previous year Marfa had suddenly been taken ill. The old woman breathed heavily, drank a lot of water, and staggered as she walked, yet she lit the stove in the morning herself, and even went for the water. Towards evening she lay down. Yakov played his fiddle all day; when it was quite dark he took the book in which he used every day to put down his losses, and, from being bored, began adding them up. They came to more than a thousand roubles. This so agitated him that he flung the reckoning-frame on the floor and trampled it underfoot. Then he picked up the reckoning-frame, and again spent a long time clicking with it and heaving deep, strained sighs. His face was purple and wet with perspiration. He thought that if he had put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, the interest for a year would have been at least forty roubles, so that the forty roubles was a loss too. In fact, wherever one turned there were losses and nothing else.

"Yakov!" Marfa called unexpectedly. "I am dying."

He looked round at his wife. Her face was rosy with fever, unusually bright and joyful. Bronze, accustomed to seeing her face pale, timid and unhappy-looking, was bewildered. It looked as if she really were dying and were glad that she was going away for ever from that hut, from the coffins, and from Yakov . . . And she gazed at the ceiling and moved her lips, and her expression was one of happiness, as though she saw death, her deliverer, and were whispering with him.