Sholom Aleichem, the pen name of Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, is probably the best-known writer of Yiddish short stories. Many of them concern Tevye the dairyman, a pious, simple man whom life sets an inordinate number of trials, often concerning his daughters. This story is a bittersweet account of a father’s reluctant acceptance that he must let his daughter Hodel become her own person, even if that means making mistakes, and even if it means her unwisely falling in love with a firebrand young revolutionary with whom she plans to change the world. I discovered it when I picked up a second-hand copy of The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, attracted partly by my interest in Jewish literature, but also because it was edited by Emanuel Litvinoff, whom I had met a few years previously. Litvinoff was an eminent Anglo-Jewish writer of the mid- to late-20th Century. I wrote a biography of his nefarious half-brother David Litvinoff, and interviewed Emanuel about David in 2010, when he was 95 years old. It was an honour to meet him, and I only wish I’d known about this book already so we could also have discussed his selections. I imagine that he chose ‘Hodel’ for its delicately wistful tone, its portrayal of father-daughter relationships and the power of its famous closing lines, uttered by Tevye to the narrator after he has forlornly bid Hodel farewell. “And now let’s talk about more cheerful things. Tell me, what news is there about the cholera in Odessa?”

First published as ‘Hodl’ in Yiddish in 1894; first published in translation in Tevye’s Daughters: Collected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, Crown, 1949, and collected in The Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories, Penguin, 1979