Quotes from Sholem Aleichem

But it was a lost cause. Like trying to find yesterday. You get the picture?

If I get hold of a book and see that the sun shone, the moon floated by, the air was fragrant, the birds tweeted—I fling it across the room.

To make a long story short, you know quite well that when a woman puts her foot down, she wins.

I don't know why, but in each mother there seems to be some sort of hidden force. It gives her the mad desire to see her daughter engaged the minute she outgrows her baby clothes.

My brother and I don't think much of each other, you get the picture? May God repay me for all the things I've done for him.

But go argue with an ignoramus. I'm referring to my own brother, Henikh, may God not punish me for these words.

Just recently, she had an engagement party for her daughter. Great God! May you and I have a third of what that party cost her.

Take my husband, for instance. There's no greater bungler than my Nachman-Ber. Ever since I've known him, he hasn't earned two broken kopeks. Then what's he good for?

You know what they say: a woman was made with nine measures of talk.

Our rich man hopped back and forth to the big city, seeing the money-grabbing, advice-giving lawyers. This one said this, that one said that, and the third one said neither this nor that, but, as you'd expect, something entirely different.

Believe me, I know how to respect a man of learning, a man who sits and studies Torah, despite the fact that he doesn't so much as put his finger into cold water. You think he's lazy? He'd do anything, poor fellow—but there's nothing to do. So he sits and studies. Let him keep studying.

But after all, I'm not God's lawyer. I'm not doing any backbiting, God forbid, and I can't stand the evil tongue.

For geese aren't ducks and chickens, you know. Ducks are scared of the pox. Chickens of polecats. But geese just glut. When it comes to eating, anything goes. Oats, millet, groats, and, begging your pardon, they peck at worse things, too.

A goose is always hungry, just like—and no comparison meant—a poor man's children. A poor man's children eat anything you give them with gusto. And they're never full. I know it from experience.

But it's nice having children. It wouldn't faze me at all having ten, fifteen, even seventy-five children. There's only one drawback. They got mouths!

I know you're looking at me and thinking: he's a woman at heart. For if he weren't he wouldn't love children so much.

What I am at heart, I don't know. But I do know that I love children. That's a fact.

If so, you're liable to ask, if there's no profit in geese, why bother? Here's my answer—what else do you want me to do after working with geese all these years?

When I make kosher-for-Passover goose-fat, Passover steps into the house smack in the middle of Hanuka. I make the oven kosher-for-Passover. I send my husband to the synagogue. Let him study there. I chase the kids out of the house.

Goose-fat hates extra company.

They say that a pauper has a bottomless stomach. That's true as the Bible. You ought to take a look at Genesi's children. May God spare me! But I'm not talking ill of anyone, God forbid. And I can't stand backbiting either.

Poor people were dying of cold, they were swelling up with hunger. The children were falling like flies. But it wasn't so terrible, because only the poor were dying. May God not punish me.

Like the saying goes: the dead look the way they eat! And you ought to see that woman's husband

The first thing he does when he comes home from the study room in the synagogue, is pick up a book. He reads it and sighs quietly. That means he's hungry.