Tewje der Milchmann

These are the stories that include the hit Broadway production Fiddler on the Roof. The story begins earlier than the movie and ends a bit after as well, and it's both infinitely sadder and funnier. The entire long tale is told in chapters in the voice of Tevye himself. He talks about how he strived to better himself, how he thought he would arrange the lives of his daughters the best and how he would live just an upright life in little village that he occupied all his life. At every turn, things do not go the way that he expects, and yet he finds a way to come to some kind of understanding, even though it may take a long time of the vagaries of fate. From little hardships to bigger ones, he discovers what it is to be faced with the biggest of all the transportation of his entire community from the land of his birth. And yet the most touching thing happens at the end, not in the adaptation, where a strand from his past unexpectedly arises before him, and he's forced to make the hardest choice of all, and you're not told exactly what happens, instead you have to construct for yourself what you think the character of this man to have you would have done. It's sheer brilliance. And listening to the audiobook was a pleasure itself. I find it very easy to conjure up in my own mind what the various settings and people that he would talk about were like.