figure
Moiseika
also: Мойсейка
A Jewish tavern-keeper at Kalanchik whose establishment the father stops at on the fatal journey; the father's drunken boast that he could buy up Moiseika, his wife, and his children along with the tavern is delivered using period antisemitic slurs, and being overheard there is the trigger for the robbery and murder that follow.
Reading notes
- An Incident (A Coachman's Tale) §5 Moiseika too, with his Jewess and his little Jew brats
This line contains a period antisemitic slur and a dismissive, dehumanizing reference to a Jewish tavern-keeper's wife and children. The Russian uses "жидовку" and "жиденята," both derogatory/pejorative forms (as opposed to the neutral "еврейка"/"еврейские дети"); "жиденята" in particular reduces the tavern-keeper's children to an ethnic slur with a diminutive suffix, treating them as objects rather than people. Jewish innkeepers and tavern-keepers were a common feature of the Pale of Settlement economy in Chekhov's Russia, licensed to sell liquor in a trade often closed to them elsewhere; the drunken father's boast that he could "buy up" Moiseika, his wife, and his children along with the tavern and its dishes casts the entire family as property to be purchased, in the same breath as furniture and crockery. The story does not endorse this: it is presented as the father's own drunken bravado, part of the very same "small-souled fancy" the narrator has already told us is his father's flaw (section 2), and its consequence -- the boast is overheard by the men who go on to rob and kill him -- is what triggers the entire tragedy. This edition renders the slurs and the demeaning phrasing directly, without softening or euphemism, per the corpus's sensitivity policy of showing period antisemitism plainly rather than concealing it.