person
Rothschild
also: Ротшильд
A thin, red-haired Jewish flautist in the local klezmer band led by Moisei Ilyich Shakhkes, who bears (per the narrator, with evident irony) the name of the famous rich banking family despite his own visible poverty -- a shabby green frock coat, a fragile, delicate figure. Rothschild is the target of Yakov's escalating, unprovoked hostility throughout the story: cursed, nearly struck, and -- after one confrontation with Yakov -- chased through the streets by a mob of boys and dogs, one of which bites him. Despite this treatment, Rothschild repeatedly seeks Yakov out on Shakhkes's errands, responds to Yakov's threats with more alarm than anger, and is moved to tears by Yakov's fiddle-playing on the coffin-maker's threshold shortly before Yakov's death. He inherits Yakov's fiddle on Yakov's deathbed and, by the story's end, has given up the flute entirely to play only the fiddle, reproducing and even deepening the mournful tune Yakov composed -- transforming, in the space of the story's final paragraph, from the town's scapegoat into its most sought-after musician.
Reading notes
- Rothschild's Fiddle §61 On Wednesday there's a vedding... Yes-s! Mister Shapovalov is giving avay his daughter to a fine man... And it vill be a rich vedding, oo-oo!
TRANSLATION-CHOICE NOTE. In the Russian source, Rothschild's dialogue is written in a heavily marked broken-Russian dialect meant to represent a Yiddish-accented Russian speaker: consonant substitutions and softenings such as "швадьба" for "свадьба" (wedding), "жа" for "за" (for), and "целовека" for "человека" (person) elsewhere in this same speech. This translation represents that same characterization using an analogous English broken-accent pattern -- most visibly substituting "v" for "w" ("vedding" for "wedding," "avay" for "away," "vill" for "will") -- rather than reaching for any existing English literary convention for rendering a Jewish immigrant accent (e.g., the Yiddish-inflected English "dialect" spellings common in 19th- and early-20th-century Anglo-American fiction), which would import a different, culturally specific caricature tradition that has no equivalent basis in Chekhov's Russian and that carries its own separate history of stereotype. The "v for w" substitution is a deliberate, transparent compromise: it signals "accented, non-native speech" to an English reader in a way that is legible without being drawn from an existing ethnic-caricature convention. See also Section 63 for the second instance and the fuller discussion of this choice in the headnote's sensitivity-note section.
- Rothschild's Fiddle §63 "Vakhkh!.."
Rothschild's characteristic exclamation (Russian "Ваххх!.."), given twice in the story (here and again in the closing lines of Section 67) at the peak of an overwhelming, almost involuntary emotional response to music -- first to Yakov's playing on his deathbed, and finally, transformed into his own performance signature, when Rothschild plays Yakov's tune for the town after inheriting the fiddle. The repetition across the story's ending frames Rothschild's inheritance of the fiddle as also an inheritance of Yakov's grief, expressed wordlessly through the one exclamation that recurs, unchanged, in both scenes.
- Rothschild's Fiddle §65 Give the fiddle to Rothschild
Yakov's deathbed bequest -- the story's single explicit act of generosity from Yakov toward Rothschild, and his last words. Coming immediately after the confession scene of Section 64, in which the mob-violence against Rothschild surfaces as one of only two things Yakov's dying memory can produce, the bequest reads as Yakov's only available form of amends: not an apology (he never voices one, to Rothschild or otherwise), but the transfer of the one object of value he owns to the man he spent the story abusing.
- Rothschild's Fiddle §67 he himself, at the end, rolls his eyes up and says: "Vakhkh!.."
The story's closing image: Rothschild, who has spent nearly the entire story as an object of Yakov's contempt and casual violence and of the town's mockery (Section 51's mob), ends it as the town's most sought-after musician, his art now carrying forward -- and, per the narration, deepening ("something so doleful and grieving that the listeners weep") -- the very grief Yakov composed but could not otherwise express or resolve in his lifetime. Chekhov offers no narratorial statement tying this transformation explicitly to the story's antisemitism theme; the juxtaposition is left for the reader to draw, consistent with the headnote's observation that the story's moral verdict throughout is structural rather than stated.