Sorry for the long break. I was off to a rough start, but I'm back on track.
As promised by Amazon, the books arrived late on Tuesday and I spent the whole evening just staring at them and picking up each one for a minute, just to get distracted by another's cover. To make the matters even worse, Swafford's biography of Brahms and Magic Mountain came in the Wednesday mail. That pretty much ensured that I won't be able to properly focus on reading anything for days. Luckily, by now I'm all organized and settled.

Tevye is beautiful. It's simultaneously hilarious and filled with the kind of melancholic sorrow and longing for the days long gone. His folksy humor and greatly informative, if surprising, interpretations of the passages from the Torah ("Without wisdom and a good idea--you might as well ride a dead horse." or "Respect him and suspect him--in Ashkenaz that means a man can't trust his own dog.") make one laugh and wonder at the same time.
He is not a hero of our times; his parochial ignorance blatantly defying everything for which the XXI century stands. Tevye's faith in God is absolute, if blind. It provides him with a handy explanation (and excuse) for all his life's failures, which would have been laughable if it wasn't so honest.
I'm wondering to what big of an extent my understanding of this book is altered by the fact that I'm Eastern European. I might not be Jewish and, therefore, lack the insight into the spiritual musing of Tevye and his brethren, but my own childhood is a living proof that the Tevye-like mentality is not the artistic creation of Solem Aleichem, but the daily reality of many a rural communities in eastern Poland/western Ukraine. To an American reader, specifically to a gentile reader, it might be yet another example of the Eastern European backwardness, but I believe it to be more real, more human than many of the lives lived here.

But I think I'm getting carried away. I need to read deeper into the book and organize my thoughts somehow. More to come; this time with less of a break, hopefully.