[I will not even try to come up with an excuse for this break. Let's just pretend it never happened.]

After the intimate emotional connection I felt with Tevye, Motl just didn't cut it for me.
With all his inherent vices (complete disregard for women, blind faith in providence, fatalism, lack of initiative, preoccupation with material goods), Tevye was a man I could relate to. His Eastern European spirit was real; so real I often felt back home again.
In a surprising way, one could feel the same connection developing between the author and his character. It seems (from a reader's perspective), that Tevye was originally created as a comical character; a personification of all the minor vices Sholem Aleichem saw prevalent in his community. He was designed to be laughed at. But as the book progressed, I (seemingly together with the author) went from laughing at him, to laughing with him, to crying with him. His quirky sense of humor (initially rather obnoxious and ascribed to ignorance) was just a way of dealing with the rapid disintegration of the world as he knew it, a world that 15 years later was to be annihilated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. We all have survival mechanism that instantly transfer us to our mental comfort zones. In the end, Tevye's was close to heart.

Motl is a different story. I understand the need for a Jewish diaspora literature portraying the history of pogroms, escapes, endless journeys, transoceanic passages and the adaptation to the new homeland in a comic, rather than tragic way. And what a better way than to tell the story from a perspective of a nine-year-old, who couldn't possibly comprehend the enormity of tragedies, trials and tribulations befalling his family?
But, with all his naivete and freshness, Motl remains unconvincing as a narrator; unconvincing to the point where his story becomes irrelevant. It's true that a child, unable to comprehend the complexities of the outside world, often focuses on the most absurd (at least to an adult mind) details, to try and make something out of the overwhelming confusion. It is also true that a child is more likely than its parents to notice comical aspects of a supposedly tragic situation. [It is worth pointing out that the idea of dealing with the incomprehensible with either ignorance or humor, or both, is a recurring theme in Sholem Aleichem's writing.] What is unlikely is for a child to be so utterly and completely immune to the emotions of those surrounding it, most notably its own mother.
Motl is never scared or truly confused. The death of his father, the slow and degrading downward spiral the rest of his family, the violence of the pogroms, and finally the never-ending and humiliating journey from a Ukrainian village to New York's Lower East Side--all that leaves Motl unmoved, emotionally unchanged, spiritually quiescent. It also leaves us... oblivious. One hundred pages into the novella and I was still reading it mainly because I promised myself I will not give up on books in this challenge.
Aliza Shervin, who translated Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son from Yiddish, points out in her introduction to the book that, by the second part of Motl, written right before Sholem Aleichem's death in 1916, a reader can easily notice the deterioration of his mental abilities (the book does not have a proper ending, it just stops mid-way through a chapter) due to his age and severe illness. As true as this explanation might be, that an aging author was way past his glory days at the time of writing, it is hardly an excuse for a mediocre book.

In other words, if Tevye is a filet mignon, Motl is a London broil.