Episode Details

Twenty-two more anecdotes of the Hodja. He scolds his rooster for knowing that morning is coming in the middle of the night, yet losing the way in broad daylight; promises one of his two daughters her wish — the farmer's wife who needs rain, the potter's who needs dry skies — without knowing which one; warns the buyer at the auction, in secret, not to buy the turban he himself is selling, for it is much too short; washes his black hen with two pieces of soap to sell her white, and curses the dyer who did not spare the colour; lets the farmers plant him in the earth so that he too may bear fruit, and reports that the fruit fell off with the frost; eats the hen he found dead on the road — should it be unclean, then, because God killed it and not you?; sees a man ahead of him carrying a sack of pumpkins exactly like his own, and wonders who he can be, if he is not I; buys soap under the name of cheese, for fear that the rain might last; out-questions the sages of Arabia on why the stars flee when the sun appears; takes his dry cow home again when the crier praises her milk as cream; hides his fortune in a sack on top of a pole where no man can reach it, and concludes that a cow has climbed up there; brings a beggar all the way up the stairs to tell him he has no money; and advises that a drowning boy be shown a purse, so that he will think money is coming and swim out himself. And at the last the wheel turns: a miser who once sent a beggar from his door with empty hands falls into ruin, and comes begging himself to the door of the very man he refused — the beggar of that day, now married to the miser's wife — and is given the whole roasted chicken: “His fortune has come to me, and my poverty to him.”

From Der Hodscha Nasreddin by Albert Wesselski (1911), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.

Chapters:

0:00 Opening

0:05 The Rooster Knows the Morning

0:37 One of You Will Get Her Wish

1:11 It Is Much Too Short

1:41 Washing the Hen White

2:25 Planted to Bear Fruit

3:15 Wash Yourself First

3:39 Because God Killed It

4:13 If He Is Not I

4:47 Call It Cheese

5:17 Why the Stars Flee

5:58 Her Milk Is Like Cream

6:31 I Bought Them with the Stones

6:48 My Half of the House

7:11 Flour Is Drying on Them

7:36 There Lies All My Money

8:00 Half My Head Is Scabby

8:27 A Cow Has Climbed Up There

9:57 Come Up and Hear It

10:38 You Are Not the Only One

11:12 Show Him a Purse

11:35 The Lost Asper Is Found

11:55 His Fortune Came to Me