Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Read online

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  For Marilyn,

  miracle of miracles

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  A Note on Spelling

  Introduction: A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That

  PART I

  WHEN AMERICA COMMANDS

  1 Tevye’s Long Journey to the New York Stage

  2 Between Two Worlds of Sholem-Aleichem

  PART II

  TEVYE STRIKES IT RICH

  3 Tevye Leaves for the Land of Broadway

  4 It Takes a Shtetl

  5 Raising the Roof

  PART III

  TEVYE’S TRAVELS

  6 The Old Country in the Old-New Land

  7 Fiddler While Brooklyn Burns

  8 Anatevka in Technicolor

  9 Skrzypek na Dachu: Poland

  Epilogue: Fiddling with Tradition

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Alisa Solomon

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A NOTE ON SPELLING

  Transliterating from Yiddish can be tricky when different sources take different approaches to Yiddish orthography. I follow the transliteration system of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research unless the words are quoted from a source that spells them differently. This goes for the names of characters despite some potential confusion: Tevye (according to YIVO and most recent translations and as used in Fiddler on the Roof), Tevya (used in the play by Arnold Perl, discussed in chapter 2), and Tevyeh (as quoted from some press reviews of the earliest translations into English); Tsaytl and Tzeitel; Khave and Chava; Motl and Motel; Hodl, Huddel, and Hodel; and so on.

  * * *

  More complicated is the name Sholem-Aleichem. I use this common spelling, along with initial capital letters (which don’t exist in Yiddish), for its widespread familiarity. (The YIVO standard “Sholem-aleykhem” looks distractingly strange.) I include the hyphen as current scholarly convention—and the writer’s own signature—dictates, more accurately signaling that the pseudonym is an ordinary compound phrase used by Yiddish speakers all the time. It is a common, if slightly formal, greeting that literally means “Peace unto you” but colloquially best translates as “How do you do?” That is why one never refers to the writer simply as “Aleichem” or “Mr. Aleichem.” To do so would be as weird as calling Howdy Doody “Mr. Doody.”

  INTRODUCTION

  A LITTLE BIT OF THIS, A LITTLE BIT OF THAT

  Glenn Beck was welling up as he neared the conclusion of his Restoring Courage rally in Jerusalem in August 2011. The conservative, conspiracy-mongering talk show host choked back tears as he bade his audience farewell. As he left the stage, exit music swelled: “Sabbath Prayer” from Fiddler on the Roof.

  A few weeks later, Occupy Judaism was planning an outdoor radical Yom Kippur service as an extension of the demonstrations taking place in Lower Manhattan that fall. To get the word out, one of the organizers made a poster that adapted one of the Occupy Wall Street logos. He took the original image—a ballerina balancing on the back of the bronze Charging Bull statue that lurches in a park in New York’s financial district—and Photoshopped the dancer out. In her place, he substituted the silhouette of a tottering violinist: another invocation of Fiddler on the Roof.

  There could hardly be more clashing sensibilities than those of Glenn Beck and Occupy activists—Beck condemned the movement as “worse than Robespierre”—yet both staked a claim to the Broadway musical about the affable dairyman Tevye and his three marriageable daughters living in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1905. Beck’s use of the song from the show was naive and even kitschy, while Occupy’s appropriation of the image winked with postmodern irony, but both operated from the assumption that Fiddler bears talismanic power to endow an event or object with a warm glow of Jewish authenticity.

  The show—created by Jerry Bock (music), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), Joseph Stein (book), and Jerome Robbins (direction and choreography)—was an instant blockbuster success when it opened in 1964, smashing all box office records in its day. The initial production played 3,242 performances—the longest-running show on Broadway for years. It won Tony Awards in nine categories in 1965. National Public Radio featured Fiddler as one of the “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” The American Film Institute named Norman Jewison’s movie version among the “100 most inspiring films of all time.” There have been four Broadway revivals, countless national tours, and probably more local productions than the licensing agency can count—more than it even knows about. Some two hundred schools across the country put it on each year. The show has survived censorious dictators, bad productions, and highbrow scolds.

  As the first work of American popular culture to recall life in a shtetl—the Eastern European market towns with large Jewish populations—Fiddler felt tender, elegiac, even holy. It arrived just ahead of (and helped to instigate) the American roots movement. It was added to multicultural curricula and studied by students across the country in Jewish history units, as if Fiddler were an artifact unearthed from a destroyed world rather than a big-story musical assembled by showbiz professionals.

  Beyond its continuing vibrant life in the theater, Fiddler, like no other musical before or since, has seeped into the culture more widely, functioning in sometimes contradictory ways—which makes sense, since the show’s essential gesture is dialectical: it looks backward and forward, favors both community and individual needs, honors the particular and the universal, struggles between stasis and change, bewails and celebrates. Tevye seems to be constantly caught in these opposing forces and, before our eyes, weighs the arguments of every dilemma—on the one hand, on the other hand …

  Fiddler has served as a Jewish signifier: “Now, I know I haven’t been the best Jew,” Homer tells a rabbi from whom he is trying to borrow money in an episode of The Simpsons, “but I have rented Fiddler on the Roof and I intend to watch it.” And Tevye or the Fiddler can often be found sharing a rooftop with Santa Claus on interfaith winter holiday cards.

  The show has operated as a barometer of Jewish political status: In 1974, Augusto Pinochet banned Fiddler in Chile as a “Marxist inspired” work containing “disruptive elements harmful to the nation.” Thirty-five years later, in 2009 in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez defunded the orchestra for a theater presenting Fiddler because it wasn’t Marxist enough. Fiddler has been a powerful intertextual work, commenting from within in Joseph Cedar’s movie Footnote (a family torn by generational conflict goes to see a performance), David Bezmozgis’s novel The Free World (a Soviet émigré family with a Stalinist patriarch sees the movie while stuck in Rome, waiting for visas), and Nadia Kalman’s novel The Cosmopolitans (Fiddler as a structuring device), to name just a few cases.

  Occupy Judaism’s Fiddler on the Bull.

  Fiddler has become ritual: kids at summer camps sing “Sabbath Prayer” on Friday evening as they light candles in place of the Hebrew blessing, and for decades weddings didn’t feel complete without a rendition of “Sunrise, Sunset.”

  And more. The show is a global touchstone for an astonishing range of concerns: Jewish identity, American immigrant narra
tives, generational conflict, communal cohesion, ethnic authenticity, and interracial bridge building, among them. It also solidified the origin story of American Jews as flight from persecution in Eastern European shtetls—never mind the actual origins of those from urban centers or from Sephardic and Middle Eastern backgrounds.

  How could a commercial entertainment do all this? The answer lies in large part in where Fiddler came from and how it was made. Wonder of Wonders sets out to tell that tale: to look at what prepared the way for the musical historically, culturally, and aesthetically, how it turned into a show with such abiding power, and where it has been a catalyst for cultural shifts. It is a story about ethnic assertion and cultural adaptation and about the exigencies and outsize personalities of showbiz. Tracing the surprising, enduring, shape-shifting utility of the beloved musical, Wonder of Wonders explores how a work of popular culture can glow with a radiant afterlife, illuminating for different audiences the pressing issues of their times.

  Specifically, it is a story about theater, the making of it and the meanings that come from the messy and marvelous collaborations that are its essence—interactions among artists, between artists and audiences, between a show and the world.

  The story begins at the source: Sholem-Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer who created Tevye in a short story in 1894 and, over the next two decades, occasionally put a new chapter about his tragicomic hero into the world. Best beloved as a story writer, Sholem-Aleichem also created novels and plays and he was eager to break into New York’s Yiddish theater scene.

  His first major foray into the theater, with his first full-length play, was a smash. Called Tsezeyt un tseshpreyt (Scattered and Dispersed), the play, which dealt with intergenerational conflict, triumphed at the Elysium Theater in Warsaw in the spring of 1905. It was performed in Polish (because of the Russian Empire’s standing, if erratically enforced, ban on performances in Yiddish) and the house was packed. At the urging and expense of the producer and translator, Mark Arenshteyn, Sholem-Aleichem traveled from his home in Kiev to Warsaw to see for himself.

  “What shall I write you about yesterday’s triumph?” Sholem-Aleichem asked his daughter in a letter the day after he saw the show. In ecstatic detail, he described how the audience “literally covered me with flowers” after the first act and how after every act that followed they called him to the stage repeatedly. In the fourth act, he reported, “the public simply went crazy, applauding every phrase that had any connection to the play’s theme. At the end, hats started flying in the air and some kind of wild, elemental force tried to gobble me up. For a moment I thought the theater might cave in.”

  He wondered, with a little false modesty, as to the cause: was it the popularity of the folk writer, the Jewish public’s yearning for a Yiddish theater, or simply the mob’s lack of restraint? In any case, Sholem-Aleichem evaded the “thousand-headed mass that awaited its prey” at the theater’s exit only because a police officer hid him away in a locked loge for half an hour and then slipped him out a back door. “My God! What would happen if it were possible to play in Yiddish?”

  With more prescience than he could have guessed, Sholem-Aleichem concluded, “My fate and your future (I mean that of my successors) are tightly bound up with the Jewish theater. Write it down in your calendar.”

  She would have done well to mark a date more than half a century later that would not only forever tie Sholem-Aleichem’s fate to the theater but also shape the future of remembered Jewish history: September 22, 1964, the opening night of Fiddler on the Roof.

  PART I

  WHEN AMERICA COMMANDS

  CHAPTER 1

  TEVYE’S LONG JOURNEY TO THE NEW YORK STAGE

  Sholem-Aleichem sat in Kiev and thought about the New York theater. He was exhausted from a reading tour that autumn of 1905, through a land sputtering with aftershocks of the failed revolution. Train strikes had delayed his travel and he was depressed by the hunger and hopelessness he had seen among the adoring crowds who poured out to hear his wry stories of the Jewish folk. At forty-six, he was uncertain about his own future as well. Though he was the most famous Yiddish author in the world, beloved by readers from Berdichev to Brod, Boston to Buenos Aires, he had no idea where his next kopek would come from. With a wife and five children to support (his eldest of six was already on her own and engaged to be married) and unrest still rumbling through the Russian Empire, he dreamed—like millions of other Jews in the region—of finding deliverance in America.

  Specifically, he expected to make a killing in the flashy Yiddish theater scene. Surely, the great actor-managers in New York would clamor for a play from the celebrated writer and pay handsomely for it, too. What’s more, he believed, his work would raise the level of theirs. In place of the sensational melodramas and trivial operettas that dominated the Yiddish repertoire, Sholem-Aleichem would offer an honest charm. Instead of the flamboyant figures who pranced and declaimed, his characters would be true-to-life Jews. His plays would be funny, yes; touching, sure. But not by dint of the cheap gags and sentimental exaggerations that were the yeast of the plays that hacks “baked”—as the critics said—by the dozen. Rather, the comic humanity and the pathos of his famous fiction would shine forth from a nobler, more sincere form of drama. Sholem-Aleichem was convinced: New York’s Yiddish theater would save him. And he would return the favor.

  A good place to start would be with a stage adaptation of Stempenyu, a highly successful novella about a dazzling, philandering violinist who woos Rokhele, a beautiful young woman tied to an inattentive husband. When he published it in 1888, the author had been writing for five years under the Yiddish pen name Sholem-Aleichem—literally “Peace be unto you” but the conversational equivalent of “How do you do?” In the late nineteenth century, serious Jewish writers such as the young Sholem Rabinowitz aspired to be could be proud to identify themselves with works penned in Hebrew or Russian—but not in Yiddish. Intellectuals and proponents of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, scorned the vernacular “jargon” that made its way into print only for the degraded texts that appealed to women—prayer books for those unlearned in the holy tongue, formulaic romance novels. Rabinowitz had long left the shtetl of his boyhood and, after standard study in a religious kheyder, had been educated in a Russian high school; as the tutor to the daughter of a wealthy estate owner near Kiev for three years, he’d had a taste of the high life (he was fired for courting his pupil); at twenty-one, he was pursuing a writing career and asserting his place in the intelligentsia. Hebrew, therefore, formal and flowery, was the language he used when he wrote essays on Jewish pedagogy during the longueurs of his day job as a Jewish community record keeper and liaison (a rabiner) in a provincial town government in the Ukraine.

  Sholem-Aleichem, urbane businessman and beloved folkshrayber.

  In 1881, the editor of the Hebrew journal Rabinowitz wrote for also started putting out a Yiddish weekly and the imprimatur such a publication granted the derided language tapped open an old desire. Rabinowitz had determined as a child that he’d become a writer one Saturday evening as he listened in on his grandfather reading to guests from a thin, yellowed book (or so his self-mythologizing autobiography maintains). The boy could not make out the words or even the general subject of the Yiddish his grandfather recited, but he could hear the visitors laughing. Someday, Rabinowitz decided, he too would bring such delight to the common people. With the publication of the Yiddish supplement to the Hebrew paper, he now had the chance.

  The Yiddish language’s standing had been rising with the growth of Jewish nationalism, spurred on by a wave of pogroms that began after the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 and then spread through the southwestern swath of the empire over the next several years. The violence tearing up Jewish towns and urban neighborhoods shocked Jews who had believed they could gain full emancipation and equality in the Russian Empire; cosmopolitanism looked less promising in the face of antisemitic attacks. With the model of earlier mode
rn national movements that emphasized the distinctness of peoples through their languages, the Jewish intelligentsia began to valorize the “folk” and their lingua franca. Hard-core Yiddishists, insisting on the language itself as the binding agent for Jews, represented only a single faction of competing nationalist visions. But whether making the case for the glory of the proletariat, the promise of Zionism, the redemption of Hasidic devotion, or the utility of cultural autonomy within Russia, Jews were hashing out these arguments in one vernacular.

  Still, to be on the safe side, following a convention of the period, Sholem Rabinowitz opted for a pseudonym when, in 1883, he published a satirical sketch in the weekly about crooked elections for a rabiner in a town just like the one where he lived. In May of that year, he had wed his former pupil, Olga Loyev. Now there was even more of a reputation to protect. His new father-in-law, a secular intellectual, would hardly have welcomed Rabinowitz’s stooping to that “unmanly” tongue any more than his father back in Pereyaslav, a poor Talmudic scholar and ardent Hebraist, would support it. (The pseudonym also had the advantage of protecting the author from the wrath of thinly veiled people he ridiculed in the feuilleton.) “Sholem-Aleichem” soon went on to publish a series of humorous epistolary stories. The very choice of moniker conveyed the waggish tone of the work. Essentially, it is a joke of the who’s-on-first variety. (“What’s your name?” “How do you do.” “Yes, how do you do. And what’s your name?”) Within the short space of a few years—first writing full-time with his father-in-law’s financial support (after a brief stint as the inspector on a sugar estate) and then, after Olga’s father’s sudden death in early 1885, liquidating the estate and playing the Kiev stock market—he began to produce a distinctive body of work while also laboring to advance Yiddish literature as a form. And he did so without ever discarding the pseudonym, even long after it was necessary. On the contrary, the persona took on a peculiar life of its own as Sholem-Aleichem fashioned himself into a folkshrayber, a folk writer. The multilingual, urbane businessman, in his tightly buttoned vests and wire-frame spectacles, who spoke Russian at home with his family, took stage as the Yiddish voice of the people. And readers—those who remained in the shtetls and those who had left them behind—embraced him as their own. They invoked his name every time they said hello.