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

by Alisa Solomon

  Sholem-Aleichem was something more even than they: he was “the mirror of Russian Jewry.” Samuel could see him no other way in the dire moment of his reflection: he was working on his pathbreaking translation of Sholem-Aleichem under the pall of emerging news of the Nazi genocide. In Samuel’s circle, details trickling in about the “final solution” were a constant and urgent matter, even as the organizational Jewish establishment hesitated to press for a direct American response and the news media failed to cover it adequately. The World of Sholom Aleichem, published by Knopf in 1943, would have to be more than a collection of stories. It was a literary call to arms (not only by dint of the advertisement for war bonds on its jacket flap). As Ben Hecht asserted that his widely performed and radio-broadcast pageant We Will Never Die, featuring scenes of murdered Jews recounting their demise, functioned as “the first American newspaper reports on the Jewish massacre in Europe,” so Samuel maintained that Sholem-Aleichem could rouse readers with a different sort of summons. Tracing a bitter line from Sholem-Aleichem’s world to the peril of the moment, Samuel writes, “It was a principle of Russian law that everything was forbidden to Jews unless specifically permitted. But by an oversight which Germany has since corrected, the right to remain alive was not challenged.” Rather than tell how Europe’s Jews were suffering atrocities and dying, he could tell how they had lived.

  Samuel didn’t simply render Sholem-Aleichem’s stories in English—he considered that impossible, given the intricacies, idioms, and allusions in the original. So he “transmitted rather than translated” them. He interjected his descriptions of the cultural realm in which the plots unfolded. “Every other sentence cries out for a paragraph of explanation,” Samuel asserts, by way of self-pardon for his free hand with the material. “I wrote round him and about him.”

  The resulting work is as compelling as it is bizarre. Samuel renarrates selected pieces of Sholem-Aleichem’s fiction into an amalgamation of storytelling, biography, criticism, and contemporary commentary. In part the book resembles the condensed, simplified Tales from Shakespeare by Mary and Charles Lamb; in part it contrives a new form of literary ethnography, drawing sociological conclusions from Sholem-Aleichem’s creations and presenting him not so much as a deliberating writer but as “the common people in utterance … the ‘anonymous’ of Jewish self-expression.” It’s as if in handing Sholem-Aleichem over to the English-reading audience at such a precarious moment, Samuel had to deliver an authentic, unassailable record. His offering couldn’t be a concoction, not even the concoction of a great literary genius. With this book Samuel was erecting a cenotaph, marking the loss of a civilization that was being annihilated even as he wrote—“an exercise in necromancy.” He needed what he depicted to be real, worthy of lamentation, untainted by artifice.

  He declares as much. Referring to anthropological case studies from the late 1920s and 1930s of a small, presumably average American city, Samuel asserts, “We could write a Middletown of the Russian-Jewish Pale basing ourselves solely on the novels and stories and sketches of Sholom Aleichem, and it would be as reliable a scientific document as any ‘factual’ study; more so, indeed, for we should get, in addition to the material of a straightforward social inquiry, the intangible spirit which informs the material and gives it its living significance.”

  No one carries that spirit more fully than Tevye, “the best known and best loved figure in the world of Sholem Aleichem.” The Tevye Samuel gave to English readers was “[a] little Jew wandering in a big, dark forest, symbol of a little people wandering in the big dark jungle of history,” a Tevye stripped of irony and refinished in sentimentality. He emerges from Samuel’s pages as the dominant exemplar, even the spokesperson, for the murdered Jews of Eastern Europe—as if the world of Sholem-Aleichem were so static that the distance between 1915 and 1945 had collapsed into a day, and his characters so real that they could stand in for the millions who perished.

  Samuel is also the first to make Golde a shrew. Exaggerating Sholem-Aleichem’s portrait of Tevye’s no-nonsense wife and channeling Tevye’s sexism, Samuel—who confessed in a letter to a friend his “very real hatred” of women—baselessly renders Golde “without equal at handing out a dinner of curses and a supper of slaps.” The misogynist tinge clings to the character in many later versions, often mitigated onstage, at least, by the warmth and likability of the actors who came to play her.

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  The “world” of Samuel’s title is the shtetl (though the word he uses is “townlet”). “Arguably the greatest single invention of Yiddish literature,” as David Roskies puts it, the shtetl was now reinvented in the decade or so after the war, for American use. The World of Sholom Aleichem was first to establish the image of the shtetl as a Jewish pastoral, a self-contained, albeit beset, domain where Jews of all classes endured through time marked out in Sabbaths and holy days. Though Samuel notes that in the original stories Tevye resides on the edge of a rural village among Gentiles, his book so thoroughly associates the dairyman with the “little people” of Kasrilevke it’s easy to conclude, reading The World of Sholom Aleichem, that Tevye lived in the shtetl among them. And that is where he explicitly is placed in a radio play based on Samuel’s book that aired on a new radio program sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary, The Eternal Light, in early 1945. There in Kasrilevke Tevye remains when, two years later, The Eternal Light presents The Daughters of Tevye. This first English-language dramatization of the Tevye stories, made for the midcentury ecumenical program that aimed to promote harmony among Jews and Christians, turns them into saccharine; here, Perchik goes off not to Siberia but, happily, to finish university in Petrograd, and a daughter called Rachel heads to Seattle to marry a hometown boy who made good in America. From here on, Tevye (in English) is a man—a spokesman—of the shtetl.

  Writing in the face of its final demise, Samuel can’t help but present the shtetl romantically as “a remarkable civilization, with values which the world cannot spare.” He selects carefully from Sholem-Aleichem’s oeuvre to keep him bound by the shtetl, claiming that the author paid little mind to characters who entered the wider world stage: he ignores novels like The Flood, Wandering Stars, and The Bloody Hoax. Thus he sets in motion the American image that grows and persists in the works that came after. As they followed, they reiterated his assertion of the most enduring and endearing shtetl ideal: that its “prosperity was spiritual rather than material.” This became the overriding trope of American remembrances of Eastern European Jewry—what Lucy Dawidowicz impatiently describes as an image of people “forever frozen in utter piety and utter poverty.”

  This false but strangely reassuring image found eager audiences among American Jews who were trying to reconcile news of European Jewry’s slaughter with their own dash to assimilate. It appealed to them as the antisuburb, notes the historian Edward S. Shapiro, its simple dignity and sense of community contrasting with the bland conformity and acquisitiveness of suburbia: the shtetl conferred an admirable patrimony. In addition to helping to send The World of Sholom Aleichem into a tenth printing, American Jews flocked to the blockbuster Chagall retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the summer of 1946, then mounted at the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall. The next year, they purchased the volumes of photographs of Jews in interwar Poland by Roman Vishniac—kheyder boys at desks, wizened men with vacant eyes, barefoot girls with smudged cheeks. One of the books featured an introduction by the theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel that practically lifted Samuel’s summation: Vishniac’s albums presented “one great portrait of a life abjectly poor in its material condition, and in its spiritual condition exaltedly religious.” Heschel’s line was quoted on the book’s dustcover. (He elaborated the idea further in his own book, The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe.)

  Myth building makes quick riddance of inconvenient facts. That Chagall’s hometown of Vitebsk was a burgeoning cultural center and no primitive backwa
ter did not stand in the way of his reputation as an authentic, if fanciful, chronicler of Old World spirituality; that his wife, Bella Chagall, came from a well-to-do family and studied at Moscow University was no impediment to her whimsical memoir of girlhood Sabbath and holiday observances in Burning Lights, another popular book of the period, being absorbed into the dominant narrative. Vishniac’s project—commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the late 1930s with the fund-raising aim of awakening American consciences to the plight of European Jewry as Hitler rose to power—was designed to show the most vulnerable segments of the community and thus to leave out the diverse and sizable population of Jews who carried on modern, cosmopolitan lives in major cities; that did not prevent his images from visually coming to define the entirety of the destroyed Jewish culture.

  No work advanced the idea of the shtetl as the single, uniform, self-contained memory site for Ashkenazi Jews more than Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe (1952), Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s work of “salvage ethnography.” (The paperback edition was given a new subtitle—The Culture of the Shtetl—and featured a cover drawing by Chagall, House in Vitebsk.) The authors based their study on interviews with émigrés to America from all over Eastern Europe, most of whom had left as children (some of them originally from large cities)—and whose memories had been shaped and amended by their reading of Sholem-Aleichem and other Yiddish writers. Zborowski and Herzog’s work was also informed by their reading of Bella Chagall, Heschel, and Samuel. Touted as an authoritative, even scientific account, in truth the book presented “a composite portrait of a virtual town, not an empirical description of an actual one,” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes. But it was widely and enthusiastically received (despite a few reviews pointing out discrepancies and errors) as a reliable record put down in the nick of time. It is still in print.

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  All these background resources notwithstanding, there could of course be no Fiddler without the Sholem-Aleichem stories themselves. When the first major volume in English—The Old Country—was released in June 1946, it entered the already entrenched mind-set that saw Sholem-Aleichem as representing a “world” and speaking from the grave for its murdered Jews. The volume of twenty-seven stories, translated by Frances and Julius Butwin and published by Crown, was “more than a book,” wrote none other than Ben Hecht, invoking this discourse in his review for the New York Times. It appeared just two months before he would stage his Zionist pageant A Flag Is Born, in which his Old World protagonist, a Holocaust survivor (played by Paul Muni), is called Tevya. Of the Butwin volume, Hecht said: “It is the epitaph of a vanished world and an almost vanished people.… All the Tevyas whose souls and sayings, whose bizarre and tender antics Sholom Aleichem immortalized in the richest Yiddish prose ever written—were massacred, six million strong, by the Germans.… In Sholom Aleichem’s books you can see all the ghosts,… not merely the report of a people. They are their historical farewell to a civilization that wiped them out.” The review was illustrated with an image from a Chagall lithograph: in front of a crooked line of pointy-roofed houses, a horse draws a cart into the frame and a fiddler rushes along, violin in hand, looking like he’s about to take a tumble. The Times gave the picture a caption: “The Vanished World of Sholem Aleichem.” (Crown’s advertisements made a less lachrymose appeal, promising plenty of “fine, juicy humor.”)

  With a spate of ecstatic reviews—many of them singling out the special charm of “Tevye Wins a Fortune,” the one dairyman story in the collection—the book climbed quickly onto the New York Times best-seller list and stayed there some three months. Right away, Crown signed Frances Butwin to a new Sholem-Aleichem project (her husband, Julius, had died while The Old Country was in galleys): a volume highlighting the Tevye cycle. Published in 1949, Tevye’s Daughters presents seven of his adventures, “scattered” among pieces from other Sholem-Aleichem series, Butwin explains, to “indicate the lapse of time between the stories” as they had been printed, over decades, in newspapers. (A few years later, she translated Wandering Star.)

  Almost right away, the Tevye volume was picked up for adaptation into a Broadway musical. In February 1949—less than a month after Tevye’s Daughters came out—a playwright approached Crown for the rights to create a dramatization and his libretto soon caught the attention of a successful composer-lyricist team, who secured an eleven-month option on the material later that year.

  But Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were busy adapting Anna and the King of Siam, among other projects, and they felt the Tevye script needed a huge amount of work, so the months whizzed past and by the summer of 1950 they had released their claim. The world never found out how the leading musical-comedy duo, both from German Jewish backgrounds, would have conjured Tevye’s world, a realm as foreign to them as South Pacific’s Bali Ha’i, The King and I’s Siam, and, for that matter, Oklahoma.

  Right after Rodgers and Hammerstein let their option go, the illustrious producer Michael Todd scooped it up. Born Avrom Goldbogen to parents who had emigrated from Poland—his father a rabbi, no less—Todd may have had more affinity for the material and he reportedly raised the $100,000 budgeted for the show. But a production did not materialize. Todd was best known for staging slightly upscale burlesques whose gaudy sets were more dressed than the women gallivanting on them, so perhaps he couldn’t win the confidence of further backers and artists. Who could say how the showman who was represented on Broadway at the time with Peep Show and The Live Wire would treat the dairyman’s marriageable daughters? The plans went nowhere.

  The playwright, one Irving Elman, did not give up. For several years, he and his agent, the formidable Edmond Pauker, sent the script to actors, producers, and directors, hoping to bring the “folk play with music” to the stage. (The music, for which Elman took credit, was an assemblage of well-known Yiddish tunes such as “Rozhinkes mit mandlen” [“Raisins with Almonds”], Avrum Goldfadn’s lullaby from his 1880 operetta, Shulamis.) Many who read the script declared enthusiasm for its warmth and humor, but almost all expressed reservations, too: “you need to take out all the animals,” “it feels so unwieldy as to be almost unmanageable,” it’s “sprawling, undramatic,” “too Jewish and too folkish for the general public,” not “commercial enough.” Leading Jewish actors—Menashe Skulnik, Joseph Buloff, Sam Jaffe, and Jacob Ben-Ami—would have been glad to star as Tevye, if changes they recommended were made to the script and if a producer could raise the funds.

  Could be, the Broadway stage was not yet hospitable to Tevye in the early 1950s. The Jewish characters who trod the musical boards in the several years Elman tried to get his adaptation produced included the vaguely implied Jews cavorting in an upstate New York summer camp for adults in Harold Rome’s Wish You Were Here (implied only by virtue of the setting), and the Yinglish revues Bagels and Yox and Borschtcapades, proffering skits, songs, and vulgar comics scoring laughs based on the old scheme of playing in-jokes (the bits of kitchen Yiddish) for audiences who, in the dominant culture, anxiously regarded themselves as outsiders. One might also count Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls if you take his lyric—“I’m just a no-goodnik. All right already. It’s true. So nu?”—to clinch his Jewish connection. But generally, Broadway’s musical makers, though most were Jewish, were not yet putting overt Jewish characters front and center. The Great White Way had no room for puffed-up patriarchs of the Old World, with chickens in their yards and prayers on their lips. Such images could be embraced in books and records—objects brought into the private sphere (and part of the midcentury rise of consumer objects as confirmers and even conferrers of identity). Jewish radio shows could accommodate Tevye, too, as they were also enjoyed in the domestic realm. But in the more diverse, public arena of Broadway, Tevye may have been too risky a commodity.

  The leaders of the Jewish establishment, at least, were not ready for such a prominent production: the tercentenary celebration of Jewish
life in America that they organized in 1954 unfolded under the slogan “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities under Freedom.” Their aim, the initiating statement said, was to pay homage to the “American heritage of religious and civil liberty” and demonstrate “the strength of the American people’s commitment to the principles of democracy in our struggle against communism and other forms of totalitarianism of our day.” Aghast, the pioneering cultural pluralist Horace Kallen complained that this Jewish celebration didn’t have very much that was Jewish to distinguish it. That, in fact, was the point. The tercentenary celebrated how well Jews could blend into America, not the ways in which they stood out. And in popular culture of the period, Jews remained coded, cutesy, crazily comic, or downright “de-Semitized,” as Henry Popkin charged in a famous 1952 essay in Commentary. Tevye had to cool his heels in the assimilating wings for another decade before striding onto the Broadway stage. Besides, Elman’s play (lost to posterity) was by most accounts simply not so good.

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  One precinct of Jewish American life, however, was ready to share Sholem-Aleichem’s characters on a public stage: the left. Communists, ex-Communists, socialists, and fellow travelers made their own claim on the folkshrayber as the Cold War began. If one stream flows toward Fiddler in this period from the source of Maurice Samuel and the invention of the sentimental shtetl, another equally strong current finds its wellspring in radical culture.