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

by Alisa Solomon

  By play’s end, Tevya is encouraging a reluctant Hodel to go join Perchik in Siberia and reassuring her: “He’ll serve his time; you’ll wait. Meanwhile the pot is boiling as they say. Then one day (When? One day)—it happens and the sun will rise and everything will be bright and shining. Then he’ll be free with all the others like him and together you’ll roll up your sleeves and turn the Little Father [the czar] upside down.” Hodel goes off to pack. As soon as that’s settled, Tevya winds up the play with a brief monologue, telling the audience what he has to look forward to now that he has concluded happy marriages for two of his daughters: “My Chava, my next, has begun with a writer: a second Gorki, she tells me. Although who the first Gorki is I never heard. How they live, these writers, I haven’t yet discovered. Maybe they eat pages. The name of this writer is—Fedka Galaghan: not exactly a Jewish name. So what will happen there, I leave to your tender mercies. My little ones are too young to be problems; but they’ll grow into it. (He laughs.)”

  Mike Kellin and Anna Vita Berger in Perl’s Tevya and His Daughters

  In short, Perl’s was a Tevya without tension. Nothing was at stake for him or the play because he made no effort to hold fast to his religious practice in the face of change. That was a dramaturgical problem the mainstream reviewers could not excuse—despite charm and humor, “it is theater that is missing,” Brooks Atkinson summed up in the New York Times—and it also was the reason the show found no traction with Jewish audiences. As a total pushover, Tevya had little to say to them about the preciousness of the lost world or the confrontation of their forebears with modernity. He was pleasant enough but hollow. The Forverts was not being academic or snobbish when it declared, simply, “This is not our Tevya.”

  As a good Marxist (who had left the Party by this point), Perl engaged in some public self-criticism, writing to the letters section of the New York Times drama pages to promise that the “cast, director, playwright, composer and producers have used the period since ‘Tevya’s’ opening to assess our mutual weaknesses and to seek solutions in the light of published reviews. Audience response during the past few days has been our barometer. We have been led to believe that some of the failings of opening night have been overcome.”

  But not enough to keep the show going. It closed in mid-November, after a six-week run. A touring version for half a dozen actors in a van once again set out for some JCCs, but Tevya and His Daughters did not thrill the provinces, as The World of Sholom Aleichem had done. When the hero shrugged everything off, he gave spectators little reason to care about his fate.

  Besides, artistic taste among theatergoers was challenged and was changing in the four short years since The World had charmed spectators with its storybook simplicity. Off-Broadway was exploding. Jean Genet’s The Maids had its shattering New York debut in a rinky-dink space in the neighborhood not yet known as the East Village; Joseph Papp was directing modern-dress Shakespeare with young, multiracial casts; the Living Theatre had already been kicked out of two buildings by city authorities; and a blacklisted fat comedian named Zero Mostel was about to astonish the theater community with his shaded portrayal of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown. Broadway, too, was finding new forms that made Perl’s plays seem quaint in more than subject matter. Waiting for Godot held out on West Forty-fifth Street for two months in the spring of 1956. And not even two weeks after Tevya and His Daughters opened at the Carnegie, two rival groups of hoodlums burst onto the stage at the Winter Garden and changed the Broadway musical forever: West Side Story—“conceived, directed, and choreographed by Jerome Robbins,” as he insisted his credits read—was an operatic tragedy in the idiom of a musical, mixing vernacular movement and ballet, Latin-inflected jazz and twentieth-century classical music, street slang and lyrical dialogue. The modernist, urban, liberal sensibility of its four Jewish and gay creators was expressed most of all in the “plea for racial tolerance” that the story, in the composer Leonard Bernstein’s phrase, could make. And in contrast to “Sholom Aleichem’s gentle but firm plea for tolerance and humanism” in The World, West Side Story was making it through an edgy contemporary story in a groundbreaking form devised by some of the greatest talents the American theater has known.

  Spectators of all stripes embraced West Side Story, of course, but for Jews—who still made up some 70 percent of Broadway audiences by some counts—the show spoke especially to a growing postwar objection to bigotry, which was starting to project outward now that Jews themselves were no longer primary victims of intolerance (this is why the original concept for the show, pitting Jews against Catholics, couldn’t work). In his influential and best-selling 1955 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, the sociologist Will Herberg had declared that American Jews were no longer a fringe, foreign-seeming minority but regular citizens who simply practiced one of the three religions that expressed the American way of life: they were as normal as their Gentile neighbors. As the 1950s drew to a close—at least according to the organizations that claimed to represent them—Jews worried less and less about antisemitism and extended their sympathy to the current victims of racial and ethnic prejudice. In addition to being no match for the thrilling experiments taking place on New York’s not-for-profit and commercial stages, Tevya and His Daughters—“all syrup,” “too sweet,” and “languid” as reviews put it—was not balanced by any moral seriousness that midcentury American Jews could grab hold of.

  And at last, between The World of Sholom Aleichem and Tevya, the blacklist started to fade. Perl, ever optimistic, was feeling “a beginning of a thaw” in the summer of 1955—some six months after the Senate had voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy—and he was hired to write for what he deemed a “worthless” television program. He even began to hope that his passport might be restored and he would be able to travel to Europe. Even as what he called the “assault on the theater”—HUAC’s Foley Square hearings investigating Broadway—opened that same summer, Perl saw better times on the near horizon. “And yet, my friend, the world grows ever more hopeful,” he wrote to Jacob Ben-Ami, then on tour with The World of Sholom Aleichem in Buenos Aires. “I think we may all still be allowed to work to the best of our ability—some day and soon.”

  Perl’s comrade in the left-wing faction of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the radio host John Henry Faulk, had filed suit against AWARE (a private organization that monitored the industry for subversives, cofounded by the author of Red Channels). Roy Cohn and the other lawyers defending the publishers of Counterattack and Red Channels managed to drag the case out for several years, but in the meantime—before 1962, when a jury would award Faulk the largest sum in a libel judgment to date—Hollywood had started to crack open the door to artists it had recently shunned. As Tevye trod the boards in New York, on the West Coast Alfred Hitchcock hired the blacklisted actor Norman Lloyd as associate producer for his new TV series. Bit by bit, others would be finding work again.

  Once again, Sholem-Aleichem helped. In 1959, the producers of the acclaimed new television program Play of the Week, airing in syndication on New York’s independent Channel 13 (later to become part of the public broadcasting network) and on some one hundred affiliated stations around the country, decided to present Perl’s World of Sholom Aleichem among its offerings of videotaped stage dramas drawn from the canonical and contemporary repertory. It was the program’s tenth show, following plays by Euripides, Turgenev, John Steinbeck, Graham Greene, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Langston Hughes, among others. The producer Henry Weinstein, who had loved the play and thought it deserved a wider audience, pushed the production forward over the objections of his bosses, executive producer David Susskind and station owner Ely Landau, who derided the work as “too Jewish.” To direct, Weinstein hired an experienced television man, Don Richardson (born Melvin Schwartz), and he insisted on casting many of the original blacklisted actors and a few more, despite Susskind’s anxiety. If he’d get in any kind of trouble for hiring one shunned actor, h
e figured, how much more trouble could he attract for hiring a bunch? Enfeebled Counterattack threatened a campaign against the program, but the independent station did not rely on sponsors, so there was no target for their attacks.

  Morris Carnovsky (who had already appeared in a Play of the Week show) reprised his role as the father in “The High School,” and Jack Gilford returned as Bontche; new additions from the rolls of the spurned included Lee Grant (Defending Angel) and Sam Levene (Mendele, the bookseller). The leading roles were completed with Nancy Walker (the Melamed’s wife) and Gertrude Berg (the mother in “The High School”), plus one more actor, Zero Mostel, who had once been Richardson’s acting student and whose stage career was taking off, even as he was barred from the movies. Some months earlier, he’d won an Off-Broadway Obie Award for his lead performance in Ulysses in Nighttown. He was the only actor cast in all three of the playlets that make up The World of Sholom Aleichem, playing the Melamed in “A Tale from Chelm,” an angel in “Bontche Schweig,” and a relative (with a spry dance at the celebration of the boy’s admission) in “The High School.”

  Even if Weinstein had considered asking Da Silva to re-create the part of Mendele, the actor would have had to decline; Da Silva was tied up on Broadway, having just opened in a costarring role as the political machine boss Ben Marino in Fiorello!, a musical by a young songwriting duo making a splashy showing: Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick.

  Richardson rehearsed the company for catch-as-catch-can chunks of time over two weeks in a grotty room of the Polish National Hall on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Enthusiastic as he was about working with Mostel, Richardson soon excluded his former student from rehearsals—Mostel kept changing his blocking, timing, and even his lines, throwing the rest of the cast off-balance. Even without rehearsing, Mostel would deliver when it came time to tape, Richardson felt sure, despite his having to shoot in long takes, as in a live show with no stops, because the new type of tape they were using was too difficult and expensive to edit. In a tiny studio, Richardson manned a camera and called the shots; he put the program in the can in two days.

  Richardson was right about Mostel: he performed brilliantly. Variety called him the “highlight of the show” and singled out his “remarkable pantomime talents,” especially in the twinkle-toed dance he performed as the Melamed, pulled from village to village by the invisible goat, his wrists twirling upward and his bulky body circling after, light as a balloon. In general, critics lauded the “stunning production” of “three one-acters of beauty, compassion and protest.” Not a single review mentioned that the broadcast occasioned the return to the airwaves of artists who’d been banned for years. Even to some of the actors, the small-scale event didn’t seem momentous. Lee Grant, for one, allowing that it was “a victory just to get something on in that period,” remembered the production merely as “one of those things that snuck by” without having much of an impact. After all, despite all the affiliated stations around the country, early public television drew small audiences. Nonetheless, a taboo had been broken and any first breach makes the next one easier. Perl credited World’s success on Play of the Week with opening the way, at least for him, back to regular employment in television. (By 1963, he was a lead writer for East Side, West Side, the high-quality weekly series about a New York City social worker played by George C. Scott; taking on urban issues like prostitution and poverty from a decidedly liberal point of view, it was produced by David Susskind.)

  Perl’s The World of Sholom Aleichem helps break the blacklist on TV with Zero Mostel, Morris Carnovsky, and Nancy Walker.

  The first air date of December 14, 1959, preceded by a couple of weeks an event often credited as a fatal blow to the blacklist: the director Otto Preminger’s announcement that he was engaging Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, as the screenwriter for his adaptation of Leon Uris’s blockbuster novel Exodus. Trumbo had been writing under a pseudonym for some time, as Counterattack had repeatedly reported—aghast, as usual—but now Preminger insisted on trumpeting his name in the credit roll.

  By the time Exodus debuted on December 15, 1960—almost exactly a year to the day of the broadcast of The World of Sholom Aleichem—America was entering a new phase. The Cold War still raged, but the domestic Red hunt had finally ended. A young, appealing new president was about to take office (thanks, in part, to television’s new role in electoral politics). The Federal Drug Administration had approved the Pill in the spring of that year and nearly 2.5 million women were taking it. African American students had begun sitting in at segregated lunch counters in the South, escalating the direct action of the civil rights movement. “The sixties” hadn’t quite started, but they were coming.

  For Jews—who had voted for John F. Kennedy by a greater margin than Irish Catholic Americans—the new decade opened on enormous changes. Antisemitism was evaporating into the atmosphere of postwar sympathy for Jews and of national optimism. Where one American in five told pollsters in 1948 they wouldn’t want a Jew as a neighbor, by 1959 such antipathy was expressed by only one in fifty. The new problem preoccupying Jewish organizations was assimilation: now that a majority of Jews had moved out of urban enclaves into the suburbs, where they built and joined synagogues in droves but rarely attended worship services, what would make them—and keep them—Jewish? In the generation since the war, in the historian Arthur A. Goren’s words, “the transcendent place of the ‘destruction and renewal’ theme in the group consciousness of American Jews” was set. Jews, as all-American exemplars of a shmattes-to-riches trajectory, were themselves part of the regeneration. And so, increasingly, was Israel.

  Exodus played no small part in building and shaping Jewish America’s self-image and politics and the culture Jews would embrace in the new era. Published in 1958, Uris’s potboiler, loosely based on the shipload of Holocaust survivors turned away from Palestine in 1947, stayed on the best-seller list for more than a year, holding the number-one spot for nineteen weeks. When the film opened, it boasted an advance sale of $1.6 million—the largest of any movie to date. Paul Newman starred as the brave and sexy sabra Ari Ben Canaan, “the fighting Jew who won’t take shit from nobody,” as Uris characterized him. Infusing Jews with a strong dose of empowerment, the movie borrowed the sweeping visuals and providential sensibility of popular biblical epics like Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). It echoed, too, the morally unambiguous, adventuresome arrogance of the Western, with Arabs figured as Indians, unaccountably hostile enemies who must be driven from the land. Before Exodus, postwar pop culture versions of recent Jewish experience presented victims who simply couldn’t stay hidden forever—The Diary of Anne Frank was published in the United States in 1952, played on Broadway from 1955 to 1957, and was released as a film just five months before Exodus—or heroes, like those of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who went down fighting valiantly, as commemorated in John Hersey’s popular novel The Wall (adapted by Millard Lampell for a modest Broadway run in 1960). But now, here were Jews taking up arms and winning. Even Jewish Currents—the left-wing magazine that was Communist until its 1956 break with the Party—couldn’t contain its excitement over Exodus’s plucky personae: “They are Jews who fight, who die, who live and who triumph,” it gushed. Historians of Jewish America writing about the period point repeatedly to Exodus as the cultural phenomenon that, more than any other, produced Israel as an answer to the Holocaust. With these heroics, the invented memory of the shtetl brought forth by Maurice Samuel’s World of Sholom Aleichem, Life Is with People, Chagall’s paintings, and representations of Sholem-Aleichem’s works in the late 1940s and 1950s became one endpoint of a teleological arc that bent toward Israel. And that gave depictions of the people of the shtetl a newly, and nostalgically, noble purpose—not as passive victims but as preservers of a great culture that would be redeemed.

  For what, after all, made Ari Ben Canaan, the very negation of the Diaspora Yid, a Jew? In part, self-assertion. In the climactic moment of Exodus�
��s central romance—the affair between Ari and Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint), the Gentile nurse from Indiana (and surrogate for American viewers)—Ari looks over the Jezreel Valley and reminds her, “I just wanted you to know that I’m a Jew. This is my country.” But when Kitty objects (“All these differences between people are made up. People are the same, no matter what they’re called.”), Ari makes a speech that goes further, happily rejecting the long-held ground rule of American assimilation: “Don’t ever believe it. People are different. They have a right to be different. They like to be different. It’s no good pretending the differences don’t exist. They do. They have to be recognized and respected.”

  This was a stunning statement of Jewish uniqueness at the height of Jewish absorption into the American middle class—made by a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, hunky movie star, in the name of the “normalization” of the Zionist project. So what, exactly, was the difference—for thoroughly secular Ari Ben Canaan and for those who eagerly watched and cheered him on in suburban movie theaters? There was only one answer: the past. The culture they came from and the catastrophe it suffered. America’s new Jewish utopianism, Zionism, unlike the Israeli version, gave Jewish history in Europe a meaningful role as glorious legacy. Brave and brawny Ari Ben Canaan made mainstream culture safe for Tevye the Dairyman.

  That the TV broadcast of The World of Sholom Aleichem and the movie version of Exodus played such significant roles in signaling the end of the blacklist spoke not only to the immense impact the Red hunting had had on Jewish artists (as well as teachers, union activists, and others). The two works, coming from such contrasting points of view and telling such disparate stories, also pointed the way toward popular Jewish culture that could incorporate both the trope of an idealized vanished world and the assertion of Jewish particularism, of both an empathy for other oppressed groups and an unabashed pride in Jewish achievement.