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

by Alisa Solomon

  Reviewing Tevya and His Daughters in 1957 for the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson took pity on Sholem-Aleichem’s genial hero. “Since Tevya had the worst of everything in Old Russia,” Atkinson wrote, “he deserves the best of Broadway now.” In a new period of Jewish communal optimism and liberal consensus—and with the right team of artists coming along—Broadway could soon give Sholem-Aleichem’s milkman a proper welcome.

  PART II

  TEVYE STRIKES IT RICH

  CHAPTER 3

  TEVYE LEAVES FOR THE LAND OF BROADWAY

  In the summer and fall of 1959, while blacklisted Arnold Perl was preparing The World of Sholom Aleichem for television, Jerome Robbins was traveling the world with his troupe, Ballets: USA, on an official tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department. West Side Story was just completing a game-changing two-and-a-half-year Broadway run and the next show he directed and choreographed, Gypsy, had just opened to ecstatic reviews. Six years after his appearance as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Robbins had been selected to represent his country in its Cold War project of cultural diplomacy. At a cost of nearly $250,000 (some of the bill footed by the hosting countries), the program sent Robbins’s ethnically diverse company of twenty young dancers to perform, over nearly five months, in eighteen cities, among them Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Reykjavik, Istanbul, Belgrade, and even Soviet-dominated Warsaw.

  The government could not have been more pleased with the result. In one city after another, the company triumphed with its ambitious and varied program. They presented Robbins’s contemporary version of Afternoon of a Faun, his satiric ballet The Concert, the cool sensation N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz, and a brand-new piece, Moves, in which dancers confronted audiences without music, scenery, or costumes. Their bodies in relationship to one another—whether in dances for the full company, a harsh pas de deux, a combative quintet for men, or a languid quartet for women—were all that Robbins needed to stir emotion and create a sense of unfolding drama. “There have been brilliant successes before and since—symphony orchestras, choral groups, jazz ensembles, other dance companies and so on,” wrote the anonymous reporter providing the official “tour analysis” for the program’s administrators. “But only ‘Ballets: USA’ was hailed everywhere as something new, fresh, original, and inherently American, growing out of and depicting the vitality of American life and art, and more, acclaim for an American creative genius.”

  From Robbins’s explosive debut as a choreographer in 1944 with Fancy Free (the playful ballet following three sailors on shore leave in New York, with music by Leonard Bernstein), American was the word critics most commonly used to describe his innovative choreography, heralding its urban themes, high and tense energies, and admixture of the vernacular and balletic—combining homegrown invention with European patrimony, jitterbug with grand jeté. And American is what Robbins himself wanted his dances to be. “Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for its [sic] American quality particularly,” he told HUAC chair Clyde Doyle in 1953, after explaining that he had lost all romance with Communism when a comrade asked him to comment on the role dialectical materialism played in his creation of Fancy Free. Artists require freedom, he explained. “The minute they become subject to any dictums they’re being false.” And without a trace of irony, but with a good dose of condescension, Doyle urged him “to even put more” of that American quality into his work.

  Being recognized as American—and now, being a celebrated symbol of “American creative genius”—was not a matter of patriotism for Robbins so much as a means of evasion. The proud national identity, he hoped, would cancel out another one he’d been given by virtue of birth. “I didn’t want to be a Jew,” he stated simply (and repeatedly) in notes toward an autobiography that he never completed. “I didn’t want to be like my father the Jew.… I wanted to be safe, protected, assimilated, hidden in among the boys, the majority.” That desire—bound up with his early shame as a gay man—shaped many of Robbins’s choices when he was young. His name change—from Rabinowitz (his parents joined him in 1944, even as Robbins himself was beginning to think he was established enough to risk reclaiming his original patronymic)—is only the most ordinary and obvious. Later, Robbins scrawled some notes in which he contemplated his early attraction to the ballet as a means of distancing himself from his heritage: “I affect a discipline over my body & take on another language—the language of court & Christianity—church & state—a completely artificial convention of movement—one that deforms and reforms the body & imposes a set of artificial conventions of beauty—a language not universal—one foreign to East & 3rd world.” And then he pondered: “In what wondrous and monstrous ways would I move if I would dig down to my Jew self?”

  Even the decision to name names before HUAC, Robbins rebuked himself two decades after the fact, oiled the wheels for his getaway: “I betrayed them to HUAC. It was not communism i betrayed, it was my mother and father—for I surrendered to the ‘American’ committee my ethnic religious and cultural background, saying to them here—kill them—I rat on them and with my stoolie words I buy being on the other side—see—you can tell I’m not one of them—I’ll feed them to you. And I did.” (Robbins himself never confirmed the conventional wisdom that he appeared as a friendly witness in response to threats that his homosexuality would be exposed if he didn’t cooperate; but the two identities, Jewish and gay, merged in the conflated stereotype of weak and wimpy manhood that he loathed.)

  And yet, on tour in Europe, at the very moment his work was hailed as “a display of 100 per cent Americana of 1959,” Robbins sensed that his transformation could never be complete and even, perhaps, that he didn’t want it to be. In half-restored Warsaw, where the troupe performed at the towering Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Sciences, the pintele yid poked at his psyche.

  How could it not? Warsaw still bore wounds of the war. By some historians’ reckoning, 90 percent of the city’s buildings had been demolished in a deliberate Nazi plan to lay waste the capital of Polish and Jewish cultures. Amid the hastily erected Soviet boxes that crammed the skyline, the painstaking reconstruction of the Old Market Square, and the barren main thoroughfare of Marszałkowska Street, a visitor could hardly miss the lingering signs of devastation. What’s more, though the name Auschwitz had not yet become a worldwide synecdoche for the Holocaust (itself a word not yet in wide circulation), the death camp was already lodged in American popular culture as the most notorious of the six sites for the mass gassing of Jews and other “undesirables” that the Nazis had established on Polish soil: it was the extermination camp described on the astonishing 1953 episode of This Is Your Life that reunited the survivor Hanna Bloch Kohner with people from her past—her father, mother, and first husband had perished at Auschwitz, TV viewers were told. And in Uris’s Exodus Auschwitz is singled out among all the camps as the most horrific: “Auschwitz with its three million dead! Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with eyeglasses. Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with boots and clothing and pitiful rag dolls. Auschwitz with its warehouse of human hair for the manufacture of mattresses!” Robbins and his troupe would not have seen posters around Warsaw advertising full-day train tours to the death camp, as they could today, but they could not have escaped the knowledge that in Poland—despite everything else that also defined the squeezed and struggling country—they were standing in a graveyard. Robbins hated it and couldn’t wait to leave. The grueling itinerary gave him four full days in town. He impulsively decided to spend one of them looking for the shtetl where his father, Harry, had been born.

  Several decades premature for the Jewish heritage tourist industry, Robbins hired a chauffeur—the watchful Intourist system would not have permitted him to rent a car and go exploring on his own—and asked the driver to take him (and one of his dancers, Jamie Bauer, whom he’d invited along for the day) to Rozhanka. On a chilly morning, they headed east out of Warsaw, driving for hours over the flat, farm-dotted terrain, toward a mi
sty memory.

  Robbins had spent a summer in Rozhanka some thirty-five years earlier. When he was almost six years old, his mother took him and his sister to meet their widowed grandfather, Nathan Meyer Rabinowitz. Along with one of Harry’s cousins and her child, they sailed to England and then traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and across Poland by train. A horse-drawn wagon carried them over unpaved roads and, finally, turned down the shtetl’s main street. Robbins’s grandfather, a baker, still lived in the thatch-roofed house that Harry had left in 1904, fleeing from conscription into the czar’s army and following his two older brothers to America. His parents had to buy a cemetery plot, bury an empty coffin, and bribe a clerk for a death certificate to cover his disappearance.

  In the interwar period, unlike much of Poland, Rozhanka was neglected by most of the factions vying for support among the country’s 3.3 million Jews. Communists, Bundists, and Hasidim lacked inroads there; only the Zionists were organizing amid the 120 Jewish families—about six hundred people—who populated the town (along with forty Christian families). The Zionist youth group established a drama club the year of young Jerry’s visit and presented a range of Yiddish plays—Moyshe the Tailor, The Way to Buenos Aires, and King Lear, among them.

  But what captured his heart in the “tiny town with dirt streets and kerosene lamps” was a sense of being carefree and thoroughly content—never mind the lack of electricity or indoor plumbing. Playing outdoors all day with the local children, catching fish from the brook, making mud houses: all of it might have seemed idyllic to any urban American boy. But Jerry’s happiness ran deeper. In Rozhanka, he felt no shame about being a Jew. He sat on his grandfather’s lap, cuddled against his chest, and this “figure with a long white beard … who I loved a lot and who I knew loved me” sang Yiddish songs to him, and he joined in. “It was a time of soft and beautiful loveliness” for him. “It was my home, that I belonged to.” Robbins recalled those days with a wistfulness not found in any of his other reminiscences of childhood. He recorded these memories some five decades later. On the tape, he chokes back a sob as he claims his belonging. By then, he had seen with his own eyes that Rozhanka was no more.

  The shtetl’s demise began with a German incursion in January 1942—parachutists, a tank, some motorcycles with machine guns. The Russian army retook the town, then lost it again, and by mid-September Nazis seized total control. Before the end of the year, they sent all of Rozhanka’s Jews to the ghetto in nearby Szczuczyn. The following April, the ghetto was liquidated, its captives sent to the slaughter.

  Meanwhile, Poles settled into some of the homes that Rozhanka’s Jews left behind; other houses were dismantled. The Jewish study house was converted into a stable and the cemetery into a pasture for cows to graze in; gravestones were removed and used for buildings and pavement.

  When he went looking for Jewish Rozhanka in 1959, Robbins found nothing.

  But he likely found it in the wrong place.

  In 1904, when Harry Rabinowitz, his father, stole away from Rozhanka, the shtetl belonged to the vast czarist empire. Two decades later, when Jerry sang Yiddish songs on his grandfather’s knee, the post–World War I borders enclosed Rozhanka within the Republic of Poland. But by the time the celebrated choreographer felt a sudden urge in Warsaw to see what had become of his ancestral home, the border had been dragged westward and he would have needed a Soviet visa to go there—not something available on a whim to an American in 1959, even, or maybe especially, to an American on an official U.S. tour, and his passport from the period bears no trace of a Soviet stamp. Even if his Polish driver had been brash enough to dare it, a wink and some hard currency at the border crossing would have presented a striking scene after several hours of driving across flat countryside and Robbins’s companion didn’t recall one. Where, then, did they go? Could the driver, in all innocence, have taken Robbins to a Polish village called Różanka that lies just west of Belarus and north of Lublin? Or to either of the other two Polish towns with that name (though one of them lies west of Warsaw and the other considerably south)?

  In some sad sense, it doesn’t matter. If there once had been Jews in any of them, their traces would have been gone. Just about every Polish shtetl suffered some version of Rozhanka’s tale of invasions and roundups and deportations. In 1959—half a century before a new generation of Poles would seek to learn about and commemorate the once-vibrant Jewish culture in their land—“everything was a void,” as one survivor put it upon returning to his hometown after the war. Before, the hundreds of shtetls that were scattered through Poland were astonishingly diverse, as different from one another as industrial production is from ox-driven agriculture, a Hasidic community from a Misnagdic, or anti-Hasidic, one. But in destruction they looked alike; ruination felt the same whether it was a textile factory or a barn, a bathhouse or a tavern that was appropriated by Poles or reduced to rubble. That’s one reason the extraordinary yizkerbikher—the collectively created post-Holocaust memorial books of maps, anecdotes, town histories, and martyrologies that retrieve a community for history—take a similar form and tone no matter which of the hundreds of shtetls is memorialized. Rozhanka’s yizkerbukh ends with a poem:

  Oh, Rozhanka, my shtetl, so prized

  I see you now more vivid than ever

  Oh, when into my thoughts you arise

  You awaken longings without measure.…

  It strikes the same melancholic chord as many a yizkerbukh’s elegy as it makes, essentially, Robbins’s choked-up assertion: “It was my home, that I belonged to.”

  Survivors who assembled the yizkerbikher from municipal records, oral histories, and their own urgent memories and storehouse of literary tropes understood that their towns, though separate and distinct, became parts of a whole through obliteration. Each was specific and each was also representative. A contributor to one yizkerbukh captured this consciousness by describing his town as “The ‘Anatevka’ of our youth and childhood dreams.” Though actually from Rudki, which lies twenty-five miles west of Lviv, in what is now Ukraine, he was invoking the name of the fictional setting in stories by Sholem-Aleichem as a way of marking the way each ruined town now stood for them all through their common fate.

  Robbins would help give Anatevka that same meaning for a vast, worldwide audience. But in 1959 the name meant nothing to him. Still, he now knew how the shtetl had become a figment of memory and imagination. On the long ride back to Warsaw for an evening performance at the looming Palace of Culture, the seeds of Fiddler were planted within him. It would take an outside impetus, though, before he could promise to give the shtetl “a new life on the stage.” It came two and a half years later in the form of a draft script for a musical.

  * * *

  A few weeks after Robbins returned to the United States in the fall of 1959, the new musical Fiorello! scored a dizzying success on Broadway. Winner of that season’s Best Musical Tony Award (which it shared with The Sound of Music), it traces the political rise of Fiorello La Guardia—the World War I hero, champion of the poor, and slayer of Tammany Hall corruption—as he toils through the years of the Depression and Second World War, on his way to becoming the beloved three-term mayor of New York City. Directed by George Abbott, who also shared book credits with Jerome Weidman, the show was distinguished by its clever and jaunty songs by Jerry Bock (music) and Sheldon Harnick (lyrics).

  As a form, the musical was flourishing in those years. This was the peak of the much-touted “golden age” of the “integrated book musical,” the sort of show that employed song and dance not as entertaining diversions but to establish the scene, advance the story, develop the characters, intensify the emotion, and deepen the serious themes. The oft-told teleology—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! climbed out of the primordial swamp of revues, follies, and frivolous operettas in 1943 to signal the evolution to this upright genre—may oversimplify both the range of musical shows produced on Broadway from the 1940s to the 1960s and the variety among integrate
d book musicals themselves, but it is true that Bock and Harnick entered the field at just the moment their talents and interests could be put to best use.

  Bock, born in New Haven in 1928 and raised in Queens, studied music at the University of Wisconsin and from early on displayed a playful capacity for capturing the essence of different musical styles within a popular idiom. When he impulsively decided to audition for the music school at Wisconsin in the fall of 1945—he had planned to study journalism—he had no prepared piano piece to perform for the panel of skeptical professors. So he offered one of his favorite party tricks: he played the simple bugle call “Reveille” as if it had been composed by Bach, then, in turn, as if it had been written by Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky. As the grand finale, Bock busted out with “Boogie Woogie Bugle Call.” The panel admitted him.

  Harnick, too, showed early signs of what would make him such a successful and sensitive lyricist. Growing up in Chicago, where he was born in 1924, Harnick shared the family penchant for writing verses to commemorate special occasions. (His first published effort, a Thanksgiving poem, appeared in his grammar school newspaper when he was in the fifth grade: “The turkey has my sympathy. / Why must we be so mean? / What has the turkey done /That he deserves the guillotine?”) More substantively, he was studying violin seriously and by the time he was a teenager he would sometimes play in the orchestras for Gilbert and Sullivan shows put on by amateur groups. He was “bowled over” by the technical feats of Gilbert’s lyrics and began to play with puns and with internal and multisyllabic rhymes in the songs and sketch comedy he was writing with a high school buddy. In the army—Harnick was drafted into the Signal Corps in 1943 and worked as a mobile blind-landing-systems installer—he gravitated to a volunteer unit that threw together a weekly show for fellow servicemen at the Robins Field airbase in Georgia. Harnick joined other cast members in improvisations based on comic scenarios that their director, Sol Lerner, a former theatrical agent from New York, remembered from shows he’d seen back home; Harnick also played the violin and wrote and performed satirical songs about life in his unit. Before Harnick received his honorable discharge in early 1946, Lerner tendered a version of “If you ever come and try your luck in New York, look me up, kid.” First, though, Harnick went back to Chicago and enrolled at Northwestern on the GI Bill. There, he studied violin and wrote for the storied student revue, the Waa-Mu Show. His classmate Charlotte Rae, costumed in overalls as a wartime munitions worker, sang his freshman contribution, “I’ve got those gotta-go-home-alone tonight blues.” She also gave him a copy of the original cast album of Finian’s Rainbow, and Yip Harburg’s lyrics lit a spark. “I thought it was extraordinary that a man could have such fun with words and yet be saying something important,” Harnick explained, and he wanted to do the same. He continued to pursue a violin career after graduating, even landing a seat in a prominent dance orchestra with a standing five-night-a-week gig at the Edgewater Hotel. But when tension in his arms (caused by his clenching with nervousness when microphones descended nightly to broadcast the music on radio) along with layoffs in the orchestra left him jobless, he moved to New York. If he was going to be penniless, he figured he might as well do it where he could try to break into showbiz.