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

by Alisa Solomon

  Harnick did call upon Lerner soon after he arrived in the summer of 1950 and Lerner helped by hooking him up with some television variety shows that needed songs. Bock had arrived some eighteen months earlier, a semester short of finishing at Wisconsin. He, too, had been writing for shows in college—a full-length musical for which he served as composer won first prize in a student contest sponsored by BMI—and with Larry Holofcener, a talented college pal, as lyricist, the two quickly snagged a job with television’s Admiral Broadway Revue, which starred Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca and eventually morphed into Your Show of Shows.

  Musical variety shows still had a few years of life on Broadway in the early 1950s—and for a bit longer Off-Broadway, on TV, and at summer resorts in the Catskills, Adirondacks, and Poconos—and they provided invaluable on-the-job training for theatrical songsmiths. Often turning out a new show every week, the writers honed their skills for all kinds of swiftness. They had to write fast and what they wrote had to establish a lot of information quickly: in a variety format, each number presented a new character (or at least a character type), a new story (or at least a joke), and its own tone. The satirical recounting of a dud of a date, from attraction to disappointment in a seething but censorious town, for example, comes off in six short stanzas—less than two hundred words—in Harnick’s first hit, “Boston Beguine” (from New Faces of 1952). “How could we hope to enjoy all the pleasures ahead,” the frustrated singer concludes, “when the books we should have read were all suppressed in Boston?” These shows were also crash courses in what worked in front of an audience and what died. Many a writer of book musicals shaped up for the complex dramatic demands of that genre—and for coming up with good new songs in a day or two during on-the-road tryouts—by cranking out tunes for the second-class form.

  Encouraged by a meeting with Yip Harburg, Harnick considered working with a partner while he concentrated on lyrics, but he never stopped writing music and his sense of composition can be felt in the supple phrasing of his words. As for Bock, he put aside his lingering literary ambitions and focused on music, becoming even more adept at producing tunes for any dramatic situation, from clomping cowboy syncopations to calypso beats to sliding Gypsy flourishes, as fanciful revue settings—or costumes—demanded. By the time they met in 1956 (introduced by their mutual friend, the performer Jack Cassidy), both had written for book shows—Harnick for a comedy called Horatio that was a huge hit in Dallas but flopped at an Adirondack resort and never came to New York and Bock for Mr. Wonderful, a Sammy Davis Jr. vehicle that ran nearly a year on Broadway (and brought Bock recognition as well as royalties for its frequently covered songs “Mr. Wonderful” and “Too Close for Comfort”). Harnick and Bock had begun to make lives—and even a living—in the theater.

  As partners, they gave each other new occasions to rise to in song after song: Bock’s contrapuntal flourishes invited Harnick to build character conflict into his lyrics; Harnick’s haiku-like turns offered Bock chances to mark subtle emotional shifts in the music. Without having to discuss it, they concurred on a core principle: that songs served the show and shouldn’t be written as stand-alone commodities. That’s why, though they typically wrote three songs for every one used, they seldom had any recyclable trunk songs.

  Fiorello! showed off their adroit and witty use of songs to convey heaps of dramatic information, draw audiences into the characters, and comment on a situation—often all at once. “The Name’s La Guardia,” for instance, shows the hero’s idealism tempered by political savvy while also poking fun at the exploitable ethnic voting blocs of the urban electorate: as multilingual La Guardia campaigns for Congress in the first act, he sings in English, then Italian, then Yiddish as he meets different groups of constituents, and Bock keeps up, shifting from Sousa-like march to tarantella to the festive dance tunes known as freylekhs.

  Bock and Harnick had been hired separately for Fiorello! and the astounding success of the show—it even won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama—cemented their partnership. The show’s coproducer, Hal Prince, signed them up as a team (along with Abbott and Weidman) for a new project while Fiorello! was still in rehearsals. (The new show was Tenderloin, a tale of whores, church reformers, and corrupt cops in 1890s New York. With an appealing score but lumpy libretto, it opened to mixed reviews in October 1960 and closed six months later, while Fiorello! was still running strong.) But Bock and Harnick were beginning to talk about developing a project through their own initiative. And they were talking about it with the librettist Joseph Stein, who had coauthored the book for their first musical together, The Body Beautiful, a clunky effort about an aspiring boxer. It opened in late January 1958 and lasted about seven weeks. Nonetheless, the three men liked working together and in 1960 an idea for a musical began to hatch.

  Stein, born in 1912, was also smitten by theater in high school and he loved to write. At City College he continued to work on plays and to contribute to the school newspaper and magazine, but without dreaming of pursuing writing as a profession. After completing a master’s degree in social work at Columbia University, he found a job as a psychiatric case worker—but he kept writing in his time off. In 1942, over lunch with a mutual friend, he met a comic who needed some new material for radio monologues. Stein made some off-the-cuff suggestions and the performer said, “Why don’t you write that up?” The fifteen dollars he paid Stein for the material marked the beginning of Stein’s professional career as a writer—and it was not the last time Stein would write for Zero Mostel.

  Stein’s comic sensibility was warm, even kindly—like the man himself. His radio sketches found humor more in the absurdity of situations and in the sure-fire Jewish outsider stance that dominated much comedy of the period than in ridicule or caustic jokes. They were funny enough to open doors to Broadway revues and TV; through the early 1950s, Stein, too, wrote for Your Show of Shows. And he crossed paths with Jerry Bock again when he and a writing partner, Will Glickman, were hired to write the book for Mr. Wonderful. But two other musicals he wrote before 1960 set him more directly down the path to the new project with Bock and Harnick.

  The first was Plain and Fancy (1955), a commission bankrolled by a Philadelphia department store owner who wanted a show about the Amish to do for Pennsylvania what Rodgers and Hammerstein had done for Oklahoma—or so Stein remembered it. (Accounts from the period explain that a woman from Pennsylvania had tried to sell the producer on her script about the Amish a couple of years earlier.) Stein and Glickman (again, writing partners) researched Amish customs, dress, and speech; the producer brought a Mr. Zeek from Pennsylvania to school the company in the ways of his tribe, and he also planted a tape recorder mic among the celery in a Lancaster County market stall to try to capture the local lilt for the cast. Preshow press coverage emphasized the exoticism of the simple-living Mennonites, but the script took pains to portray the community in a positive, even wistful light. It relied on a well-worn plot device: two city-mouse New Yorkers, Dan and Ruth, alight in Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, where Dan is selling a farm he inherited to a local man. In the process of helping to right a romance, the outsiders come to appreciate the meaningful way of life they witness, and the community reaffirms and tightens its ties to tradition (displayed most wondrously in a second-act opening number, in which a barn is raised onstage). Utterly conventional in form and quaint in spirit, the show offered a frisson of the foreign in a pleasant, familiar package. It ran for more than a year despite lukewarm reviews.

  Stein turned to themes of family conflict within a tight, rigid community once more when, in 1959, he adapted Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. Working on his own as librettist this time, Stein stayed faithful to O’Casey’s close study of the crumbling Boyle family in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence—stalwart mother, drunkard dad, stool pigeon son, besotted then spurned (and pregnant) daughter—while also coloring in the social background. The show featured several big ensemble scenes that brought 1920s Dublin to life, with w
omen commiserating comically on front stoops, men cavorting in a pub, neighbors viciously turning on the Boyles when the family’s ballyhooed inheritance fails to materialize. The show offers a surprising critique of masculinity in times of war—the son’s death at the hands of IRA avengers comes across as part of a violent culture that’s out of control, the dad’s drinking renders him entirely ineffectual, and the women leave to make a better life, daughter following mother “to my sister’s place, to the farm, where you can take a full breath without the smell of sadness in it.” Despite a rich score by Marc Blitzstein and stirring, Irish-inflected choreography by Agnes de Mille, Juno closed after sixteen performances, criticized for failing to find a convincing middle ground between bubbly musical numbers and O’Casey’s bitter tone.

  Stein didn’t have either musical consciously in mind when he suggested that he, Bock, and Harnick take a look at Sholem-Aleichem’s short stories as possible source material for their new venture. He was simply reminded of the stories after Harnick proposed they adapt Sholem-Aleichem’s Wandering Stars. A friend had given Harnick a copy of the novel and he saw great potential in the rollicking, epic, and tumultuous love story that traces the parallel paths of a cantor’s daughter, Reizel, and a wealthy man’s son, Leibel Rafalovich, who are separated as youngsters as they try to run off from their shtetl together to join the theater. Each traipses across Europe and, eventually, comes to America as a star—Rosa an admired singer in the Gentile opera houses, and Leo Rafalesco a celebrated leading man of the Yiddish stage. Literary critics have long pointed to the book’s choppy plotting, melodramatic emotion, and expositional cop-outs (epistolary chapters that fill in skipped-over events, for example) as key evidence of Sholem-Aleichem’s failure as a novelist. But theater people have frequently found it irresistible, both for its vivid portrayals of the mendacious managers, conniving costars, and imperious divas who nonetheless consistently manage to put magic on the stage and for its direct (critics would say overly blatant) theme of the theater’s irresolvable inner conflict as a commercial art—one that must please a paying audience even as its creators aspire, like Rafalesco, to greatness. Harnick loved it. So did Bock. The Broadway musical seems like the story’s natural habitat—the form, after all, was invented and sustained by scrappy Jewish artists who learned to balance seriousness and shmaltz, assimilation and ethnic assertion. Wandering Stars looked perfect as Harnick, Bock, and Stein’s next project.

  Except that it was too sprawling for even a three-hour stage adaptation. Or so Stein contended. Traversing a dozen locales and as many years, populated by hordes of colorful characters and twining around two central plot lines, the novel couldn’t be contained in the taut structure of a book musical. (If the New York Times reviewer is to be believed, Maurice Schwartz’s 1930 dramatization with songs by Avrum Goldfadn bore out Stein’s judgment: it played as “a succession of insufficiently fused fragments.” How the Moscow Yiddish Art Theater’s version fared is hard to say; the June 1941 debut was overwhelmed by other events.)

  But the short stories—those, Stein told his collaborators, might be more suitable for the stage. He remembered that his father, an immigrant from Poland who was now living with him, had read them in Yiddish when he was young. That pious, affable milkman with his tangled Talmudic quotes and rebellious daughters. Those tragicomic tales of ruin and survival. Couldn’t those make a good musical? Even Rodgers and Hammerstein had thought so, though Stein didn’t know it at the time.

  But where to find the stories in English in 1960? Frances Butwin’s Tevye’s Daughters had been out of print for nearly a decade and even though some Sholem-Aleichem was still available in translation, Stein wasn’t having any luck locating it. Neil Klugman and the other caustic characters in Goodbye, Columbus seemed to be shouting from every bookshop window, asserting themselves, controversially, as the irreverent new voice of Jewish America. Stein called all over the city and finally, at O’Malley’s secondhand bookstore on Park Avenue South, he put his hands on a volume with a fading gray green cloth cover, the title Tevye’s Daughters looping across it in a gilded cursive font. Inside, he rediscovered the sympathetic, stalwart hero who made him laugh so hard he cried. In March 1961, Bock, Harnick, and Stein met formally for the first time to discuss staging the stories.

  Harnick was surprised by how much the stories appealed to him. He remembered reading some Sholem-Aleichem when he was in high school on the recommendation of someone who’d heard how much he enjoyed American humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber. But stories by “the Jewish Mark Twain” left him cold. Harnick “wrote them off, just dismissed them” at the time. But twenty years later they came across as “wonderfully human and moving and funny.” For what reason—emotional maturity? more refined literary sensibility? inchoate postwar fondness for the old Jewish world? simply the availability of a better translation?—Harnick couldn’t say. They simply resonated. Bock and Stein had the same reaction: the stories were “so warm and human and emotional that they cried out for music.” Only later would Harnick acknowledge a buried basis for the appeal. “Over and above the beauty of the stories themselves, there was another reason why we were all drawn to this material, which can perhaps be best illustrated by a title which Mr. Stein suggested: ‘Where Poppa Came From.’” But in 1960–61, the men did not recognize that motivation. “It never entered our minds that it was Jewish,” Harnick recalled. “We all felt the same way about the stories, that they were just very beautiful and we couldn’t wait to work on them.” Or, as Stein liked to put it, “These were stories about characters who just happened to be Jewish.”

  Like a lot of other American Jews, that’s pretty much how Bock, Harnick, and Stein felt about themselves. Stein, the oldest of the three, was the only one raised by Orthodox immigrant parents in a Yiddish-speaking household. But he “was never very involved in religion” and after his bar mitzvah found whatever spiritual calling he may have felt in the collaborative world of the theater. Bock and Harnick came from less observant families—Harnick in a mostly Gentile neighborhood, where a brief adolescent interest in becoming a rabbi was quickly supplanted by music and writing, and Bock in a secular family where it was his grandmother’s singing of Russian and Yiddish folk songs that infused him with what he referred to as his ethnic “juices.” All three—like ever-growing numbers of other Jewish Americans—felt comfortable in this era of growing acceptance and integration. Being Jewish was not the governing fact of their lives, but neither was it an issue. They would never deny that they were Jews, they just responded to the identity with the quintessential Jewish gesture: a shrug.

  From the beginning, Bock, Harnick, and Stein ran into discouraging, even derisive, reactions to their effort. The first came from Stein’s own agent, who let him know she thought he was wasting his time on a ridiculous project. “I’ll go through the motions of making a routine contract,” she told him with some irritation when he asked her to draw up a standard agreement among the three partners; she expected that it would not amount to anything. The writers had plenty of their own doubts. “Who would be interested in producing a show about a shtetl?” Stein wondered. But they kept at it, simply out of love of the material and the desire to work together. “It was pure speculation and pure affection,” Stein said.

  Of Sholem-Aleichem’s eight Tevye stories in the Butwin volume, they initially chose to work from five: “Modern Children” (the story that focuses on Tzeitel’s marriage to Motel the tailor), “Hodel” (the daughter who chooses Perchik, the revolutionary, and follows him to Siberia), “Chava” (the one who marries a non-Jew), “Shprintze” (who drowns herself after her wealthy beau’s uncle calls off their betrothal), and “Get Thee Out” (in which Tevye and his family are evicted).

  Stein’s first order of business was figuring out how to weave the distinct and separate stories—written over the stretch of two decades—into a single drama. He had adapted works before, but not from fiction, and Sholem-Aleichem presented difficulties that went far
beyond the need to spin full scenes and dialogue out of narration, some of it quite minimal. (All that is said in “Modern Children,” for instance, about Tzeitel and Motel’s nuptials is a near throwaway line—“the next day they were engaged, and not long after were married”—yet it inspired what eventually became Fiddler’s lengthy and elaborate act 1 finale. In the movie, the scene lasts a whopping twenty-one minutes.)