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

by Alisa Solomon

  The stage’s demand for incident was the least of Stein’s challenges. The bigger problem lay in the clash between the musical’s essential means—full frontal delivery—and Sholem-Aleichem’s thickly layered indirectness. In the original series of prose monologues, the action emerges more from Tevye’s way of recounting events than in the events themselves—in the twists of his language, the ironic drama of his dawning self-consciousness, the sheer relentlessness of his verbiage (in contrast to his tragic failure to speak up during the events he now relates), his vital need to narrate himself through every situation. Stein would have to determine how—and where—to use monologue in a way that didn’t reduce Tevye’s complexity. For starters, without Sholem-Aleichem as his listener—the frame the original author created—to whom would Tevye be speaking?

  Then, there was Tevye himself. He is far more complex than Juno’s blustery Captain Boyle or Plain and Fancy’s conservative Papa Yoder. If Tevye occasionally shares a few of their characteristics—some self-inflated authority, some delay in recognizing what’s transpiring around him—they are neither what make him funny nor what make him affecting. Comic and tragic incongruities combine in Tevye, this man of unshakable faith who constantly questions God. Enduring one catastrophe after another, the man with no power confronts the Highest Authority. He even quotes Scripture in the process: Tevye throws the Book at Him. But that’s the easy part for Tevye. “I wasn’t worried about God so much. I could come to terms with Him, one way or another,” he says in the Shprintze story as he heads home from hearing her suitor’s uncle break the engagement. “What bothered me was people.”

  Jerry Bock (at piano) and Sheldon Harnick: songs should serve the show.

  This is a mirthless humor that would prove difficult to translate to the commercial theater, even half a dozen years after Samuel Beckett’s comic bleakness had been introduced to the Broadway stage (where it found less than mass enthusiasm). Stein labored to keep Tevye lovable and funny without sacrificing—or sensationalizing—his pathos. He understood that when the audience laughs at Tevye, it must not be with condescension or there would be no emotional truth in their show. But understanding a critical point is one thing, applying it credibly in the theater another.

  Stein pored over the Butwin volume, numbering sections with a light pencil to create a workable sequence of connected events. He encouraged himself with the certitude that any adaptation is a new thing in itself, not a literal translation: “I’m not a stenographer.” Even so, he wanted to capture what had touched and stirred him and his collaborators in Sholem-Aleichem’s work in the first place. Otherwise, what was the point? He was determined “to be very true to the original in terms of mood and feeling.”

  Keeping faith with those qualities tested the three men as they met periodically over the spring and early summer of 1961 to exchange ideas and as they weighed a couple of outline variants that July. One question thrummed beneath their labors even if it was never explicitly named, a version of which (unbeknown to them) had vexed even Sholem-Aleichem himself when he tried to adapt the material for a popular theatrical audience: to what extent could they maintain the tragic tone of the Tevye stories when writing for the chipper expectations of Broadway? How they’d treat the Chava story provided one key answer. Like Sholem-Aleichem before them, they changed its ending. Their first outline has Chava returning to the family fold at the play’s close: “With pogrom threatening, her place is here. Her husband knows where she is, she feels he will come. Tevye accepts her.” And though Stein would rewrite the scene many times before settling on a final version, that essential action stuck.

  Even so, the collaborators worried that the second act piled one sad event upon another: apart from Chava’s marriage to Fyedka, there was Hodel’s departure for Siberia, the town’s eviction and exodus, and, in an early variant outline, even Shprintze’s suicide.

  Couldn’t they use some comic relief? They thought of removing Chava’s story line entirely and replacing it with a vastly modified version of “Shprintze,” Sholem-Aleichem’s most painful story of all. They imagined that with “light and humorous treatment” they could exploit the story for its “valuable social elements” addressing the class divisions among Jews. What if, they wondered, instead of Shprintze’s drowning herself when her suitor’s wealthy family tears him away from her, Tevye tries to calm his heartbroken daughter? The scene could have “high humor and tenderness without any Second Avenue quality.” And more: “We will also be able to make another kind of comment because we will see the wealthy family being evicted together with the other Jews.”

  Like any number of bad ideas entertained in a creative process, the suggestion was quickly abandoned. Wringing humor from “Shprintze” would have required too great a distortion for a weak payoff, especially when compared to the affecting Chava story (one that they would come to use to escalate the challenges that Tevye faces, just as Sholem-Aleichem did). They dropped “Shprintze” altogether. They wouldn’t have time for five stories and, in any event, it was too dark for the show that was beginning to take shape.

  Besides, Stein had settled on a means of bringing the material home to contemporary audiences: he was sending Tevye’s family to America at the end of the play. Though in the first outline Tevye himself was to remain behind—“he is too old, he is afraid of new things, this is his home; he will survive; survival, he assures them, is his strongest trait”—a letter from an uncle who has already emigrated persuades him that his children should do the same. To Stein it just “felt right” that they should come to the United States. It was historically true that the wave of Jewish immigration surged in the period after the failed 1905 revolution and the subsequent pogroms. Sholem-Aleichem and his wife and son were among more than 150,000 who came in 1905–06 alone. Stein’s own parents arrived only a few years later. Stein entertained giving the daughters less “exotic” names like Rachel and Sarah.

  Where Tevye and his family were coming from proved just as significant an adjustment. At first, the script didn’t specify. “Does Tevye live in Boiberik?” the authors asked in some early notes, naming the summer resort town to which Tevye delivers his milk and cheese. In the original stories, Tevye lives between Boiberik (which Sholem-Aleichem based on the real-life Boyarka) and Yehupitz (based on Kiev) and sometimes bemoans his remoteness from a Jewish community. Kasrilevke (Golde’s hometown) and Anatevka (where the butcher Lazar Wolf and the tailor Motel Kamzoyl live) lie some versts away. But like the earlier radio adaptations of the stories, Stein moved Tevye to the center of Anatevka, collecting all the characters in a single setting. Dramaturgical expediency ended up serving the postwar Jewish immigration narrative, flagging the trajectory’s end points: shtetl to America.

  With an outline all three men approved, Stein started to flesh out the scenes. He built upon what little dialogue he found in the stories and kept much of the book’s language in Tevye’s monologues. He pulled in some bits and pieces of background from other stories in the volume that aren’t part of the Tevye series. He invented—as he had to—many of the interactions. In mid-October 1961, he completed a draft of act 1.

  “Move! March, you foolish animal!” ran the first line—the voice of Tevye heard from the wings, urging his tottering horse to get a move on. Then a stage direction: “Tevye enters, sits on a rock, sighs wearily.” He spills his heart out to the audience, complaining cheerfully about his “stubborn animal.” He ponders aloud: “Well, even a horse is one of God’s living creatures and he has the same rights as other living creatures—the right to feel tired, the right to be hungry, and the right to work like a horse!” He explains that he sells milk and cheese for a meager living, that he has a wife and five daughters—“One more beautiful, smarter, livelier than the next.… And I have only one question about my daughters. How do I get them off my hands?” He all but announces an ambivalent fatalism: “The good Lord made many, many poor people. And if He wants it that way, that’s the way it should be. You see, if it should
have been different, it would have been. (Pause.) And yet, what would have been wrong to have it different?”

  Soon Tevye meets Perchik, the young revolutionary, and invites him home for the Sabbath. The scene shifts to Tevye’s home, where the girls are peeling potatoes, sewing, and doing laundry and their mother, Golde, is cracking wise. When Tzeitel wants to know where to put the potatoes, Golde answers, “Put it on my head! By the stove, foolish girl.” When a younger daughter complains that she can’t abide kasha, Golde carps: “Did I ask you what you hate? Eat it.… If you want to hate, hate a crazy dog, hate a drunken peasant who beats up people, why should you hate kasha? Kasha’s not to hate, kasha’s to eat!” The letter arrives from the uncle in America (a good occasion for a song, Stein notes) and the daughters’ romances are introduced in parallel scenes even as Tevye promises the first to the butcher, Lazar Wolf.

  Bock and Harnick pulled no punches in expressing their disappointment in the draft. They objected to the opening monologue as “pure, unadulterated exposition” holding up the launch of the story. They didn’t like the way the daughters “have one-liners here and there that don’t begin to reveal them as people.” The scene when Tevye goes to meet Lazar Wolf wasn’t working. Stein had wanted to avoid a hackneyed routine, so he changed the story’s comic mix-up of the two men talking at cross-purposes, Tevye thinking they are discussing the sale of a cow while the butcher thinks they are talking about his interest in marrying Tzeitel. Stein had Tevye come right out with his understanding of why Lazar wanted to see him—“You are interested in my cow”—and that, his collaborators told him, made the scene seem “neither fish nor fowl.”

  Most of the comments addressed dramaturgical points—how simultaneously to build and streamline the action, how to fill out the characters—that would be ordinary in a critique of any script’s first pass. But some responses show the writers grappling with enormous questions they may not have uttered aloud but that would determine the show’s prospects as much as any technical shaping and pruning they would do: What was its attitude toward the Jews of Anatevka and the world around them? And, as a corollary, what did it have to say about their own times?

  They wondered whether the constable who warns Tevye of the coming pogrom that he will oversee should be “a subtle anti-Semite, a some-of-my-best-friends-are type guy rather than a Nazi?” They favored the former characterization. “This man seems to be both friend and fiend,” they reasoned. “And this leads to a feeling that if we could extend the symbol of Government and Gentile or peasant hostility [toward] the Jews beyond this one man we would have less of a black and white villain and more of a truthful examination of the problem.” At the same time, Bock argued for some ethnographic color: “I think a big Sabbath meal could be fascinating for its ceremony, warmth and uniqueness on stage as well as providing a background that’s part of the fabric of our show.”

  Two days after Bock delivered Harnick’s and his comments, Stein’s father died. Whether propelled by a redoubled desire to honor his father’s legacy or stirred to action by his collaborators’ ideas or both, Stein was back at work on the script within a week. He met with Bock and Harnick on November 6 to discuss a new outline. Two months later, he delivered a funnier, more tender new draft that featured preparations for a big Sabbath meal.

  In the meantime, Bock and Harnick got cracking on the score. With their first collaboration, on The Body Beautiful, they had established a simpatico way of working together: first they’d discuss the show’s subject and source material, then they’d go off and work independently. Bock would sketch some tunes—“musical guesses,” he called them—and give them to Harnick on a tape. Meanwhile Harnick read more deeply, came up with song placements, and began to hatch some notions for lyrics. He’d work with the tapes from Bock. When he had lyrics that didn’t seem to fit any of the recorded tunes, he’d send them along and Bock would compose in response. Back and forth they would go, each stimulated by the other.

  “Sheldon, here’s a little gay folk thing that I think has some interest for us,” Bock told his partner on the first recording he sent him in the fall of 1961. Bock plays oompahing chords on a piano in need of tuning as he sings his skipping melody with nonsense syllables: “bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-yaaaa, bup-bup-yá, bup-bup-yá.” Figuring that the dream scene in which Tevye tricks Golde into agreeing to let Tzeitel marry Motel would stay in the book no matter what direction Stein took it, Harnick had been picturing the nightmare’s coming to life: deceased Grandma Tzeitel appears to bless her namesake; then Lazar Wolf’s first wife, Fruma Sarah, comes to threaten revenge if, as the Butwin translation has it, Tevye should “let your daughter take my place, live in my house, carry my keys, wear my clothes.” When the tape arrived in the mail, Harnick quickly affixed the words “A blessing on your head, mazel tov, mazel tov. To see a daughter wed, mazel tov, mazel tov” to the first set of “bup-bup-yá’s,” and the rest of the lyrics to “The Tailor Motel Kamzoil” seemed to flow by themselves, guided by the language in Sholem-Aleichem’s original short story and the contours of Bock’s accelerating tune.

  Through the fall and early winter, the pair sent music and lyrics back and forth between Harnick’s Manhattan apartment and Bock’s home in the Westchester suburb of New Rochelle. Now and then, they’d come together in their publisher’s office on West Fifty-seventh Street and sit for hours at an upright piano singing through their creations, smoothing out bumps in the transition from page to sound, and musically doodling. In the neighborhood where popular American song was born, bred, and brazenly peddled, the ghosts of Tin Pan Alley were harmonizing with strains from the Pale: Bock fused his jaunty pop proficiency with a deeply absorbed feel for the thick harmonies and sweet-and-sour falling fourths of Russian folk music, the melancholy modes of Yiddish song, the spiraling frenzy of Jewish wedding dances. Bock didn’t need to do any research to compose this score. He “felt it was inside me” and found that the “opportunity to now express myself with that kind of music just opened up a flood of possibilities.”

  He had also soaked up the styles from late 1950s LPs, such as the Moiseyev Dance Ensemble’s compilations of Russian folk tunes and Theodore Bikel’s recordings of Yiddish songs. (Bikel maintains that more than soaking up styles, Bock siphoned some tunes.) When on one of the tapes he sent his partner Bock sings a melody for Harnick with “a certain Yiddish-Russian quality” that he says is “overly sad, which might be a point of humor,” his rich voice breaks, beautifully, with cantorial krekhts—half-tone hiccups that distinguish the technique. Maybe that’s why Harnick heard something devotional in it. The lyricist pulled directly from Jewish liturgy—“May God bless you and protect you”—to shape (with some variation and invention) the song Tevye’s family would sing around the table on Friday evening, “Sabbath Prayer,” a yearning song that saw barely any revision over the next two and a half years as the show slowly made its way to Broadway.

  But it was another plaintive tune, a waltz, that most stirred Harnick when he played the tape Bock had sent him and heard his partner croon through it with place holding la-da-dee-dee-da-da syllables. Bock thought the melody might express a “flirty idea” for the daughters, but Harnick heard something different. He took to heart Bock’s suggestion that the tune was “unashamedly sentimental.” Words just came—they “crystallized” on the music: “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older. When did they?… Sunrise, sunset…” He couldn’t wait to share the words with Bock. He took the train up to New Rochelle and sang it at the piano in the composer’s basement studio. When they called Bock’s wife down for a listen, she started to cry and Harnick realized they’d struck deep. Years later, he could count this moment as an early inkling that the show they were making out of sheer love might come to be loved by others.

  * * *

  It was way too soon, however, to let in such grandiose thoughts. The creative team didn’t even have rights to the material yet, and without them the proje
ct was going nowhere. Almost as soon as Bock, Harnick, and Stein had started talking seriously about the Tevye stories, their representatives had initiated what they all thought would be a routine licensing process. Negotiations with Crown Publishers began in August 1961 and quickly resulted in a letter of agreement. Bock’s lawyer expected a contract within the first few days of November. By the new year of 1962, Stein had completed a second draft and Bock and Harnick had written at least a dozen songs, but they still lacked a signed deal. The unexpected snag had a name vaguely familiar to the authors: Arnold Perl.

  When Perl licensed the stories for his production of Tevya and His Daughters in 1956 (after Rodgers and Hammerstein had let their option go), he secured exclusive rights from Crown Publishers and the promise of access to any Sholem-Aleichem material he might want from the writer’s son-in-law B. Z. Goldberg, who took a liking to Perl. Four years later, the former Communist was driving a shrewd capitalist bargain. The new Tevye team was buying access to the stories published by Crown, not to Perl’s play. (Though Perl’s family would maintain that Fiddler is based on it, Stein claimed never to have seen Tevya and His Daughters and, apart from their significant structural differences, there are no overlapping lines that don’t come either from the Butwin translation or from Maurice Samuel’s The World of Sholom Aleichem.) Perl held out for an 8.2 percent royalty (larger than the 4.8 percent Sholem-Aleichem’s family was granted) and, most important, a line of acknowledgment on all title pages and ads forever: “by special arrangement with Arnold Perl.” The deal was done in July 1962.