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

by Alisa Solomon

  For his part, Robbins interviewed his father, learning for the first time about the ruse and bribe that enabled Harry to steal out of Rozhanka at age fifteen on an “underground railway,” as Robbins likened it. Harry traveled by foot with a deserting Russian soldier, all the way to Amsterdam. Robbins was moved by the rare opportunity to “feel my father’s feelings so strongly.” He asked Harry, too, to explain how and why he had discarded Orthodox practice. Answer: his recognizing how his relatives and other Jews engaged in “juggling and bending” the religious laws to accommodate the demands of American business and culture. Robbins also pondered his maternal grandmother, who had come to live with his family when Robbins was an adolescent, “a wonderful tiny, amazingly wrinkled little woman” who “never lit a stove or turned on electricity after sundown on Sabbath eve; kept separate dishes for dairy & meat foods; attended shul religiously & was always reading the Talmud.” He could still picture how beautiful she looked on Sabbath evenings in her dark velvet dress with a tiny handmade lace collar, lighting the candles and reciting the blessing. As a child, he was “both awed and scornful of her ritual gestures.” He “‘despised’ her Jewish backward ways,” which he could not ask her about, even if he’d wanted to: she spoke only Yiddish. Some thirty years later, he was finally allowing himself to make sense of this heritage that had been “laid open for me and more gently than i ever realized, i absorbed it, drank it in and let it sink to a place deep within me, quietly building up a rich & glorious storehouse of cherished sacred and touching knowledge—all stored away—deep & away.” Now he was not only opening the vault but spelunking into its many caverns, hauling up one treasure after another to enliven the world of the play, in order to make it specific. And true. The more he delved, the more he pressed the writers to toughen and tighten the script.

  * * *

  The version Robbins first read had come a long way since the initial draft, with its stagnating action and some sections sticky as damp sugar. In response to Bock’s and Harnick’s notes, Stein had restored the ironic confusion in the meeting between Tevye and Lazar with a light, humorous hand and, in place of a series of escalating insults between them that had ended the scene before, the men now concluded with a happy toast “To life!”—and broke into song. In this draft, Perchik was charmingly introducing the subject of marriage to Hodel as a “political question,” and in general humor was emerging more out of character than from set-up jokes. A scene in which Tevye goes to the local priest to demand his daughter Chava be returned to the family ends with him reeling away, rebuffed. Following Sholem-Aleichem, Tevye wonders in a troubled monologue, here set to music, why God bothered to make different kinds of people: “Forgive me for asking / But why did you choose / to make of your children / both Gentiles and Jews? / These questions, almighty God / I hope you’ll excuse / But I had a daughter / Too precious to lose.” The action finds a spot of uplift when Motel acquires a sewing machine at last and sings it a love song, but then the constable delivers a new, irrevocable blow: eviction. In acquiescing to the decree, Tevye stands up to its minion (and plays to the house): “We are not strong, we have no power in the government. But we have a special talent to survive. We are a peaceful people, we do not win great wars, but we survive—we flourish and survive!” Then Chava joins the family, pledging to emigrate with them no matter what her husband decides. (He shows up and, after a tense silence, Tevye tells him to help with the packing.)

  In addition to “Sabbath Prayer,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Tevye’s Dream,” Bock and Harnick had already written a touching musical plea from Tzeitel begging not to have to marry the butcher, “Poppa Help Me,” and a “Letter to America” in which the community, led by Tevye, responds to mail from relatives overseas by singing of their love of Anatevka, asking, “Who needs America? / Who needs a new community / changing our ways to I don’t know what? / Maybe there’s opportunity / Maybe I’d like America, but…”

  All of these developments gave the show more dramatic tension and shape. Stein was fattening the characters and the songs were advancing action or thickening context.

  Robbins had complaints from start to finish. To begin with, something about the opening number, “We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet,” rankled him. Famously inarticulate about what he thought was needed when it came to text or acting, Robbins could only repeat that it wasn’t working. He couldn’t explain why; he just didn’t like this song that uses the rush of Gilbert and Sullivan–style patter (but in a minor scale) to convey the family hurrying to complete all their preparations before sundown. The whole day leading up to the Sabbath was “a race with time,” Life is with People informed, and the song begins at a gallop. First Shprintze, then Bielke, begs Golde to let them go play. They’ve rubbed, they’ve scrubbed, they say, but their repeated pleas of “Momma, Momma” are rebuffed by Golde’s insistence that they stay inside and do their pre-Sabbath chores.

  Now the older daughters join in, following Golde’s instructions to set the table, even as they urge her to calm down. But there’s no calming their mother: “So who can relax while there’s so much to be done, keeping one eye on the soup and the other on the sun?” The daughters try to reassure her—there’s plenty of time, no need to be nervous—and keep reminding her in the refrain, to little avail, “We’ve never missed a Sabbath yet.”

  Jerome Robbins and Joseph Stein: book changes.

  On they sing, Golde frantic as she lists all that remains to be done: preparing noodles, plucking chickens, chopping liver, making challah, washing woodwork and dishes, peeling potatoes, dressing the smaller children—many of the tasks itemized in Life is with People that govern a woman’s life each Friday as she “darts from broom to oven and back again peering, stirring, prodding, dusting, giving commands to her daughters.…” The song captures the frenzy—and the reward.

  Everything slows down and in a simple, almost liturgical passage that leans longingly on an augmented fifth, Golde and the girls reflect on the peace that enters their home and their hearts as the sun comes down: “For Sabbath, Queen Sabbath / Sabbath Queen and Bride / All work and all worry / Must be set aside.”

  That beautiful respite is broken and the staccato enumeration of chores takes off again, as the family returns to the sweeping and plucking and scouring and cooking. What was Robbins’s problem? “We’ve Never Missed a Sabbath Yet” condenses event into song and presents the weekly ritual that binds and sustains the community. It appears to accomplish what a standard opening number needs to do: it tells the audience where they are, who lives there, what matters to them. Still, Robbins wanted the writers to change it. He didn’t explain that the song merely establishes a situation without setting an action in motion. He just said the show needed to start someplace else. But he couldn’t say where.

  Instead, in meeting after meeting at his home, Robbins kept asking the authors a question that struck them as unnecessary for having such an obvious answer: “What is this show about?” He’d lean back in his chair and await their answer, but the authors were dumbfounded. Robbins knew full well that the show traced the trials of Tevye, a simple Jew trying to scratch out a living in the Russian Pale of Settlement at the turn of the century. They had nothing new to tell him. Still, Robbins kept hammering the question like a district attorney and, every time, one of the creators gave the same answer: “The show is about a dairyman and his marriageable daughters.”

  One late autumn day, Robbins snapped, “No, no, no, that’s no good.” He let out a gust of exasperation. “That’s not it. That’s not enough. That’s ‘The Previous Adventures of the Goldbergs.’”

  Nobody said anything, but the team understood what Robbins meant about “the Goldbergs.” And they agreed with him. None of them wanted to create a show like the long-running sitcom that had carried a warm if meddlesome Jewish mother into American hearts for nearly three decades. From 1929 to 1950 on radio and then for another half-dozen years in various forms on TV, The Goldbergs presented a lovable Jewish family o
f Yiddish-lilting immigrant parents and slang-slinging American-born children. Gertrude Berg wrote each episode and also starred as Molly Goldberg, the dizzy dame but ultimately can-do matriarch who found the way out of—and a comforting lesson in—any predicament. Life magazine likened the program to “a pair of comfortable old shoes which never seem to wear out.”

  Bock, Harnick, and Stein had no interest in cobbling their show on the same last. A prequel to The Goldbergs meant not only something too soft but something pleading too hard for acceptance. They were past all that, they knew. The Goldbergs had been off the air for more than five years.

  No one remembers who uttered the words that finally provided the answer to Robbins’s persistent question, but they seemed to rearrange the molecules in the room. “It’s about the dissolution of a way of life.” Robbins leaned forward. “That’s it! That’s it,” he said. He wasn’t the sort to cry out or slap the table—more a “quiet, growling presence,” as Hal Prince describes him—but his enthusiasm was unmistakable. “It’s tradition,” he asserted. “Yes, that’s it. We have to establish the traditions at the beginning and then the audience will see how they’re breaking down. That’s the show.”

  Instantly, Robbins saw how this theme could give him a pliant and powerful dramatic tension around which to stage the action. The forces breaking down the traditions would press from both the inside and the outside. In the first instance—modern children challenging their parents’ staid ways—the generational conflict would make the story universal. At the same time the violent antisemitism of czarist Russia would exert pressure externally. The persecution endured by Tevye and the people of Anatevka was on account of their Jewishness, expressed by the very traditions that were in danger of unraveling. That would make the show simultaneously universal and a very particular story. Through his own personal pursuit for a reconnection to his heritage, Robbins intuited that the story could also be embraced by Jewish audiences in search of a usable past, as their own ties to tradition attenuated.

  Right away, an image took shape in his mind. Robbins saw exactly how to open and close the show. “I’ll begin it with one of the oldest folk forms: the circle,” he told the authors. “I’ll bring the cast out and make a folk circle. And at the end, we’ll bring the cast out and the circle will disintegrate.” (Aronson’s use of two turntables, one set within another, would share this idea.) Robbins sent Bock, Harnick, and Stein away with instructions to make every scene relate to the theme of traditions breaking down. Then he turned more attention to the question of who, exactly, would be in that circle. “Shtetl means my community, more than my location,” he wrote in his research notes, echoing Life Is with People. “The people made the shtetl, not the place.” In casting, he had to follow that principle: the actors, working as an ensemble, would have to make a community. Together, they would have to manifest a tenable oxymoron: a gritty, gutsy Broadway shtetl.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT TAKES A SHTETL

  In September 1963, Robbins had begun one of Broadway’s longest, most arduous casting processes ever—not a surprise, given that he’d taken an unprecedented six months to put together the company for West Side Story. Back then, in 1957, his effort to cast previously unknown, young, credibly hoodlum performers came as an innovation: he was creating a couple of gangs, not an assembly of chorus boys. More unusual, he expected each of them to sing, dance, and act—and to do all three well with a score and set of movements that were far from easy. Until then, typically only the stars of a musical had to deliver song and character brilliantly and at least passably make it through some choreography; a chorus carried the big songs while a troupe of hoofers took care of the dancing. Robbins overthrew that formula forever.

  Besides, he was notoriously indecisive. For major roles, he’d call actors again and again, settle on one, then change his mind, then change it once more. He was looking not only for the qualities actors could bring to a role but also for how they worked in relation to others with whom they might play scenes. For Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Austin Pendleton auditioned seven times for Robbins, as did Barbara Harris. Neither was offered the job until the day they read together.

  Pendleton was the only actor Robbins knew from the start that he wanted for Tevye. He had enjoyed working with him on the Kopit play and thought the young midwesterner’s winning earnestness would work well for the new project. Pendleton was the first actor he invited to audition. Twenty-three, and just a couple of years out of Yale, Pendleton read for the role of the revolutionary, Perchik. He loved the part and didn’t complain that, over a period of several weeks beginning in September, Robbins asked him to come in a second, third, fourth, and even fifth time to read the same scenes. Every hungry young actor in New York, it seemed to him, would do whatever it took to land a part in a musical directed by Robbins. He floated away from every audition, no matter how arduous it had been, flattered and thrilled that Robbins believed in his acting enough to consider him for a part so different from the shy, stuttering boy he had played in Oh Dad. One day, Robbins handed Pendleton some unfamiliar pages. “Since you’re here, would you mind reading this other part?” Robbins asked. The character was called Motel and, as Pendleton recalls, he wasn’t yet well defined or as interesting as Perchik: “He was a sincere young guy who wants to marry the oldest daughter and who’s poor and honest and all that, but there was nothing really vivid about it.” Robbins dismissed Pendleton with a standard issue “very nice, thank you,” and Pendleton went on his way, preoccupied with how he’d bring Perchik’s fervor to life onstage.

  His heart could hardly sink, though, when he learned through the grapevine in October that Robbins would offer him the role of Motel. “I was going to be in a Jerry Robbins musical,” he told himself. “What was there to be disappointed about?” Some days later, when he ran into Robbins in the street, the director grabbed him by the shoulders and exclaimed, “Since we cast you, we’re reconceiving the role of Motel. He’s this utter loser, but just absolutely tenacious—it’s you!” Once rehearsals were under way, months later, Pendleton would wither under Robbins’s even sharper stabs at his vulnerabilities. In the meantime, though, he eagerly awaited the work’s start.

  On and off, from October to January, Robbins saw hundreds of actors for the other forty-five roles, often spending six-hour days with hopefuls scheduled at ten-minute intervals. They poured in on the recommendation of casting agents and in response to ads posted in trade papers that offered standard brief character descriptions most notable for signaling to actors that some roles would require them to “look”—or maybe even “act”—Jewish. Among them:

  Golde: wife of Tevye, middle-aged, stern, sarcastic but with wit. A devoted mother with good humor and sentiment that embarrasses her. Sings.

  Lazar: Jewish, middle-aged butcher, rather crude and loud but with a likable streak. Sings.

  Yente: Jewish, middle-aged matchmaker, talks steadily, a real “yente.”

  Fyedka: not Jewish, young, sensitive but determined. Sings.

  Bock, Harnick, Stein, and Prince frequently joined Robbins behind the table, a thick stack of résumés, 8 × 10 glossies, and schedules spread out before them. On some days as many as twenty-five auditions were crammed into two hours, and dozens of actors returned several times over the months. Exacting as Robbins was, he encouraged and supported the performers who interested him: he might attend a voice lesson with someone whose singing was unsure (as he did with Joanna Merlin, who was called back seven times and was eventually cast as the oldest daughter, Tzeitel) or send someone for special movement classes (as he did with Robert Berdeen, originally cast as Fyedka, so that he could learn Russian character dance) or dispatch his assistant, Tommy Abbott, to coach a promising actor privately (as he did for a Perchik contender, Stuart Damon). In part, the outside help was Robbins’s way of overcoming objections of his collaborators: “Excellent actress,” Harnick had scrawled on the audition schedule next to Merlin’s name at her first tryout. “Can’t sing.” But Robbins
sent her to work with Bock and Harnick, too, and they got to know her range and ability to sell a song; they knew she could combine Tzeitel’s fortitude with real warmth and soon agreed that the seasoned actor (who had played all of the girls in a scaled-down touring company of Perl’s Tevya and His Daughters a few years earlier) was the strongest contender for the role.

  Robbins was planning a ballet for the second act that would express Chava’s pull toward Fyedka and the stretching, then breaking, of her tie to her family. So he made dancing skill the highest priority for that part. He chose Tanya Everett, a seventeen-year-old redhead from North Carolina with no significant professional experience and less knowledge about Jews—she was a Baptist who had gone to a Catholic boarding school. She did have solid dancing and plenty of charm. But compared with her, Merlin sang like Callas. The team knew they needed a sturdy singer for the third sister to help carry the other two. Besides, settling for anything less than a great soprano for Hodel, the fiery second daughter who would go off to join her arrested paramour in Siberia, was impossible. She would sing “Far from the Home I Love” in a tightly focused emotional moment in act 2. Robbins liked Anne Fielding, who had performed in the chorus in Stein’s Juno and taken over for a lead role in Once Upon a Mattress. (She had also played Chava in Perl’s Tevya at the Carnegie.) She possessed a robust voice and intense stage presence. “Marvelous. Sings well,” Harnick noted on her audition sheet.

  Robbins put all three women onstage together at a 12:30 audition on Friday, November 22, and was pleased enough with the combination to present the trio to Bock, Harnick, Stein, and Prince early that afternoon. The creative team watched as the women learned a short dance routine and the men appreciated the easy rapport among the actors: not only was each a capable, appealing performer, the connection among them meant that they could pass as sisters. The group parted happily for the scheduled lunch break, planning to return at 3:00 to look at some potential Yentes and Perchiks, beginning with Bea Arthur. On the way out, they saw actors huddled around a radio, crying: President Kennedy had been shot. Auditions were called off for the rest of the day and Broadway went dark that night—the first time it had ever done so for any reason other than a strike.