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

by Alisa Solomon

  Yet Almagor nearly jumped out of his chair at the National Theater. Not only because “my fat man was excellent.” The happy shock of seeing a shtetl onstage made him “excited like I had never been excited in the theater. Me, the anti-galuti, the sabra, was so thrilled by the show.” Somehow, he just knew other Jewish Israelis would feel the same way: the time was right for his generation to find a warm way into the European piece of their legacy. When the performance ended, he summoned the chutzpah to go backstage to inquire about the rights. He poked through a door and found the creative team sitting around “just like in the movies,” with “empty glasses and full ashtrays,” analyzing the night’s performance. He blurted out an introduction, quickly reciting his credentials, and was welcomed in. Some of the Fiddler team had read about the Israeli My Fair Lady in Variety. (The Hebrew rendering of “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain” had become famous worldwide: barad yarad bidrom sfarad ha’erev—hail fell in southern Spain this evening.) Almagor was even drawn into the performance postmortem.

  In the morning, he phoned Godik. “Giora! I found it,” he cried. “Sholem-Aleichem!” The Polish-born impresario nearly slammed down the receiver. “No, it’s not galuti,” Almagor pressed. “It’s different. It’s marvelous.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Godik said. “I want to do How to Succeed in Business.”

  “I saw it, Giora. It’s not for Israel.”

  Godik produced the Frank Loesser show. It flopped.

  Almagor headed back to Los Angeles to devote himself to his dissertation on Micah Berdichevsky, an important figure in early Hebrew letters who developed a modernist, symbolic literary style and argued from the Pale in the early twentieth century for a secular Jewish nationalism. But before turning his focus back to Berdichevsky’s complicated narrative techniques, Almagor quickly wrote an article for the Israeli paper Ma’ariv—a four-page spread under the headline “The Fiddler Who Went on the Roof.” It was one of the first major publications about the show and certainly the first to frame Fiddler for Hebrew-speaking audiences. Accompanied by several production photos, the article teeters with ambivalence, as if Almagor was embarrassed to admit to Israeli compatriots what he had gushed to Godik: that he loved the show. Every accolade—Fiddler is “intelligent,” “agreeable and moving”—is sapped by sarcasm or complaint. He objects to the “tasteless” genre of the American musical, “Broadway’s questionable contribution to the world of theater,” and, wisecracking, wonders if there will be “a new Louis Armstrong hit, ‘Hello, Shprintze.’” In the end, though, Almagor owns up to his guilty pleasure: “Shmaltz? Maybe. But so beautiful! Kitsch? Terrible. But what a treat!” Having proclaimed his proper wariness, he is able to confess, “Most of the time I enjoyed myself, laughed and was moved to tears.”

  Could other sabras do the same? Godik had not entirely dismissed the possibility—especially not after the sensation Fiddler became in New York only a few weeks after Almagor’s call. Godik sent another scout, a young actor visiting the States who had recently made a career breakthrough in the title role of a hit satirical film about an “Oriental” Jewish family emigrating to Israel, Sallah Shabati. His name was Chaim Topol.

  Topol and Almagor were friends. Though they hadn’t served in the same army unit, they were in the same age cohort, moving from performance troupes in the military to the civilian revue circuit when they were discharged in 1957. Topol directed and performed in pieces Almagor wrote. His most successful role, however, remained Sallah, a character carried over from his ensemble in the army, the one attached to Nahal, the unit for youth committed to kibbutz life, as Topol was as a teenager. The Nahal troupe performed their affectionately satirical sketch comedy and songs in bases and civilian communities all over the country, not only boosting morale but contributing to the construction of a common culture for immigrants from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East at a time when Israel still lacked national television. Sallah’s author was the humorist Ephraim Kishon, recruited by the troupe because of his funny weekly column in an Israeli paper. He and Topol developed the comic character in an ongoing series of skits in which the newcomer from an unspecified Arab country, a ne’er-do-well father of too many children, bumbled his way to moral victory over pesky big shots, bosses, and bureaucrats. When the Nahal troupe morphed into a highly successful civilian touring company, Spring Onion, Sallah’s popularity grew even greater. The jokes typically turned on the clash between the patriarch’s benighted old ways and the sometimes dubious demands of modern Israel. (The sketches thereby reinforced stereotypes about the “backwardness” of Israel’s non-European Jews even as they poked fun at Ashkenazi power.) Sallah Shabati opened early in 1964, and while Israeli critics panned it, audiences broke Israel’s box office records; the film remained the leading feature in cinemas around the country for some six months. People came, in Topol’s view, “as if greeting an old friend.” It was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1965 and it won the Golden Globe in the same category. Topol was bestowed with the Golden Globe for “Star of Tomorrow.” Sallah rose to classic status in Israeli cinema, a passenger entertainment option on El Al flights from New York to Tel Aviv well into the twenty-first century.

  But despite some surface similarities between the two patriarchs dragged into modernity by their daughters’ marriages, Topol did not recognize a kindred spirit in Zero Mostel’s Tevye. Indeed, when he checked out Fiddler for Godik, he “fled from the theater with my hands to my ears.” He had seen one of the performances in which, he claimed, Mostel infamously ad-libbed borscht belt jokes—“You’re yawning, Mrs. Finkelstein, what’s the matter? Your husband keep you awake last night, or am I putting you to sleep?” Topol was “absolutely convinced” that Fiddler “would be loathed in Israel for precisely the reasons that it was loved in New York”: sentimental memories of the old galut as imagined from the comfort of the new.

  But Topol saw it again one evening, this time with Mostel offering a “clean” performance. Now when Mostel came onstage, “one felt the whole of the Russian Jewish experience, its light and shade compressed in his person. He was not an actor. He was a reincarnation.” The awed Israeli recognized a beautiful, emotional truth in the show when it wasn’t shrouded in shtick. Of course Fiddler could work in Tel Aviv, Topol could now see. It could work anywhere. Godik made a trip to New York and saw for himself. By mid-November—some six weeks after the Broadway opening—the deal was done. Fiddler would make its foreign debut in Israel under Godik’s command. Out in Los Angeles, Berdichevsky would have to wait: Almagor now had a new translation commission.

  * * *

  Sholem-Aleichem entered the theatrical repertoire in Eretz Yisrael—the Land of Israel, the biblical name commonly used for the prestate Jewish settlement in Palestine—as one of the most popular playwrights for amateur and budding professional groups alike, playing in translation as early as 1909. His comic plays became a staple at the most illustrious early theater, Habima, which was established in mandate Palestine in 1928, having migrated from Moscow, where the troupe had developed under Stanislavsky’s wing, beginning in 1917. From the start, Habima intended to manifest a break with shtetl culture, and performing in Hebrew was one strong sign of that doctrine. Its legendary production of Ansky’s The Dybbuk, premiering in 1922, was another, featuring scenery and costumes by the avant-garde Soviet artist Natan Altman, whose sketches, by his own account, depicted people who were “tragically distorted and twisted, like trees that grow on dry and barren soil.” The company’s acting, at first based on Stanislavsky’s realism, caught up with Altman’s designs: the director, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, gave the performers jerky, stylized movements and frozen poses; in the scenes with beggars, actors wore cubistic masks inspired by animals. Overall, the production achieved a new sort of mythic beauty, but one stemming from the grotesque, glaring otherworldliness of its personae. If Habima did not, after all, entirely relinquish the shtetl as subject and setting, it emphasized its difference from the old c
ulture with its avant-garde distance.

  Between 1928 and 1938, Habima presented six Sholem-Aleichem plays amid a repertoire that also included modern European dramas; in the same period, two went up at the Ohel Theater (founded in 1925, initially as a workers’ theater under the auspices of the Histadrut, the national union). According to the Israeli theater scholar Freddie Rokem, these “mostly melodramatic adaptations from his stories depicting the life of the Jews in the Diaspora … were often given a Zionistic interpretation … emphasizing the squalor and small-mindedness of the Galut-Jew.” Or, as a newspaper reviewer covering Habima’s production of The Treasure jeered, the director “drew Kasrilevke not with ink but with poison. A German presenting the same would have been deemed an antisemite. And in Tel Aviv people loved it: Why wouldn’t these nobodies say adieu to their ridiculous town and move to the land in the Galilee or the valley?”

  To the extent that Sholem-Aleichem was regarded more warmly in Hebrew, it was as a writer for children. Early translations were simplified to aid youngsters in mastering Hebrew, the literary scholar Dan Miron points out. A 1910 translation of “Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son,” for instance, was “diluted, abridged, fragmentary, and, in essence, disrespectful,” Miron fumes, adding that it represented a “dumbing down” of the Yiddish master.

  That is exactly how Almagor encountered him. Growing up in the 1940s in Ramat Gan, an early agricultural colony that grew into a small city east of Tel Aviv (and that was infamous for the Hebrew-language extremists who blew up a local Yiddish press in 1943), Almagor remembers learning “some of the sweet stories” by Sholem-Aleichem at school, but none of his serious work: “Sholem-Aleichem for us was funny stories for little boys.” On the other side of the city, at his school in the Florentine neighborhood of Tel Aviv (named after a Greek Zionist who had purchased the real estate in the 1920s), Topol, too, learned the humorous tales as a child. Clowning around at school, Topol would recite Sholem-Aleichem stories in class; already a captivating performer at age seven, he was never punished for diverting students’ attention but was called on to entertain other children with his Sholem-Aleichem material when teachers were absent. He especially loved enacting a story called “Topele Tuturitu” and, given the coincidence of his family name, quickly became known in the schoolyard as “Topele.”

  Around the time Topol was amusing his classmates, Tevye entered the Hebrew theater. Habima premiered Y. D. Berkowitz’s translation in 1943, some fourteen years before Tevye spoke English on the American stage. In contrast to the easygoing portrait of a man overcoming some unexpected twists and turns that Arnold Perl would present, Berkowitz offered a hero besieged from all sides. Following the plot lines of his father-in-law’s original dramatization and focusing almost entirely on the Khave story, Berkowitz exaggerated the treachery of Tevye’s non-Jewish neighbors. As he had done in the Yiddish version with Maurice Schwartz in 1919, he made the local priest a major character: a violent and ruthless antisemite who tries to pressure Tevye into renouncing his faith. By play’s end, when Tevye is expelled along with Tsaytl and her children (Golde and Motl have died), Khave returns, repentant, and joins her father and sister in their eviction. Here it’s the hostility of galut more than the backwardness of Jews that drives home the Zionist point.

  Habima revived Tevye (Tuvia ha-kholev, in Hebrew) in 1959. By then, Berkowitz’s language sounded archaic and the show, as far as Almagor and Topol’s generation was concerned, served as just one more example of how moribund the state’s classical theater had become. At that point, even the younger, alternative institution, Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater, was fifteen years old, delivering a more realistic and robust style of acting in a more colloquial language—one spoken without accents. Increasingly, Habima, as Almagor put it, seemed like “the theater for the grandparents.”

  Then Giora Godik swept into the theater world, producing commercial theater in the American mode. With no state subsidy, the self-fashioned impresario, whose father had been a star in the Polish theater, copied the American style as precisely as he could. For My Fair Lady, he brought to Israel the original director, set designer, and choreographer to re-create the show exactly as it had been done in the United States—identical in every way, except for the Hebrew. It so happened that the Habima troupe was playing at an overseas festival in the winter of 1964, so Godik leased their theater for his February opening. Though the rental was largely a practical matter, the symbolism was not lost on the public. “A sacrilege!” theater people joked, to see a flashy commercial musical colonizing the venerable stage. My Fair Lady’s premiere was a gala affair, with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and other government officials in attendance; Godik threw an opulent opening-night party and guests drank and danced as they awaited the reviews. Even without the ecstatic press, audiences probably would have swarmed the box office. The scale and skill of the production roused pride in a nation coming of age: it could present the quintessential American entertainment every bit as well as Broadway.

  With Habima returning after two months and ticket sales strong enough to keep the show going far longer, Godik searched for a space in which to extend My Fair Lady’s run. He found it in Jaffa, the Palestinian town on the Mediterranean coast at the southern end of Tel Aviv that had been left mostly deserted and derelict since the 1947–48 war had driven out most of its residents. Godik was not shy about risks. Besides, a small cabaret that had moved into an old hammam had already proven that audiences would make the geographically short but socially distant trip. Godik took over the Alhambra, a stately Bauhaus building that had been a posh movie palace and performance venue in its heyday in the 1920s to 1940s. Damaged during a devastating three-day mortar bombardment of Jaffa in 1947, the Alhambra stood empty and hobbled now, a startled symbol of Jaffa’s decimated glory as a capital of Arab culture. Godik quickly renovated the place, tearing out the back wall, refurbishing the auditorium, and adding his lit-up initials to the signage out front—all in time for My Fair Lady to move in that April. After packing the house at the Habima for more than five hundred performances, the show sold out at the Alhambra night after night for months.

  Godik’s formula fit well with Jerry Robbins’s need for fastidious foreign productions that would live up to his standards: the Israeli producer wanted Fiddler’s original creative team to come over and reproduce the New York production in every painstaking detail. Robbins sent his directing and dancing assistants, Dick Altman and Tommy Abbott, who kept him apprised in blow-by-blow letters of their progress. The stage manager, Ruth Mitchell, went for a few weeks, as did Boris Aronson and the original builder of the turntable, Fred Feller; later, Stein arrived for the last rehearsals and the opening. (Robbins had been expected to fly in for a final polish—and the taskmaster’s imminent arrival was a repeated threat whenever actors slacked off at rehearsals—but in the end he simply sent some encouraging telegrams.)

  As soon as the six-week rehearsal period got under way on April 22, Altman and Abbott’s enthusiasm collapsed—in part, because they arrived with a false set of expectations about the connection between Israelis and the world of Sholem-Aleichem. Altman naively expected a “cast full of rabbis” and was annoyed and even a little offended by how “forgetful of Jewish ritual” the performers were; he not only had to keep reminding characters passing in and out of Tevye’s house to kiss the mezuzah but repeatedly had to insist that they carry out the gesture in the religiously correct way. The Americans’ lack of background in Sholem-Aleichem’s writing also led them to misjudge Almagor’s translation. They didn’t understand that when he rendered “If I Were a Rich Man” as “If I Were Rothschild,” he was not merely making the line scan in Hebrew; he was using the title of a Sholem-Aleichem story (not one involving Tevye) in which a Kasrilevkite, so poor he can’t give his wife any money for preparing a Sabbath meal, daydreams about how philanthropic he could be if he commanded the means of the famous financier.

  More important, because audiences laughed in unfamiliar places, the New Y
ork team thought Almagor had added extraneous jokes in translation; in fact, he had taken advantage of the audience’s grounding in Scripture—a mandatory subject in Israel’s Jewish public schools—to restore some of the specific humor of Tevye’s quotations, by all accounts the most difficult aspect of Sholem-Aleichem’s layered Yiddish to convey in another language. In English, Arnold Perl had sidestepped the issue by opting for generic proverbs; Stein made more of an effort, at least referring to what “the Good Book says.” For his first effort in Israel, Berkowitz admitted to changing Tevye’s puns and distortions, claiming to have had his father-in-law’s blessing in doing so, since Hebrew itself offered no one-to-one correspondences for Tevye’s intricate intertextual humor. Almagor believed that the point was to make people laugh, not to send them “to look in the Aramaic dictionary,” so he tried for analogues drawn from commonly known sources. For instance, Almagor’s Tevye changes the standard blessing over bread, “hamotzi lekhem min ha’aretz,” into an insult, by saying “hamotzi lekhem am ha’aretz”: the shift from “min” to “am” transforms “from the earth” (whence bread is brought forth) into a colloquial term for an idiot. Though Almagor’s renditions did not pass muster with the Yiddishists, they did succeed with audiences. Stein couldn’t understand why the rhythm of the scenes seemed off and told Godik to get someone to cut the interpolated jokes. He remembered Israel as the “only country where they played around with the script.”