But cultural misreadings hardly compared with the frustrations Altman and his colleagues faced in the basic mechanics of getting the show up. Rehearsals were cut short on Friday afternoons as the country shut down for the Sabbath; actors expected days off for religious holidays that none of them actually observed; they balked at the very idea of eight-hour workdays; many of the men refused to grow beards until threatened with being fired. The backstage crew was worse. “It’s been constant arguments,” Altman wrote to Robbins. “Even the new prop men are slow as molasses, and several items are still missing. (Item: They still haven’t given us enough bagels for the Bagel Man—they can’t find bagels in Israel?)” A week later, Altman’s patience was running out. “The inefficiency here is stupendous and it seems to take people here days what would be done in 10 minutes in the States,” he reported. “More than a few times Tommy and Boris and I have been ready to pack up and leave.”
The actors, at least, began to give him reason to feel heartened. “They all are responding to our directions beautifully,” Abbott told Robbins, “with the exception of the usual one or two nuts who have their own little world, all to themselves.” Thankfully, the man selected to play Tevye—Bomba Zur—was not one of those nuts, but word quickly made it all the way to New York that he was irredeemably miscast. Altman shrugged off the dire warnings as so much fractious squabbling, which, he was learning, was a popular national pastime. As he told Robbins, “Everyone—but everyone—here has a different (and very positive) opinion about who should be Tevye.”
Godik’s poster: Bomba Zur in Fiddler at the Alhambra.
Zur, thirty-six, was a pudgy comedian with a round, innocent face known for his clowning, and he had been well received as Mr. Doolittle in My Fair Lady. But apart from some girth and some zaniness, he shared little in common with Zero Mostel: he had scarce experience not playing for laughs and even less confidence. When he auditioned for Tevye, “he read the more serious scenes very well—with a great warmth and simplicity that seemed to surprise Godik’s people,” Altman noted. “He’s scared to death—which is fine with me. He’s a sweet man, & I expect him to be quite good.” As rehearsals wore on, Zur’s panic got the better of him. He’d make strides when working alone with Altman and the pianist but fall apart, losing focus and energy, among the rest of the company. In an early run-through, “‘Rich Man’ and the monologues were especial bores,” Altman complained. When Stein arrived, he wrote to reassure Robbins that Zur “has the equipment to make a good Tevye.… He’s a little frightened of the part, very insecure, and Dick is bringing him along slowly, and I think quite successfully.” By previews—except for one for which Altman chided him for being “shockingly lazy”—Zur was “getting there.” And, Altman hastened to add, “the audiences absolutely love him.”
By all accounts he projected a sweetness and likability onstage. In his own view, Zur succeeded because he made the role Israeli. “My Tevye doesn’t groan, weep, wail, and sigh like a miserable Jew in the Diaspora,” he proclaimed. “I dropped all the ‘oy vey ist mir’s from Joseph Stein’s script.” The script doesn’t actually contain any, but this was a good wisecrack, signaling the actor’s proper sabra scorn for the galut. With a similar sneer, reporters greeted the American librettist. Stein was startled by how hostile the press interviews seemed, as if the journalists were angry at him. “What makes you think we would be interested in shtetl Jews?” he remembered them demanding. “We’re not interested in that culture anymore.” Stein shrugged in his good-natured way and answered, “Wait till you see the show.”
When Israelis did see the show, they were ecstatic—the public, anyway. The critics and intellectuals, on the other hand, sounded like the Yiddish guardians who had railed against shund in America half a century earlier, writing as if trying to outdo one another with the barbed cleverness of their takedowns: they dismissed the show as “cheap, empty, and hollow”; “saccharine water with rose petals made of cellophane”; “Yiddishkayt drowning in shmaltz”; “not even fresh shmaltz, [but] putrid shmaltz.”
As for Zur, those who knew the original stories recognized what he was doing and despised it, even if they hadn’t read the interview in which Zur defined Tevye as “a warmhearted human being who loves his daughters and his home more than his religion.” Little surprise that the newspaper of the National Religious Party would resent this portrayal by a sabra who “never knew what an exilic Jew is and can’t play one.… There is nothing Jewish about this Tevye. He talks to the Almighty as if he were an army major.” But more mainstream papers also protested that “he was the least Jewish of all the Jews onstage, with nothing of Tevye in him,” that he was “more goy than Sholem-Aleichem-like,” and that he was “miscast as Tevye, a character he does not understand.” And yet they conceded that “he does his part with grace and charm” and that “Bomba cannot be on the stage and not entertain.”
For their part, audiences could not have cared less about Zur’s failure to be religiously correct or, more generally, about Fiddler’s alleged lack of authenticity. The show was doing cultural work that didn’t require such fealty. On the contrary, it likely succeeded because of its distance from the burden of historical accuracy.
Beyond the spectacular dancing, great songs, touching story—the obvious reasons audiences responded to the show—something more profound and complicated was at play that unexpectedly let the show get under the cactuslike skin of anti-galuti sabras. Fiddler arrived at a time when Almagor and Topol’s generation was being shaken loose from its smug repudiation of the European past. “Negation of the Diaspora”—the central Zionist principle that Jewish emancipation requires national ingathering—had hardly gone away as a patriotic precept, but the scorn for those who had perished in the Holocaust, and for the dynamic culture they’d created, was lifting. The catalyst had been another highly theatrical event some four years earlier: the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann.
A watershed episode in Israeli history, the four-month trial unfolded in the spring and summer of 1961, heavily covered in the newspapers and often broadcast live on the radio. In his eight-hour opening address, Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner, vowed to pronounce the indictment in the name of the “six million accusers” who “cannot rise to their feet to point an accusing finger toward the glass booth and cry out at the man sitting there, ‘I accuse.’ For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, washed by the rivers of Poland, and their graves are scattered the length and breadth of Europe.” He eulogized the history of European Jewry—“the heart of the nation, the source of its vitality”—ticking off the instrumental Zionist thinkers and cultural heroes who had arisen from there. Marc Chagall and Sholem-Aleichem were among those prominently mentioned.
Hausner had fashioned himself—in the Israeli historian Tom Segev’s phrase—as the “impresario of a national-historic production.” In calling witnesses, Hausner gave stage to more than a hundred survivors who, having been silenced for nearly two decades, testified in detail about the horrors they experienced. Hausner was playing especially to the young generation, aiming to turn their repugnance for the past into respect and understanding. In Segev’s view, he largely succeeded. The trial, Segev writes, “marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the way Israelis related to the Holocaust. The terrifying stories that broke forth from the depths of silence brought about a process of identification with the suffering of the victims and survivors.” Almagor, for one, remembers the shame and regret his father repeatedly expressed during the trial over the way his generation had educated their children. Many of those children—then in their late twenties—became motivated to fill in the gaps.
A splashy Broadway musical, of all things, was one medium through which they could do so, in not too taxing emotional terms. Artificial and cheery by virtue of its genre, Fiddler brought audiences close to the Old World without collapsing the distance that national self-definition still required. As one local critic covering the show wr
yly remarked, “The Diaspora is returning to us [after] it was condemned to oblivion, via Broadway.”
Which may have been the most expedient way it could have returned. The nine Tony Awards bestowed on the Broadway production even as the Israeli version was opening proved how much America adored Tevye. The most ardent cultural self-loather had to wonder, then: how contemptible could Yiddishkayt be?
Even the denunciations of Fiddler in the Hebrew press served as a means of elevating Yiddish culture. Those reprimanding the show for its shmaltzification of Sholem-Aleichem were asserting, in essence, that Yiddish literature was better than the commercial entertainment American showbiz had made of it. Whether extolling or reviling the musical, the Israeli critics couldn’t help proclaiming the preciousness of Yiddish heritage.
Fiddler played in Israel for some fifteen months; Hal Prince’s office bragged that more than one-quarter of Israel’s population of about 2.5 million people saw it. (And if El Al’s special promotion worked, scores of American tourists saw it, too, booking tickets for the “5,760-mile Off-Broadway production” at the airline office in New York. After all, the campaign pointed out, “It may be forever before you can get tickets for Broadway’s ‘Fiddler.’”)
About six months into the run, Godik replaced Zur—whether because Zur demanded an outsize raise or because Godik could finally get the actor he originally wanted remains a matter of conjecture and dispute. In any event, Godik worked a deal with Habima to pry Shmuel Rodensky away from his repertory contract for two months. Rodensky, born in the Russian Empire in 1904, was a sensitive bear of an actor (who had played the spiteful priest in Habima’s 1959 production of Tuvia ha-kholev) and he gave the critics a Tevye they could love (while still getting their digs in at the show): “He filled that character with human warmth that is otherwise lacking in that sterile musical. He replaced some of the melodramatic foam with tragic power.” The show sold out for almost another year (with Rodensky suspended by Habima for failing to return after his contracted leave) and it took brief tours to Haifa and Jerusalem. Then, in a grand gesture, Godik took advantage of Rodensky’s background and produced Fiddler in Yiddish. Though the Yiddish production closed within a couple of weeks, it was declared an event of national importance. “It shows how rooted and mature Hebrew is that it can dispense its energy on a production in another language and, even more so, Yiddish, our national language of the past,” wrote a critic for the daily Ma’ariv. “When the cast—most sabras, and even some Yemenite—does so well in Yiddish, we feel a coming together of people and generations and we are proud that could have taken place in our generation.” It was a pride that could not have been felt or named only a few years earlier.
Godik floated the possibility of a European and South American tour of the Hebrew company (playing in some cities in Yiddish), and Hal Prince approved as long as it didn’t touch down in cities where an English-language production was planned—and especially not in or near London, “because I think it would give the show a particularly Jewish reputation.” The tour never materialized, likely because Godik was already beginning to suffer cash flow trouble that would eventually land him in so much debt that he’d flee Israel. His attempt to mount the French production in Paris also fell through because he couldn’t secure a theater before his license to the rights ran out.
But through his casting of Rodensky, Godik had enormous international impact on the future fate of Fiddler, if only indirectly. And not only because Rodensky eventually played the part in Germany (pulled past his reluctance by the Israeli ambassador in Bonn, who warned him that if he didn’t do it a German actor would embody the Jewish patriarch, no doubt as an antisemitic stereotype). More significantly, because Rodensky couldn’t keep up with Israel’s brutal schedule of nine or ten shows per week, he handed over the matinees and some other performances to his understudy, Chaim Topol. The younger actor scrutinized the master—“the greatest Tevye ever,” in his estimation—watching him from the wings night after night and learning from him the importance of striking the right balance between comedy and gravitas, of not overplaying the humor in the first act so as to avoid undermining the drama of the second. Topol admired how Rodensky “tore my heart” every show and he determined he would “go Rodensky’s way” in his approach to the role, too. Rodensky led the cast in the Hebrew-language film of Tevye and His Seven Daughters by Menachem Golan (who had produced Sallah)—a version based directly on the Sholem-Aleichem play (complete with Shprintze’s suicide and Khave’s return to the family) in Berkowitz’s high Hebrew and with the Zionist tinge of verdant back-to-the-land farming scenes and the remnant of the family heading for Palestine at the end. It was released in 1968. By then, Topol was on his way to starring as Tevye in a movie, too.
* * *
While Topol was going on for Rodensky several times a week in Israel, the Broadway production, nearly two years into its run, was still selling out nightly, a national company was packing houses across America, and negotiations for the motion picture rights were under way. Foreign productions were in the works for the Netherlands, Finland, Australia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; the British producer Richard Pilbrow was preparing the London production. The conditions were excellent: not only would the show be staged at Her Majesty’s Theater—one of the few decent houses for musicals in London—the space would be available for rehearsals. And the London Fiddler, slated to open in February 1967, would be the only big musical coming to town that winter. “There will be virtually no competition,” Pilbrow told Prince at the end of September. “London is starting to await Fiddler and February is the best possible time!” As soon as the show was announced, orders for charity benefits started “flooding in.” The producers were sure they’d clean up. Everything was in place. Except one thing: Tevye.
At first the British producers hoped to cast the stout and likable Shakespearean Leo McKern—they were “wild” about him, saying there was “no other Englishman about whom we feel any enthusiasm at this time”—so when he turned them down in late August, they turned to Hal Prince for help. Granting that Prince would think they were out of their minds, Pilbrow told him that “the one hope, whether any of us like it or not, of the entire theatre knowledgeable public in the U.K. is that the star of Fiddler on the Roof should be Zero Mostel.” Prince’s office opened the negotiations. “If he should turn us down,” Prince admitted to Bock, Harnick, Robbins, and Stein, “we are in real trouble.” They had “already sounded out Scofield and Redgrave and a list as long as your arm of less likely candidates.”
Mostel demanded 10 percent of the show’s gross and a four-month commitment, including the rehearsal period. London would go no higher than 7.5 percent and no lower than a six-month contract. And now it was late September.
Prince thought that, barring Mostel, the show should feature an Englishman, but the London producers complained they’d run out of options quickly and wanted Prince to provide a well-known American. He didn’t have much time to spare or to consult with the Fiddler team, he told them, “when the authors are off in Boston troubling over a new show [Bock and Harnick’s Apple Tree], when I’m on my way out of town with a new one [Cabaret].”
Back and forth went their increasingly testy—and then mollifying—letters and telegrams as the actors under consideration either said “no thanks” or were vetoed by a producer on one side or the other of the Atlantic (among them, Theodore Bikel, Kirk Douglas, Danny Kaye, David Kossoff, Alfred Marks, Anthony Quayle, Peter Ustinov, even Laurence Olivier). “You must deliver [Herschel] Bernardi or suitable substitute for opening on February 16,” one of Pilbrow’s partners cabled Prince as the weeks raced by. But Prince saw no reason to imperil the thriving Broadway production, where Bernardi had successfully taken over the central role. What’s more, he reminded his British colleagues, since Bernardi was an unknown in London he would not instantly mean box office there. Besides, he sniped, “as the play is being produced in fourteen languages this coming season, obviously there are actors in othe
r countries capable of undertaking Tevye. After all, he’s not an American folk hero, he’s a Russian.”
In the midst of all the to-and-fro, Prince’s secretary sent Pilbrow a query: “Hal would like to know if the Israeli movie Sallah has been in London and if so, have you seen the fellow who plays the father?” And on October 4, Pilbrow wired Prince with an all-caps list of eight men newly in contention. One name was so unfamiliar to the London producers that they got it wrong: “CHYAM POPAL.” Pilbrow elaborated in a follow-up letter: “Somebody totally unknown, if brilliant, with such a gorgeously strange name, could seem like a masterpiece of casting (you will note I can talk myself into almost any point of view)!”
It took more than a week for the producers to get their hands on a copy of Sallah, and meanwhile a colleague in Israel raised doubts about Topol’s command of English. But when the film finally arrived, the producers fell in love and they summoned Topol to audition in late October. They had no clue that the cable reached him while he was playing Tevye several times a week in Jaffa. They simply didn’t know that he had any connection to Godik’s production, nor that he had appeared on national TV in the United States six months earlier on “The Danny Kaye Show” singing Fiddler’s “To Life” with the host in Hebrew. As for Topol, at first he thought the invitation was a joke.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 30
