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

by Alisa Solomon

  Over the next couple of months, in his annual summer school drama program, Piro directed Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, grooming a new set of incoming chorus kids and refining the actors who had just finished seventh grade and would be playing lead roles in Fiddler as well as in a scheduled production of The Crucible. While Piro instructed the kids in theater basics—most of all, he never tired of telling them, actors must truly love the characters they play—the dispute between the UFT and the community governing board of Ocean Hill–Brownsville simmered down and returned to full boil several times as various arbitration efforts showed promise and then failed. In general, the country was barely keeping the lid on discord and division that summer, which had seen the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, angry demonstrations at the Oakland murder trial of Black Panther Huey P. Newton in July, and 23,000 police and National Guardsmen violently attacking antiwar demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago. When Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff condemned the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” during his nominating speech for George McGovern, Mayor Richard Daley erupted in anger: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch!”

  Beverly Cannon and Teddy Smith: “Do You Love Me?”

  But it was a new scourge of “black antisemitism,” the UFT’s Shanker insisted, that fueled the fracas in Brooklyn. Only a year earlier, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had issued a report concluding that African Americans were far less likely than white Gentiles to harbor negative attitudes toward Jews. That didn’t stop Shanker from framing the dispute as, at its core, a Black-Jewish battle. And he did everything he could to make others see it that way. The notion seeped deeply enough into the discourse that Variety joked in September that, taking a cue from the all-Black Hello, Dolly! Hal Prince was “mulling an all-Negro company of Fiddler on the Roof.” The producer was not amused.

  A few days before the start of the new school year, Rhody McCoy announced that he had hired 350 new teachers (many of them white and Jewish, recruited from progressive college organizations around the country) to replace the UFT members who had walked out the previous May. And on the first day of the semester, the UFT called a citywide strike, closing all the schools for two days with the demand that the ousted teachers be welcomed back to their duties. When they did go back, once again they had to push through protesting crowds, and when they made it inside they found that they were not assigned to classes. Out went the UFT again, this time for more than two weeks. After another brief return, the union called its third citywide strike in mid-October; it lasted until the third week of November.

  Over those autumn months, newly recruited teachers crossed picket lines to hold classes, accosted by striking UFT members, who were themselves confronted by local supporters of community control. It got nasty. Working teachers told reporters that picketers not only yelled “Scab!” at them but also called them “Commie fascists,” “Black Nazi lovers,” and “nigger lovers”; strikers, in turn, said they were branded “racist pigs.”

  Shanker raised the panic level, wielding a leaflet filled with Jew-hating invective. It was a composite of two flyers: one, he alleged, had been placed in teachers’ mailboxes in two Ocean Hill schools, demanding “absolute” Black control of community schools; the other had been “phoned in to a UFT representative” and decried the “bloodsucking exploiters” and “Middle East murderers of colored people” dominating the public education system. The community governing board swiftly disavowed and denounced the material. The flyer bore the crude letterhead of an organization that did not exist and a phone number that did not operate. Later investigations concluded that the leaflets, in the temperate terms of the ADL, were not the product of any organized effort; in the blunter words of the New York Civil Liberties Union, they were the means by which the UFT had “perpetrated multiple fraud.” In the hot moment, they changed the public terms of the debate. Shanker ran off hundreds of thousands of copies and handed them out widely as “proof” that the movement for community control was driven by hatemongers. Media conversation about the school standoffs shifted from issues of teacher accountability and quality education to the specter of black antisemitism. Mayor Lindsay, a champion of community control, was shocked to find himself jeered at and shouted into silence when he went to speak at a Brooklyn Jewish center in October.

  The Black and Puerto Rican adolescents who would be learning almost incidentally about Jewish history and ritual practice as they sang “Sabbath Prayer,” put up a chuppah for Fiddler’s wedding scene, and contemplated why Tevye and his family were being evicted, for the most part stayed out of the fray. Those with parents involved in community activism may have talked over the issues at home, but unlike kids in the demonstration district whose schools remained open during the strikes, the Eiseman students didn’t walk the gantlet of sniping factions to attend classes. Piro’s students, in fact, got out of the neighborhood. When Piro had voted with his union to strike, he was thinking about the due process question, not plotting to win extra time with his drama kids. But when the teachers stayed out most of the fall, he was delighted to be able to work on what he deemed “a professional theater schedule”: he held daily rehearsals at his Manhattan home.

  The principals in the cast—except for Maritza, whose mother would not allow her to go—rode the LL train in to Sixth Avenue and walked the couple of blocks over to Piro’s studio apartment at Seventh Avenue and Sixteenth Street. The subway took less than an hour, but for many of the students the seven-mile journey was as momentous as a trip to the moon. Some seldom went to Manhattan, and none had hung out in a white teacher’s apartment. The tiny place, stuffed with fabrics and trims Piro had scrounged for costume making and with a rented sewing machine stashed in a corner, made him wonder, drolly, whether “it looked like a drag queen lived there.” The dozen kids who crowded into the narrow room didn’t make anything of it. And as blustery as they were about their own bombastic hormones, they expressed no curiosity about Piro’s private life. He was a teacher, after all. The students couldn’t imagine he had one (though a few of the girls admitted to having crushes on him). They arrived midmorning and arrayed themselves on the two daybeds that served as sofas, playfully whacking one another with the covered pillows they shoved aside to make room.

  Piro began with discussions about the scenes they’d be rehearsing later. He drilled them on standard actor stuff, which made the kids feel very serious about their labor: Did they grasp each scene’s situation? What their characters wanted? Could they understand it better by relating it to something in their own lives? Sheila found quick identification with Chava. Her own strict parents did not permit her to date boys—and her five brothers kept a close eye on her. Chava’s desire for forbidden Fyedka made good emotional sense to her. When they worked on the edict scene, Olga thought about kids she knew who faced evictions from their homes. Though her own family was solid, many of her classmates lived in precarious households and recognized the feeling of “leaving because you’re thrown out, leaving because you’re not wanted.” Teddy, quietly coping with a fraught homelife in a shabby apartment that stank of urine, where he had to look after young siblings whenever his mother unexpectedly and unaccountably stayed out—liked to put it simply: “Tevye—he’s a poor milkman who lives in a ghetto just like we do.” But these weren’t political claims or arguments for their right to do the play. The students didn’t perceive any irony or incongruity in their efforts—it was cynical grown-ups who imposed that interpretation—and the Black-Jewish conflict raged mostly beyond their radar. They were drawing actors’ parallels. As Olga understood, it was “all about getting into character.”

  The afternoon work turned technical. To depict the attraction between Chava and Fyedka, Sheila and Reggie had to stand closer together while trying not to. The girls had to sing “Matchmaker” from their bellies and “feel the joy.” Olga had to make Yente’s speech more spontaneous—less of a prepared shtick—but still get the lines absolutely right. An
d Teddy, that tough bundle of talent, like all other Tevyes, had to be restrained from hamming. Even at fourteen, he could read an audience’s pulse and play for extra laughs or attention. In Piro’s apartment, the other kids were his audience and he sometimes displayed his dominion by drawing back lazily or provoking a power struggle. “I’m not going to do it like that,” he brashly told Piro from time to time, more for the drama of the altercation than for the sake of any principled interpretive disagreement. The other kids waited out the storm. It wouldn’t take long before Piro yelled. All of the kids had been on the receiving end of his outbursts, though none as often as Teddy, and all of the students understood them as expressions of Piro’s passion and perfectionism. The flare-ups never contained any malice or insult. When Piro raised his voice to say “I told you twice to do it like this!” or “What could you have been thinking?” the students were motivated by how much he cared that they get it right. Sometimes he just stared at them silently, right in the eye, and they knew they had failed to live up to his expectation.

  For extra coaching and to work on the songs, the company bounced a few doors up Sixteenth Street to the apartment of Piro’s friend, the actor Joe Sicari, whose minuscule ground-floor one-bedroom had an upright piano. Sicari was a stickler for expressing character through singing, he repeatedly explained to the kids as they worked through the show’s score. It took session after session for Teddy and Bev to find the right dynamic in “Do You Love Me?” For all the maturity of her thirteen years, Bev could not understand why Golde would not admit she loved Tevye unless she really didn’t. Or maybe it was just that Bev didn’t want to encourage Teddy’s blossoming infatuation. Either way, Sicari had to work hard to remove a few layers of Golde’s irritation.

  Between the morning conversations and the afternoon scene work, Piro served lunch. Serious lunch. Piro was a good cook, and a proud one, and he prepared meals for the Fiddler group as if he were planning a sophisticated dinner party. He fussed over chicken al forno and fancy pasta salads; he assembled English muffin pizzas. Sicari sometimes pitched in by baking apple pies. The kids helped clean up.

  Piro took the students to see Fiddler on Broadway—balcony seats were still cheap in those days. He and Birnel shepherded the group to the Majestic Theater (the 1,600-seat house into which the show had moved in February 1967) for a matinee. Harry Goz—the fourth Broadway Tevye—led the cast. A more measured performer than Mostel or even Herschel Bernardi, whom he replaced, Goz let emotion build gradually over the course of the show, and he was the best singer of the bunch. Rae Allen played a wry, pleasant Golde. Piro enjoined the kids both to get involved in the show and to keep an analytical eye on the choices the actors made. He invited them to see themselves commanding the same power that could have an audience “living and breathing your words.” Most of the children were riveted. Teddy and a couple of the other boys, though, hung out in the men’s room smoking past the intermission break; Piro nearly dragged them back to the theater.

  Through the trips to Manhattan, the focused labor, the lunches, the goofing around, the dribbled-out sharing of details about home, and the joint struggle to create something, the children bonded—like all other kids in all other school musicals everywhere for all eternity. But seldom are the attachments as tight and indelible as they became for Piro’s Fiddler, or as meshed with the play’s themes. These kids, as they wistfully described it, grew into a family. In trying times, they established their own secure communal circle—the image so central to Jerry Robbins’s conception of the show—and soon, like Anatevka itself, it would be assailed by nefarious outside forces.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, the UFT settled with the Board of Education—the ousted teachers would return to their Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools (the plummeting number who still wanted to, that is) and the experimental governing board would be temporarily suspended—and the schools reopened. In the meantime, Richard M. Nixon had been elected president. (Shifting alliances in New York City notwithstanding, national electoral politics were still an arena in which Jews remained closer to Blacks than to whites: Nixon garnered 17 percent of Jewish votes and less than 5 percent of African American—he won 43 percent overall.) But the animosity incited on the picket lines and in the press hardly abated. Jewish hackles stayed raised; Black resentment redoubled. The Eiseman teachers who had objected to Fiddler when it was first announced stepped up their campaign to close it down. They called themselves the Maccabees, emboldened, perhaps by the recent emergence of the Jewish Defense League, the far-right organization pledging to protect New York’s Jews from the genocidal peril it saw everywhere; the JDL took some rhetorical cues from the Black Panthers (“Every Jew, a .22” became its notorious slogan) and had sprung into being just in time to rally behind the UFT. Though small in number, its members managed to splash plenty of gasoline on the controversy long past the end of the strike.

  The Maccabees returned to Eiseman fired by new grievances against the musical. In addition to taking exception to the “defilement” of sacred garb—boys in the cast putting on yarmulkes and prayer shawls—they decried the way the show depicted Jews as weak and docile. Brownsville, they maintained, needed to know that Jews could not be pushed around. One fellow teacher told Piro that if he didn’t cancel the show he’d find his personal secrets blazoned in the newspaper—an only slightly indirect threat to “out” him. Another teacher threatened to kill him.

  Piro could think of only one answer: the show itself. He offered to present the opening number and first scenes at the school’s upcoming Friday assembly. The opposition would see how honorable the students and his intentions were, he was certain. The kids had been taking great leaps in their roles now that they could move around on the school’s stage, whose thirty-five-foot-wide proscenium opening and twenty-five-foot depth made it seem like it could contain Piro’s and Sicari’s apartments several times over. Maritza and the other children who hadn’t trekked to Manhattan had been slotted into their parts and were working hard to catch up. Maritza had to stop waving her arms and hyperventilating through her lines like the divas in the telenovelas her mother watched. Piro urged her to feel what Hodel was going through and to forget that she was acting. Piro leveled with the cast, telling them bluntly that the show’s future depended on how well they would perform at the assembly.

  Two days before their presentation, Rubin called Piro into a meeting. After the turmoil of the fall, the principal had become warier than ever. More than about how the parents would react to Jewish material, he worried about the trust that had been broken between the community and the teachers: the UFT had denied the children almost a whole semester of school. It was necessary to tread lightly, Rubin warned. He was canceling Fiddler and wouldn’t even consider reinstating it without a written letter of support from the Brownsville Community Council, the elected neighborhood body that had started under the Johnson administration’s Model Cities program.

  On the day of the assembly, the children gathered quietly backstage. The boys put on the black overcoats Piro had rescued from discard bins and they donned the yarmulkes Stephan and a Jewish boy on crew had scrounged up. The girls draped shawls over their shoulders and head scarves over their hair. There was no teasing or fooling around, not even as the adolescents changed clothes in full view of one another. When showtime came, Piro pressed the play button on the reel-to-reel tape of the “Music Minus One” karaoke-style LP Birnel had recorded, and Teddy walked onto the stage, paste-on beard cascading down his chin, to begin Tevye’s monologue. When the chorus came on—two halves from opposite wings—bopping in a line and singing “Tradition,” they radiated excitement and joy. True, Teddy didn’t sustain good, direct contact with the audience and Olga’s Yente went a bit overboard, but in general Piro knew they had nailed it. The audience of their eighth-grade peers hooted and clapped in appreciation. The Maccabees, however, had stayed in the faculty lounge drinking coffee. The cast returned backstage high on how well everything had clicked and by how much fun t
hey’d had making it happen. Bev, for one, was in a state of amazement. For the first time, she had fully entered the play’s world, suddenly feeling like “it wasn’t make-believe anymore. It was real.”

  Piro showered the kids with the praise they deserved, and then dropped the bomb of Rubin’s ultimatum: “This show has been canceled.” Some actors burst into tears; some shrugged with studied nonchalance; Duane cursed “those fucking Jews.” None understood why anyone could object to the project they were so earnestly pouring their hearts into. Sheila plunged into sadness over the prospect that she would no longer get to play Chava: “The girl giving me freedom was being taken away.” Piro announced that they would pick up The Crucible again. Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunts was now acquiring its own unwelcome relevance, he thought.

  That night, Olga’s mother, Lillian Carter, called Piro at his apartment. His show’s Yente had arrived home heartbroken and Carter needed to know why. The teacher’s detailed explanation of events hardly satisfied her. Why, she wondered, could the principal accept this project for the two months her child was traveling into Manhattan and then suddenly withdraw his approval? And why had it been all right for Al Jolson to “black up” for minstrelsy or for whites to assume the voices of Amos ’n’ Andy on the radio, and for it not to be all right for Black and Puerto Rican children to play Jews, sincerely, in a play? A member of the school board for Eiseman’s district, she pledged her support. And she gave Piro the phone number of a mover and shaker on the Brownsville Community Council.