Topol’s tough Tevye could also be seen in America as a harbinger and a hero of emergent white ethnic pride. The immigration law signed by President Lyndon Johnson toward the end of 1965, abolishing long-standing national quotas that had favored Europeans, was beginning to have an impact, as America’s gates opened to Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. In the wake of these changes and the rise of Black Power, the notion of “Ellis Island whiteness”—as Matthew Frye Jacobson calls it, an ethnic whiteness distinct from WASPdom—was forged and the “ethnic revival” launched. In 1970, Congress had begun to consider a bill calling for an Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, enabling America’s children to learn “about the rich traditions of their forefathers … and the many ways in which these past generations have contributed to American life and culture” as well as increase their “awareness and appreciation of the multiethnic composition of our society.” It became law in 1972. In the meantime, when Fiddler was in post-production, the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak wrote his high-profile polemic, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, decrying WASP supremacy and, in the name of Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, demanding the inclusion and special attention he saw Blacks accorded. “People uncertain of their own identity are not wholly free,” he wrote. They needed their “historical memory, real or imaginary … a set of stories for individuals—and for the people as a whole—to live out.”
The new ethnicity declared itself in particularly masculinist terms: Novak pugnaciously voiced blue-collar resentment; Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League upped the ante on their aggressive theatrics, brandishing baseball bats and lead pipes in a photo for a full-page ad in the New York Times with text proposing that “Jewish boys should not be that nice” lest they “build their own road to Auschwitz.” “Self-defense” activists in Italian communities—Newark, New Jersey’s, city council member Anthony “Tough Tony” Imperiale, for one—wielded serious weapons and turf-war rhetoric, too. In part, they were parroting the macho posing of the Black Panthers. They were also putting themselves forward as the arbiters of ethnic realness, in contrast to their mainstream leaders—wimps, they sniped, who would not stand up and fight for their brethren.
The Tevye of Jewison’s movie strode comfortably on this terrain. He could be read both as the lovable, rustic old papa and as the chest-thumping champion of ethnic survival—and these images did not necessarily contradict each other. The “unmeltables” characterized themselves as climbing up from a past of hardship to become responsible, striving Americans, and Topol portrayed a Tevye who, supported by the cohesion of family and ethnic group, did not falter on that paradigmatic path. Jewison had been drawn to the character’s humanism, the modern Jew-as-metaphor, but now, here was a Fiddler teetering upon a gabled point between assailed liberalism and the coming neoconservatism. The Jewish establishment worried at the time that the postwar “golden age” for Jews had played itself out, according to a cover story in Newsweek that was published in March 1971, some eight months before Fiddler opened in movie houses all over the country. Titled “The American Jew: New Pride, New Problems,” it reported that Jewish communal leaders (in contrast to blustering Meir Kahane, against whom the story pitted them) believed that “an era of unparalleled security and achievement for American Jews may be coming to an end.”
Those anxious Jews must have felt so good watching Topol’s sumptuous, emphatic arrival on the screen, looming so large in close-ups when he considers his daughter’s defiance that viewers are practically in his nostrils. Here was a reassuring rejoinder to the era’s disquietude and the community’s self-doubt: the reminder of how far they’d come. This was not shtetl nostalgia so much as bootstrap nostalgia. The image countermanded, too, the brash new depictions of neurotic Jewish masculinity that became prominent between 1967 and 1973: Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin, Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, George Segal—the fellows who slinked and slobbered onto the screen in movies like The Graduate, Bye Bye Braverman, Goodbye Columbus, Where’s Poppa?, Move, Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, and all the Woody Allen pictures. J. Hoberman aptly calls them the “nice Jewish bad boys.” (Among women in the movies, it was only Barbra Streisand who flaunted her Jewish otherness in this period.) These young men—Tevye’s spoiled grandsons—made no effort to “blend in,” like the generation before them. But their display, unlike Tevye’s out-and-proud self-assertion, was insolent and crude.
* * *
For returning dignity to mass culture’s depiction of the Jewish male, Jewison was praised in a Jerusalem Post article as “one of the few filmmakers left anywhere who still believes a hero can be a good guy, and not necessarily a dope addict, drop-out, sadist, or at best, a loveable lunatic.” He seemed to be the only Hollywood director who respected “those old-fashioned virtues movie-makers have discarded, family, love, religion, and humor.”
Perhaps that’s why some people wanted to bring Fiddler home, where images of Anatevka might proclaim those very values. Before the advent of videocassette and DVD releases—and at a time when consumer culture was growing as a form of identification—Fiddler moved into living rooms through various lines of domestic tchotchkes.
Ceramic figurines of the characters went on sale, suitable for the display case or shaped to the needs of a host serving snacks: Tevye and the Fiddler as salt and pepper shakers, the house with chickens in the yard and violinist on the rooftop formed into a teapot, even Tevye and his cart as a chip-and-dip set. Chadwick Miller, one of the companies that produced Fiddler objets—in a factory in Japan—made music boxes related to any number of popular entertainments. Little porcelain replicas of Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw from Love Story, for example, sit atop a green pedestal, as if at a picnic, and when wound up, the music box beneath them plays the theme from the movie. A six-inch ceramic Tevye produced in 1972, arms up, fingers snapping, twirls to “If I Were a Rich Man” as his tune tinkles. But unlike the tragic lovers, he is more than a souvenir for an admirer of the film. Sold through distributors of Judaica, such collectibles allow the purchaser to participate in an American form of home decorating, but with a Jewish twist. Much like items from Israel, the objects confer and express a sense of group attachment through what the sociologist Herbert Gans calls “symbolic ethnicity” or, when people buy ritual objects for decorative purposes, “symbolic religiosity.”
The Tevye chip and dip set brings Fiddler into the home.
And there are loads of the latter, for sale to this day: Fiddler Hanukkah menorahs (arms aloft as in the “Tradition” number serve as candle holders), spice boxes (used in the Sabbath-ending Havdalah ritual) in the shape of Tevye’s house, complete with fiddler on top; even mezuzah covers with Tevye and Anatevka painted on wood or a fiddler molded from metal. The music boxes or tableware might mark a nonobservant home as ethnically Jewish, and so do the ritual items, but as much by dint of their Fiddler designs as by their religious functions. The ceremonial Fiddler articles are sanctified decor, the figurine Judaized and made functional—for identity-building if not religious practice.
The generation of Jews—and Americans—who would display such items was skewered in a January 1973 spoof of the movie in Mad Magazine—another means by which the Fiddler film seeped into the general culture. The seven-page spread, “Antennae on the Roof,” promised to update the “famous musical about the problems of people who had nothing” with a version “about the problems of people who have everything.” In this patriarch’s house, even the dog kennel has an antenna on its roof. Why? “Because here in the suburbs, a family is measured by one yardstick—POSSESSIONS!” To the family psychiatrist—a dead ringer for Freud himself—the family sings (to the tune of “Matchmaker”), “Headshrinker, headshrinker” about how much they hate their lives. Tevye dreams of being a poor man, singing, “I’d simply sign my name and draw unemployment…” As for the daughters, one runs off with a rock band to romp naked in the woods, the second leaves with a fellow dope-fiend, the third gives up he
r violent commitment to the revolution to elope with her girlfriend.
The panels are packed with cartoonist Mort Drucker’s extraordinarily witty and detailed drawings—the house and a pool, Princess phones, golf clubs, televisions, antique car, yacht. He rendered the Tevye figure as Zero Mostel, whose stamp remained on the role, his eyes rolling in one frame, staring maniacally in another, squinting with delight in a third, and in all the frames, a stringy, desperate comb-over stretched across his pate. Topol appears only at the end: as Tevye’s ancestor, coming to haunt the suburban man and wife in their unsettling dreams with the other Anatevkans—caricatures of the movie’s principals, twisting their mouths into scowls and shaking their bony fingers in accusation. To the rhythm of “Miracle of Miracles,” they deride modern humanity for what they take to be its excesses: industrial pollution, labor activism, Yippies, head-busting hard-hats. “But though God’s made imbeciles great and small,” they sing, “the one that bothers us most of all / Is that we fear that God may make a fuss / And … some … how … blame … you … on … us!”
What’s surprising here, and different from the typical Mad movie spoof, is that the cartoon doesn’t really make fun of the film. Rather, it uses Fiddler as a tool of critique, to lampoon materialistic success and its attendant hypocrisies. The repressed shtetl ancestors return to haunt the new generation, which cowers in its suburban brass bed. The comic reversal, where the past disavows the present—a gesture equally conservative and countercultural—suggests that late-twentieth-century American Jews (and by extension, Americans in general) had lost sight of the pure values that once bound them as a community and guided their actions. The familiar romantic shtetl is implied, despite Drucker’s grotesque exaggerations of its characters, and ethnic mixing made suspect: “God made a modern Camelot,” they sing of America. “Now that we’ve seen that / Mess you’ve made / We’re afraid / God wants back his melting pot!”
* * *
It’s hard to sustain a parody of the movie given its somber turn, harder still to make it the center of an evening of levity. Still, in recent years, the film has been called on to do important iconic duty on the most ironic Jewish celebration each year: Christmas. If “Chinese and a movie” has been a time-honored way for Jews to spend the day when nearly everyone else is otherwise engaged, increasingly that movie has been Fiddler, in coordinated events where people come for the express purpose, as cultural scholar Jeffrey Shandler has put it, of enacting their Jewishness. Synagogues, Jewish community centers, and clubs meant to attract young Jews program Fiddler sing-alongs as a means for multiple forms of such enactment.
But one doesn’t have to make a point of countercelebrating Christmas to sing along to Fiddler. At all times of the year, Jewish film festivals from Boston to Seattle have invited moviegoers to dress up as Anatevkans, shimmy their shoulders to “Tradition” and belt out the tunes along with the film’s cast. (The lyrics and dialogue are displayed in closed captions, for those too young to have memorized the songs in their suburban dens in the seventies.) In 2006, Bet Shira Congregation in Miami hosted a sing-along on Tu b’Shvat. The synagogue’s president, Ron Rosengarten, put on an old vest and a short-brimmed cap. Rabbi Micah Caplan pasted a long gray beard to his chin. And congregant Martin Applebaum donned a puffy-sleeved peasant shirt and stuffed his pants cuffs into the top of his socks. Applebaum also brought twenty rubber chickens to distribute among the audience so they could throw them into the air on the appropriate cue.
More than two hundred synagogue members came to join in the merriment. Children fiddled along with the overture and the babushka-clad sisterhood assembled near the screen to croon “Sabbath Prayer.” The twenty chickens were hurled when Lazar Wolf, toasting Tzeitel and Motel, said, “I am giving the newlyweds five chickens.” And chocolate Hanukkah gelt was flung toward the ceiling during “If I Were a Rich Man.” Synagogue member Barry Blum kazatzked during the wedding dance scene with a plastic seltzer bottle glued to his felt top hat.
A Fiddler on the Roof sing-along: projecting the desire for a usable past.
Some ninety minutes into the occasion, the high spirits deflated. How could it be otherwise after the pogrom in Act 1 and the bleaker and bleaker mood as Chava becomes dead to Tevye and Hodel departs for Siberia? Once the Anatevkans receive their expulsion edict and they pack up against a gray, desolate landscape in the pitiful scene the sing-along became dead to participants. The mirthful energy cannot be sustained in the face of such darkness.
But up until that point, participants frequently left their seats to ham it up in front of the larger-than-life images of Tevye and his family, often standing in the path of the projector’s flickering light stream so that their own shadows danced into Anatevka. The metaphor was hard to miss: Fiddler continues to provide American Jews a screen onto which to project their desire for a usable past.
Outside America, and in places with few Jews, Fiddler has served as a screen, too, for making visible the shadows of history. Nowhere did this happen as powerfully as in Poland.
CHAPTER 9
SKRZYPEK NA DACHU: POLAND
The train was due at 8:00 p.m. The crowd waiting for it at the station listened for the clatter of wheels on the old, narrow-gauge tracks as it approached, trundling through the San River valley. Soon they could make out the lively beat of a freylekhs, a catchy dance tune, being played by a klezmer band in an open boxcar. And quickly, like the couple dozen passengers on the train, they started to clap along. Next stop: Anatevka.
Or so their town had become, it seemed, to residents of Dynów, Poland, who had assembled at the long-abandoned station one July night in 2006 for an open-air performance of Fiddler on the Roof. The show would start when the train pulled in with the band playing. The director, Magdalena Miklasz, wanted the spectators to feel like villagers greeting the musicians’ arrival. She wanted them to blend in with the world of the play. The old train station was the perfect locale for creating such a mood, she and the designer, Ewa Woźniak, had decided. The station house with its weathered wooden planks would serve beautifully as the inn where Tevye and Lazar Wolf drink l’chaim. A rustic old shed would be Tevye’s home. The pines and lindens framing the playing space between the buildings, and the terraced fields beyond, would evoke the landscape Tevye traverses with his milk wagon every day. Never mind the wide sight lines. With the audience seated on the tracks and atop old train cars, and the actors playing on the scrubby ground, the layout was ideal. Everything would feel so close, so immediate, so real. The traditional barrier between actor and spectator would dissolve, just as Miklasz wanted, and the people of Dynów would imagine that they were living alongside Tevye and his family.
Once upon a time, they had. At least figuratively, as Miklasz saw it. Before the Holocaust, which snuffed out three million—90 percent—of Poland’s Jews, half of Dynów’s population was Jewish. Bakers, barbers, tailors, shoemakers, city council members, orchestra players, sports club competitors, recipe-swapping and kid-minding neighbors—Jews were woven fully into the fabric of life in the town, whose residents numbered about 3,700 on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Born in 1983 and 1984, respectively, Miklasz and Woźniak are barely old enough to remember Poland’s Communist times, much less the period before the Second World War when Catholic Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived together in inescapable if uneasy propinquity. Yet they wanted to present Fiddler as a way of recalling Dynów’s multicultural past—and as a way of looking toward Poland’s European future.
Miklasz’s great-grandparents had lived in Dynów since before the war in a squat stone house about a mile from the town square. As a young girl growing up in Kraków, Miklasz spent her summers in the town, visiting her great-grandmother. Here, in the countryside, she could pick cherries right from a tree behind the house, sing by the campfires they built in the rambling backyard, swim in the San. Sometimes she crawled into the dank concrete root cellar and tried to imagine what it had been like for her great-grandmother’s Jewish neighbors,
the Koch family, who hid there in September 1939 while Nazi soldiers scoured Dynów of its Jews.
How could it have happened? Miklasz wondered. And who were these Jews who once made up such a large portion of her country but had been decimated long before she could have encountered them directly? Could they really have left no traces in Dynów? What could that history mean for her generation now? Miklasz and Woźniak wanted to find out, and as young theater artists—especially in Poland, where theater traditionally has played a significant role in progressive movements—their best means of exploration was to make a play.
In the Bialystok Puppet Division of the National Theater School of Poland, where Miklasz and Woźniak met in 2004, they worked on a production of Memorial Prayer, an adaptation of Sholem-Aleichem’s Tevye stories with some bits of Fiddler woven in, written by the Russian playwright Grigory Gorin in 1989. More rustic and sardonic than the Broadway musical, Gorin’s play draws from the same four Tevye stories—“Modern Children,” “Hodl,” “Khave,” and “Get Thee Out”—but adds Menachem Mendel as the matchmaker. Gorin’s Tevye was the crowning role for Russia’s great comic actor Yevgeny Leonov until his death in 1994, hours before he was to go onstage in the part. Reading the play, Miklasz couldn’t believe how familiar the characters seemed. Golde was just like her great-grandmother, she marveled. The beleaguered sense of humor, the folksy aphorisms, the affectionate, jokey antagonism between husbands and wives—it all echoed her girlhood summers in Dynów. Surely this communal temperament was more regional than ethnic. After all, Sholem-Aleichem’s imagined Anatevka lay just across the San, which came to mark the boundary between Poland and Ukraine only through the Hitler-Stalin pact. While the national borders slicing up Galicia could mean the difference between life and death for Jews escaping into Soviet territory during the Nazi occupation of Poland, in cultural terms the frontier was arbitrary, meaningless—and not only among Jews.
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