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The warnings murmured to Miklasz when she had announced Fiddler as De-Novo’s 2006 show were not materializing into real opposition as the three-week rehearsal period raced by. Now and then, someone would privately mention that some other people might not appreciate De-Novo’s dredging up the past, but no one tried to get in the way. The outpouring of communal support was as generous as ever. That didn’t mean there wasn’t some anxiety passing occasionally like the summer rain clouds over the valley. But Miklasz and Woźniak knew that whatever justification the project had was in the doing of it and, through the doing of it, the community’s taking ownership of it. A professional tour of Fiddler stopping in Dynów might not have sold a lot of tickets. Who could say? But De-Novo was not simply presenting a ready-made spectacle to an anonymous audience.
“This is it!” Miklasz told the company backstage on opening night. She wasn’t inclined to say more. And anyway, she didn’t have time. Playing the role of the fiddler—she’s a first-rate violinist—she had to assume her position atop the high station house roof, where she would remain for the entire show. Everyone understood this was their only chance to make Anatevka come alive. The entire run was just the one night.
The train bearing the band, a group called Membra Solo from the nearby larger city of Rzeszów, chugged in right on schedule. They had played a klezmer concert as a preview at the other end of the ten-minute train ride. As the musicians debarked and found their places, spectators scrambled for seats. In a town with a population of 6,200, about 2,500 people had come to the show.
Justyna paced behind the shed, repeating her lines to herself; Mateusz Mikoś, the student playing Motel, felt his mind go blank, as if someone had unscrewed his personal hard drive. The stage manager signaled Miklasz, who adjusted the bowler hat on her head and drew out those two notes that begin the opening theme.
The “narrator”—an elder from the Dynów community—walked out and welcomed the crowd with the introduction to Gorin’s Memorial Prayer (assigned in his script to Tevye). “In Anatevka, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews lived together since the beginning of time,” the speech begins, as apt for Dynów as for the fictional shtetl. “They lived together, worked together, and only died separately in their respective cemeteries. That was the tradition.” Unlike Fiddler, which built on the postwar American desire to remember the shtetl as an all-Jewish idyll, the perestroika-era Memorial Prayer had an interest in restoring Jewish presence to the multiculti mix of the Soviet republics. More than that, it propounds the closeness of the communities, seeking to minimize (rather than celebrate) ethnic difference. Gorin’s Tevye—and De-Novo’s—comes on pulling his cart and presenting himself to the audience: “Jewish people call me Tevye; Russians, Tevel. I have five daughters, two cows, and one horse so old it can only take the wagon downhill. When the road goes uphill, I take it myself, and then I take off my hat so it won’t stick to my head. And then nobody can tell if I’m a Russian or a Jew. And honestly, what’s the difference?”
The play goes on to show how little difference there is. Yes, he celebrates the Sabbath in a particular manner and sees his daughter married under a chuppah, but the beleaguered Tevye of Gorin’s play struggles entirely against poverty and antisemitism (which is forthrightly addressed in the text, with the constable, for example, accusing Tevye of a blood libel, a slander still granted great credence in a region to the north of Dynów). The internal challenges to Tevye’s faith don’t much register in Gorin. Thus, there’s no dramaturgical reason to take pains to establish his piety and devout practice. Those exotic behaviors the De-Novo company observed in the Jewison film at the Oberja aren’t significant in Gorin and were not employed in Dynów (though the company was treated to a presentation about the Jews of Dynów by Szajnik). If Jerry Robbins had been hounding Gorin to tell him what his play was about, the Russian would not have put “the breakdown of tradition” on his list of answers; he might have said, “the barbarity of narrow nationalism.”
But “tradition” still mattered to Miklasz, as a concept and as a musical number. While the attenuation of the daughters’ (and, presumably, grandchildren’s) ties to Tevye’s observance had little resonance in Dynów, that he stood for something did. With only three weeks of rehearsal and only three professionals among a cast of fifty, Miklasz selected only a few Fiddler songs for her show—“If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Anatevka,” and, most powerfully, “Tradition.” (In place of “Sabbath Prayer,” the vocalist for Membra Solo hauntingly sang, as actors lit candles, the Hebrew hymn “Shalom aleichem, malachei ha-sharet,” which ritually welcomes the Sabbath.)
As in Fiddler, the chorus came on singing “Tradition” at the end of Tevye’s self-introduction. At first they could be heard in the distance, but not seen, as they intoned the melody with “boy-boy-boy” syllables in place of the lyrics. The sound grew closer and fuller, and the company began to come into partial view behind the buildings, like fragments of a dream rising into consciousness. Soon, they filed into the playing area and, with their transformation from invisible specters into flesh-and-blood presences, they converted the very ground into the shtetl of old. The Jews had returned. No matter how well anyone acted or sang (it varied) or whether tech ran smoothly (it didn’t), this moment of theatrical alchemy could not be reversed.
Anatevka materializes in Dynów: “Tradition.”
At the show’s end, the chorus dematerialized as they went off singing “Anatevka,” as if going back to a shadowy realm where they had been hidden for decades. The audience applauded for fifteen minutes and showered the company with flowers.
Miklasz and Woźniak decided to do Fiddler again for 2007, this time for two nights. It wasn’t just that Miklasz was disappointed by a brief microphone malfunction during “Rich Man” (with a Tevye played by an admired professional, Maciej Ferlak). She also wanted more music and a longer rehearsal schedule. This time the company would sing “Sabbath Prayer,” as she had hoped to have them do the first time. And she felt they could go still deeper with the material. Playing over two consecutive evenings in 2007, the show drew audiences of nearly 2,000 each night.
Could Miklasz and Woźniak determine their show’s cumulative effect? They hadn’t expected Fiddler to change anything, not in any conventionally understood didactic way. That kind of thinking had disappeared, they were happy to note, with the demise of the People’s Republic of Poland, whose artists were always too unruly and disgruntled for the cheery heroics the Soviets prescribed, anyway. If De-Novo’s work was affecting people in any deep sense, Miklasz and Woźniak understood the impact phenomenologically: it had meaning not by virtue of referring to something else but by being something else, something the spectators were part of making.
That involvement far exceeded the usual imaginative participation theater demands of an audience. De-Novo’s public recognized pieces of their own lives in the show—their household wares, their neighbors, their children—and watched from a space barely separated from the playing area in the open air. There were few boundaries between themselves and the world of Anatevka. They understood it was a fiction; that’s why it could be so true. And Tevye’s cart left real track marks in the ground.
But for all its evocation of the Jews who once shared their town, De-Novo’s Fiddler was not primarily salvage work that looked back for the sake of nostalgia or to fulfill the duty that propelled so many in the generation that preceded them—to fill in the huge gaps in the historical record. That work was being ably done all over the country by scholars, curators, and artists. Miklasz and Woźniak were—and are—looking behind in order to look ahead. Miklasz said that in working on Fiddler she sometimes felt like she was raising up ghosts. She was. Because her generation needs them to point the way forward.
EPILOGUE
FIDDLING WITH TRADITION
In the middle of a fashionable Los Angeles bar mitzvah luncheon, a man bursts into the hall. Dressed in a long black caftan and wide-brimmed hat and spor
ting a beard that straggles onto his sternum, he looks around, bewildered. Clearly, this is not the Orthodox or Hasidic milieu in which his garb would not stand out. At this party, few of the men wear yarmulkes. They sit comfortably with women whose skirts barely brush their knees. The interloper stumbles around, poking his nose into the group at one table, then another, asking for particular people. Finally, he addresses the whole room, loudly. “This isn’t the Shapiro-Goldfarb wedding?” he asks, acting as confused as Lieutenant Columbo. “It’s Jonathan’s bar mitzvah? Oh my goodness, what a coincidence! This is my kinda people, I gotta tell ya! Where’s Aunt Frieda?” He names a few more of the family and honored guests and then calls for Jonathan to make his entrance: “Shmuley, Nachum, Avrum, Moyshe, bring him in!”
Half a dozen men in similar Hasidic dress bear the bar mitzvah boy on their shoulders while the band strikes up Fiddler’s opening number, “Tradition.” These are the Amazing Bottle Dancers, a performance troupe of fake Hasidim for hire. More borscht belt than Borough Park, they also entertain at weddings, birthday parties, and other events all over the country, including the Jewish Heritage Celebration produced each year at a Philadelphia Phillies game.
With their paste-on payess bouncing in time to the music, the men deliver the bar mitzvah boy to a seat at the central table. Then the tune shifts and the men perform their showy number: a section of Jerry Robbins’s “Bottle Dance” from the wedding scene in Fiddler, shatterproof bottles nestled securely into holes cut into the tops of their hats. (The original Broadway dancers enjoyed no such assistance.) In a line facing the honored family, they clasp hands at shoulder height and take a step leftward with the left foot, then cross the right foot in front of the left. Off they go, executing the moves of Robbins’s exacting choreography, including the climactic knee slides. Finally, rising to a standing position, they let the bottles drop into their hands, then swerve and bend to the music, eventually forming a circle and inviting all the bar mitzvah guests to join in a mass hora. The routine, according to Michael Pasternak, a Los Angeles–based actor and the founder of the Amazing Bottle Dancers, offers “a way of adding a touch of tradition into the event.” As if the bar mitzvah itself were not sufficient to the purpose.
These are fine, athletic dancers and the performance is meant to be good fun (and, as a video advertisement for the group promises, “You don’t even have to be Jewish to appreciate the humor”). Whether one finds it amusing, affecting, or appalling, or a wacky combination of all three, this twenty-first-century entertainment reveals how deeply and indelibly Fiddler on the Roof has saturated Jewish culture in America and how it has gathered authority. The entertainment depends on a telling transmutation: Robbins absorbed some elements of presumed folk culture from weddings he attended as research, and he remade them into an elaborate composition for a work of the theater. Several decades later, his artistic creation came out of the show intact and returned to the realm of ritual celebration to bestow authenticity on the proceedings. In other words, a Broadway showstopper turned into folklore. Just as Sholem-Aleichem’s literary craftsmanship gave way to the idea that he was (in Maurice Samuel’s phrase) the “‘anonymous’ of Jewish self-expression,” Robbins’s calculated choreography became, in the words of the Amazing Bottle Dancers’ promotional video, an “age-old magnificent dance.”
When the troupe performed in 2008 on the annual Chabad telethon—the nationally broadcast fund-raising extravaganza of Lubavitch Hasidim—it opened a return lane on the bridge Robbins had built between Old World practice (as he and his collaborators imagined it) and popular entertainment. The “Bottle Dance” helped the image-savvy Lubavitchers remove the aura of strangeness around them by placing them within a familiar comfort zone. It was as if the two-minute performance, which opened the broadcast, was telling viewers: “Hey, you know us! We might look odd with our cloaks and beards and hats. But you’ve seen us in Fiddler on the Roof!”
The show about tradition has become tradition. And in the twenty-first century, that is still a fraught concept even though—or maybe precisely because—in the five decades since Fiddler premiered (as long a stretch of time as between Sholem-Aleichem’s original stories and their Broadway incarnation) we have learned that tradition is “invented,” along with other postmodern lessons that can help illuminate why the show can be invoked both to confer Jewish bona fides on bar mitzvahs and to invite American rapport with Hasidim. We know, too, that, in the words of scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, heritage “is a mode of cultural production in the present” and that identity is fluid, fragmented, contingent, “performative”—not an innate given but brought into being through the living of it. Fiddler has become part of the material out of which a new generation, applying those lessons, is self-consciously fashioning contemporary Jewish culture and forging a usable past for a new era. The show is never far from arguments, artworks, public proclamations, material objects, communal gatherings, celebrations, and ritual practices through which current debates over Jewish authenticity are joined. Even as old orders explode and the Jewish community fragments, Tevye, along with the imagined world he represents, holds firm as a primary figure to whom artists, ideologues, and folks with products to peddle turn to consider—and often just glibly to indicate—both the unacceptable loss and the irrefutable promise of change. He trudges on within—and as—a storm of contradictions.
Tevye’s twenty-first century began, on the one hand, with the Yiddish literary critic Ruth Wisse’s continuing the scholarly sport of condemning Fiddler for degrading Sholem-Aleichem—and, through its positive portrayal of Fyedka, as she sees it, for far worse. “If a Jewish work can only enter American culture by forfeiting its moral authority and its commitment to group survival,” she sneers in The Modern Jewish Canon, “one has to wonder about the bargain that destroys the Jews with its applause.” On the other hand, also in 2000, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick were honored with a Special Cultural Arts Award by the venerable Yiddish center, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; the fund-raising gala included a “poignant musical tribute that included a medley of their songs.” Fiddler on the Roof: cultural génocidaire or cultural hero? Nowadays, the Yiddishists themselves are divided.
So are the Israelis. A right-wing ultra-Orthodox settler, Tzvi Fishman, self-published a 580-page novel called Tevye in the Promised Land that brings the hero and his family to Palestine after the expulsion from Anatevka and reads like a kosher version of the evangelical Christian Left Behind series as it transforms the old dairyman into a swamp-clearing, Turk-battling, messianic Zionist. Meanwhile, Dan Almagor decided that the most fitting way to use royalties on his Hebrew translation of Fiddler was to purchase violins for Palestinian children in a music program in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Jenin.
In a video supporting a Rabbis for Human Rights campaign against Israeli displacement of Bedouins in the Negev, Theodore Bikel, a long-beloved Tevye, invokes the character he has played more than two thousand times, to decry the eviction and how “the very people who are telling them to get out are the descendants of the people of Anatevka.” And he dons Tevye’s costume in a magazine advertisement for a Jewish funeral provider, ballyhooing Dignity Memorial for “working for generations to preserve Jewish traditions.” At the same time, the show’s authority can be called on to confront Jewish anxieties: Aron Katz summoned it for his prizewinning entry in the Israeli “Anti-Semitic Cartoons Contest,” cheekily launched in the wake of the controversy over Muhammad cartoons in a Danish paper and the subsequent call by an Iranian publication for Holocaust cartoons. In Katz’s image, which referred to conspiracy theories that Jews masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, a silhouetted male figure in caftan and wide-brimmed hat fiddles atop the Brooklyn Bridge while in the distance the World Trade Center towers burn. Nothing so efficiently supplies the means for reassuring and for ruffling Jewish sensibilities as Fiddler on the Roof.
Fiddler as shorthand for the cheeky Anti-Semitic Cartoons Co
ntest.
What’s striking about these deployments of Fiddler and so many more—a progressive fair-tax lobbying campaign called the “If I Were a Rich Man Tour”; the assertion by disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that he decided to become religiously observant upon watching the Fiddler movie; Stephen Colbert’s joking that after Christians properly reclaim Rosh Hashanah they will stage Fiddler with Tevye played by Mel Gibson—is their self-conscious sincerity. All take seriously Fiddler’s status as a luminous icon capable of projecting echt Jewish luster, even if it’s only a show.
To some degree, that’s simply a function of pop culture’s reign and reach in general. But the frequency and undiminished pungency of Fiddler references after all these years speak to the unusually abundant and various entry points the show continues to provide for people of all persuasions. Today, it plays an even larger role in the new Jewish cultural sphere, where it has been embraced by artists who once disparaged it. The klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals remembers heading to gigs in the 1980s dreading that someone might ask her to play “Sunrise, Sunset.” But by the turn of the new century, some of the most serious klezmer players happily took part in the pathbreaking (if highly uneven) album Knitting on the Roof, produced by the label attached to the original Knitting Factory venue in Manhattan, which specialized in musical experiment and was a deliberate breeding ground for “new Jewish culture.” The album features a range of contemporary musicians, each interpreting—or deconstructing—a song from the show. A similar framework organized the kickoff for the Oy!hoo Festival at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y in 2007: each performer in a lineup of leading Jewish music makers covered one of the Bock and Harnick tunes, responding to them with hip-hop, Sephardic, indie rock, klezmer, and other soulful styles.
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 41
