Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  It’s possible that they would never have returned to this subject had Tevye the Dairyman not come up again in a telephone conversation. This time, a proposal came not from Tengiz but from Efim Berg, a director from the provinces—a person with a reputation as a troublemaker, who had mysterious connections. He was, in fact, not really from the provinces; he had studied in Moscow, staged plays in Leningrad, and for five years worked as the head director in one of the oldest theaters in Siberia.

  The first thing Efim asked Nora was “What is your ethnicity? Are you a Jew, by any chance?”

  Nora was taken by surprise. In her passport, she was identified by the ethnicity of her mother—Russian—but she had never concealed the fact that her father was Jewish.

  “Half, on my father’s side,” she said.

  “You will do, then,” Efim said, and invited Nora to take part in a staging of Fiddler on the Roof.

  As it later turned out, his offer had an interesting history. The fact was that the designs and sketches for the stage set had already been made, by the extremely well-known artist Kononov, and they had even been accepted, but Efim rejected them at the last minute. Kononov, a recipient of many national prizes and distinctions and a favorite of the authorities, had never worked in theater before. His reputation had been built on portraits of government officials and enormous patriotic canvases on heroic-historical subjects—from the thirteenth-century Battle on the Ice to the routing of the fascists at Stalingrad. Kononov was an ideological anti-Semite, which everyone knew very well, and Efim Berg was surprised, to say the least, when Kononov received the offer to design the stage sets for the Jewish play Fiddler on the Roof. His name alone, appearing on all the posters announcing the performance, would guarantee the interest of the broader public and the indulgence of the ministry heads.

  Swiftly, in a realistic style, the monumental Kononov drew the crooked little houses of the Jewish shtetl, and they were ready to start constructing the sets—the sketches had been passed on to the set-building department already—when all hell broke loose. Right before leaving, the director and the artist sat down to drink a glass “for the road.” Both of them relaxed and let their guard down, and Efim, in a fit of drunken gratitude, admitted that he had always considered Kononov to be an anti-Semite, but he was glad that he had turned out to be a “regular guy” and was committed to staging the Jewish performance. Kononov began defending his reputation, and his right to take part in this production:

  “You Jews are so aggressive and pushy, you always try to move into others’ territory. Your painter Levitan paints our landscapes; your Chagall introduces his Jewish fantasy into our space; Pasternak and Mandelstam use our language as their own; you taint our Russian art, injecting into it the spirit of cosmopolitanism, destroying Russian integrity and purity. Anti-Semitism is our only protection, because, if we don’t wall ourselves off from you, if we don’t create impediments for you, you’ll infect the whole world with your Jewish ideas. And this whole avant-garde, from Malevich to Shostakovich”—here he was mistaken—“are the result of this Jewish disease, absorbed by the Russian people merely through proximity to you. Yes, I’m an anti-Semite, but I’m prepared to help you stage your Jewish play if only you will agree not to muscle your way into our Russian world with your destructive ideas. Yes, let a hundred flowers grow where they will, but no one wants hybrids and mongrels; therefore, I will fight for the purity of Russian art.

  “Go ahead and stage your Sholem Aleichem. I will even help you; but don’t touch my Chekhov!” announced Kononov with a good-natured smile.

  At that very moment, shrieking the words “Your Chekhov!,” the diminutive and springy Efim leveled a punch at his interlocutor, striking him on the jaw. Kononov, who had a significant advantage in size, floored Efim with a single blow. Efim, in turn, after somehow managing to struggle up to his knees, grabbed from the table a paperweight that had found its way into the theater four directors ago, even before the war, and only the fact that the producer and the assistant just happened to be nearby prevented a murder. They dragged Efim away bodily, stuffed the artist in a car, and sent it off in the direction of the airport.

  After recovering from his upset, which was more moral than physical, Efim turned over in his mind all the set designers of Jewish descent he knew. Unfortunately, David Borovsky was engaged for the entire year. Mark Bornstein, an acquaintance from Leningrad, also declined. Then Efim remembered Nora.

  Their acquaintance was also marked by a conflict, which had transpired five years earlier. At that time Efim had been appointed head director, and he had invited Tengiz, many of whose productions he was familiar with, to stage Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Tengiz accepted the offer, and arrived with Nora. Time was short: the play was due to be performed before the start of the school vacation. Everyone was in a rush; they were all on pins and needles. Finally, Efim and Tengiz quarreled about something, the cause of which neither of them could remember afterward. Now Efim was asking Nora to stage Sholem Aleichem with him.

  Nora laughed. “I was just at the Moscow première, and the applause at the end nearly brought the house down. That will be a hard act to follow.”

  “No, I’m not talking about that play, I’m talking about Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a brilliant musical—a Broadway play—it’s been performed all over the world. The script is by Joseph Stein, and the score is by Jerry Bock. I have two voices in the theater now that would make Topol go green with envy.”

  At that moment, Nora had no idea which Topol it was who would soon turn green, but she said that she’d take a look at the material. That evening, she went to see Tusya. Tusya was unexpectedly glad. She found an American LP on the shelf and put it on the record player. The music was enchanting—sadly happy, happily sad, lively, and carrying inside it the impulse to dance.

  “It’s klezmer music, a wonderful modern arrangement,” Tusya explained. “Small klezmer orchestras wandered through Eastern Europe before the war. Nowadays there are vestiges of the music in a few pop renditions. But this is klezmer at its best.”

  They listened to the record from beginning to end.

  “I’ve never heard anything like this,” Nora said.

  Tusya was surprised. “I didn’t teach you very well, then.”

  From that evening on, a new subject—Jewishness—became part of Nora’s life. A circumstance that had previously not really concerned her at all, and had not seemed significant in any sense—the Jewish half of her—began to mean a great deal to her. And, as was usually the case in her life, this new knowledge came through the theater. It was the last realm of knowledge her old teacher personally inducted her into.

  “You see, Nora,” Tusya said, “at the end of my life, I’ve been forced to examine my relationship with Jewishness. For Russian Jews of our fathers’, and your grandfathers’, generation, it was a very painful issue. It was the problem of assimilation. They were ashamed of their Jewishness, and put great effort into pulling up these roots and becoming part of Russian culture, as seamlessly as possible. They had to struggle against enormous resistance within the Russian milieu. The same thing happened in Europe. It began earlier there, though—at the end of the eighteenth century. Look it up in any encyclopedia. Under the letter ‘A,’ for ‘assimilation.’ Look up ‘Austro-Hungary.’ The first volume.” And she gestured toward the bookshelf.

  “In a nutshell: In the nineteenth century, educated Jews became the leading cosmopolitans of Europe, and created a new intellectual universalism. There was an enormous explosion of intellectual energy. With wild enthusiasm, Jewish youth broke away from the heder and began to pursue secular education. They made great strides in science, art, and literature. And, it goes without saying, in economics. At the same time, they began to lose what would later be called their ‘national identity.’

  “Simultaneously, another movement got under way, completely contrary to the first. This was Zionism. The goal of Zionism was to create an independent Jewish state, which had not existe
d for almost two millennia. In spite of historical precedents, this state was created—but at an enormous cost: the six million Jews who died in the gas chambers. My late father would lose his mind if he heard me say this. These are the thoughts I think in my waning years. Why were Jews so enamored of Soviet power? Because, in the initial years, it replaced ‘national identity’ or ethnicity with ‘internationalism.’ Many Jews hoped in this way to free themselves of the burden of being Jewish.”

  It was remarkable. When Tusya was present, the mundane chatter around a dinner table quickly turned into an intellectual conversation of the highest order. When she led a seminar on set design, the primary topic of discussion had become literature, dramaturgy. A decade later, when she began to lecture on the history of theater, she led her students beyond the boundaries of theater into the realm of psychology and philosophy. Every subject she broached immediately became too narrow, too confining, and she spoke of the adjoining areas, what lay beyond, about things that at first glance did not seem directly relevant—but it later turned out that what was most interesting lay precisely in these marginal spaces. Nora had long known this about Tusya, and now, listening to her spontaneous lecture on the fate of the Jews, she thought about how far Tusya had come from Tevye the Dairyman, with his mundane, and at the same time ponderous, questions.

  “I’ll try to explain to you why that play so irked me, but it’s not easy. It’s saccharine and mendacious. There’s no more ‘Tumbalalaika’ anywhere in the world. That is a cheap, cookie-cutter stereotype, a cartoon. There is a Jewish people scattered around the world that introduced contemporary morality harking back to the Ten Commandments. There is an image, very fraught intellectually, of the two-thousand-year existence of the Jews, banished from one country after another, a small people who miraculously survived, and who want to retain their Jewish identity and live on their own land—and have a right to do so, as do all other peoples. Alongside this is the image of a mighty power that to this day wants to destroy them. I have nothing against Sholem Aleichem, but we need to retire Anatevka to the museum; things have moved far beyond that. Not to mention that it no longer exists, and never will again. I wanted to be able to say all these things before you begin your production. And I would never dare say any of this to you if I didn’t believe that the theater today is still capable of saying things that are impossible to articulate, to express, any other way.”

  “But this musical doesn’t allude to any of the things you are telling me—nothing I could discern, anyway,” Nora objected.

  “Nora, you have to know how to unearth meanings. It’s very often up to you to extract them not from the work at hand but from yourself.”

  This turned out to be the most difficult of all Nora’s projects. She wrestled with the text. What helped her most was the splendid premiere with the bells tolling in the finale—she didn’t have the right to trespass on that territory in any way. Efim Berg came to Moscow on business. They met and spent a wonderful evening with Tusya. Efim, usually garrulous and disinclined to listen in a conversation, was reticent and attentive this time. They spoke about the merits and shortcomings of musical theater, about the gradual transformation of the genre of high opera into the democratic genre of the musical, about the two revolutionary American musicals, Bernstein’s West Side Story and Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Tusya again surprised Nora with her thoughts about possible trajectories of development in the theater: about the broadening of the space of theater thanks to cinematographic devices; the use of street scenes, drawing the viewer into the action onstage; about the carnivalization of life; and about the return of theater itself to its ancient mystical roots.

  “All of that was tried in Russia just after the Revolution, but it was squelched. And very quickly it returned to its conservative forms, and the Russian avant-garde, which promised so much, was silenced,” said Tusya, folding her arms over her chest in a cross, like a corpse.

  Then, when it was already night, Efim took Nora to visit a theater friend of his at his house. There, on a new VCR brought back from America, Nora watched the film version of Fiddler on the Roof for the first time. Though it had long since become a relic, it had never lost its riveting appeal. Now Nora knew that, from this generally accessible spectacle, so sweet and appealingly humane, without changing a single line, she would have to extract something much more essential than the playwright had communicated. Efim couldn’t sit still—he sprang up to his feet and galloped around, tapping and stamping his feet, clapping his hands—but he had already fallen under Tusya’s influence, and the play appealed to him more and more.

  Nora was already coming up with ideas and drawing them on big sheets of Whatman paper. She drew the small box of a stage hung on the inside with long strips of colored fabric, alternating red, brown, and dark blue. Small human figures rushed around inside this compressed space, chaotically, hither and thither. A horse and a cow seemed to appear, then disappear again, filling the box with living creatures of the land. She drew a rope with rags hanging from it, and then took a fresh piece of paper and peopled it with other figures, old women and children, and again changed everything in this constricted world. Then she drew a leaning table platform and placed on it a pot, with bowls, and again drew an empty box. She couldn’t figure out whether all these outward signs of an impoverished, benighted rural existence were necessary, or whether they were superfluous details that would distract the eye. Finally, she scrapped it all except the platform leaning downstage.

  This wrapped up the preliminary work; now it was time to consider the actual staging. Nora was not sure whether Berg, a talented but capricious and ambitious man, would accept her fully formed vision. In addition to everything else, she proposed that the stage dimensions be diminished, creating a compressed space that would open up only in the finale.

  She made three mock-ups, and laid them one inside another. They differed only in the color of the curtains that constituted the “body” of the set. On fourteen poles hung three layers of fabric. In the center of each section of cloth was a small vertical slit, invisible when the fabric was hanging.

  The first layer was thick red, ceremonial and disquieting. At the end of the “Sabbath Prayer” scene, Tevye would pull a curtain from the pole and put it over himself like a mantle, placing his head through the slit in the fabric. All the other actors would also put on these improvised red mantles, and sing a Sabbath song, which Nora already knew was not a real Sabbath song, but commonplace, ordinary music, an ingeniously interwoven medley of religious and local folkloric melodies.

  Now Nora removed the outermost mock-up and revealed the next layer of curtains, the brownish-ocher ones. When the next scene was performed—with the matchmaking and the wedding, which seamlessly blended into the pogrom—these curtains would be pulled down in turn, and transformed into overcoats, traveling garments. And again, on the proscenium, the crowd of shocked and agitated Jewish villagers would sing the prescribed mournful melody, and under the layer of brownish ocher would be revealed the last layer, the dark blue.

  Nora removed the second mock-up, leaving only the last. This was where the finale would play out. The Cossack sergeant informed the Jews that all of them would be expelled from Anatevka, and from the rigging a ladder descended. One could interpret this as one willed, in accordance with one’s awareness of Biblical texts. It could be viewed as Jacob’s Ladder—the villagers would yank the final layers of fabric from the poles and throw over themselves these garments the color of the nighttime heavens, then ascend the stairway and disappear there, in the gridiron. On the darkened stage, in a black room, only the poles would remain—not a single human being. An empty world, from which all people were gone.

  And while they ascended the stairs into the heavens, they would sing their little ditties and songs, and snatches of conversation would be heard: “Did you forget the frying pan? And the rug? Where’s the pot, the bridle, the candlestick holder?” And this would be even better! Because the contrast between the tri
vial details of the daily round of life, with its matchmaking and its marriages—its Friday hustle and bustle, and a sick cow, two-cent cheating and two-bit guile—and the great drama of life of the human being, the end of human existence on earth and the complete collapse of the failed plan of the Lord God, would be all the starker.

  From on high, out of the darkness of the heavens, let not only these unpretentious folkloric strains be audible, but the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, and the seventeenth, and the thirty-second preludes and fugues, fragments of The Well-Tempered Clavier, those magnificent musical texts, music for all time—let that music resound. Because, ultimately, all these mad and evil games of rash and mindless people led to the dress rehearsal of the end of the human world, to the Holocaust.

  On the stage, all that would remain were the black poles, and emptiness, and silence … Oh, and about the costumes … What will they be? Leotards, and on top of them some loose-fitting smocks or tunics, garments without shape or color, and no ethnic allusions—no embroidered vests or headscarves tied above the forehead—nothing of that sort.

  And, please, no applause. Only ancient fear and the presentiment of absolute finality, of wholesale death. Go home, ladies and gentlemen, into the darkness and into the silence …

  “Good, Nora! Very good. We’ll do it. There’s just one thing I don’t understand. What is this Jacob’s Ladder you mentioned?”

  Nora glanced at Berg in surprise. “You don’t know? The dream of the patriarch Jacob near Bethlehem. He dreamed of a stairway with angels going up and down it, and at the very top of it, the Lord God says to Jacob something like ‘The place where you are lying asleep, this land, I will give to you and your descendants, and I will bless you and them, and I will be with you and all your peoples.’”