Frances and Julius Butwin led the way. Both child immigrants from Eastern Europe, they found their impulse to translate Sholem-Aleichem “not in a postwar effort to salvage the ‘vanished world’ of eastern European Jewry,” according to their son, Joseph Butwin, but as progressives stirred by the Popular Front’s promotion of proletarian and folk literature. (For Frances Butwin, an additional catalyst was her upbringing in Charleston, South Carolina, amid the community’s self-conscious cultural renaissance, one of America’s “remarkable acts of memory and invention.”) Though by the mid-1940s, the alliance of Communists, socialists, industrial unionists, and bourgeois liberals in the fight against Fascism had long collapsed, the impact of the “cultural front” had not dissipated. Far beyond the party-line agitprop with which Popular Front art is commonly dismissed, much excellent work was ignited by the radical fervor of the 1930s and it shaped American culture well into the Cold War. Thanks to the Butwins, Sholem-Aleichem was part of this transformation.
Living in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Butwins found a “great friend, mentor, and comrade” in Meridel Le Sueur, author of the acclaimed people’s history of the upper Midwest North Star Country (1945). The Old Country emerged from the same Popular Front exigencies—a valorization of “the folk” and the promotion of regional roots—after the Butwins had read Samuel’s The World of Sholom Aleichem and recognized some parallels. Their volume and Le Sueur’s, Joseph Butwin notes, were just two of numerous “country” books published in the 1940s in a vogue for American folkways. (Desert Country, Palmetto Country, and Deep Delta Country appeared in a series published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Crown, meanwhile, was getting in on the boom with A Treasury of American Folklore and A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. The radio and recording industries also developed folk departments, which featured Yiddish songs among their vernacular regional musics.) The Jews, too, were (once) a folk.
The Butwins’ selection and translation of Sholem-Aleichem stories hardly pressed any of them toward an ideological doctrine; it was enough that the “little people” of Kasrilevke were a hardworking common folk, “lacking food, clothing, money and indeed everything but courage, faith and humor,” as the Chicago Daily Tribune reviewer put it.
The books inspired leftists to create stage and radio performances. The dancer and choreographer Sophie Maslow, known for her Dust Bowl Ballads and Folksay, turned to Sholem-Aleichem to explore her Jewish heritage in a similar idiom, in what became her most famous dance, The Village I Knew (1950). In a series of seven scenes, it abstractly depicts rituals of shtetl life and events from stories in The Old Country. (She also drew on the visual imagery of Marc Chagall.) Maslow was from Brooklyn (with secular, socialist immigrant parents), so The Village was not in fact a place she “knew” firsthand; laying claim to it, the performance introduced a mode of identification that would characterize shtetl stagings to come, right up to Fiddler: it evoked nostalgia for a place one had never actually been.
When the writer Arnold Perl and the actor Howard Da Silva teamed up two years later to stage The World of Sholom Aleichem, their work, too, appealed to the sentimentality of a general audience, even as the two men were drawn to the material for its depiction of Jews scraping by under the boot of the czar. In Sholem-Aleichem’s stories, they saw the imperative for Jews, having experienced oppression, to proclaim solidarity with anyone facing injustice. More than that, they were fighting injustice by virtue of doing the play: both were blacklisted and out of work and they hired a company that was blacklisted, too. Sholem-Aleichem didn’t just provide some of their material; he was their red flag. At a time when mainstream Jewish organizations were purging leftists from their staffs, opening their files to HUAC, and, in the case of the American Jewish Committee, advocating the execution of the Rosenbergs, a team of unemployable, unrepentant leftists, at least some of them Party members (or former members), produced a surprise Jewish smash hit. While Fiddler was not drawn directly from Perl’s World of Sholom Aleichem or from the Tevya and His Daughters that he presented later, the Perl productions demonstrated that old Yiddish stories could find a sizable contemporary audience and make it happy.
* * *
Da Silva and Perl made an unlikely pair. The actor, ten years older, was a big, brash personality, not particularly tall, but imposing, built like a bulldog and sometimes snapping like one, too. Perl was short and wiry and, if not classically handsome with his round glasses and receding hairline, intensely charismatic—a charmer who dressed nattily and whose flinty, flirty eyes journalists noted as “piercing.” Where Da Silva sometimes came off as a blowhard, Perl captured everyone’s attention with his persuasive discourse. Where Da Silva often worked from gut feeling, Perl reasoned everything through. But the two men shared political convictions, a newfound love of Yiddishkayt, and ferocious levels of energy, and they forged a theatrical partnership through which they could not only ride out but just about beat the blacklist.
Until 1951, Da Silva (born Silverblatt to immigrant parents in Cleveland) was enjoying stupendous success as an actor. From the 1930s, including a stint with the Federal Theater Project, he appeared frequently on the New York stage—the Butwins saw his magnetic performance as the menacing outsider, Jud Fry, in the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! when they came to New York to sign their deal with Crown for The Old Country—and by the mid-1940s, he had a thriving career in Hollywood, cast in feature roles in several films a year by the end of the decade. Then the friendly witness Robert Taylor named him before HUAC, declaring Da Silva suspicious because “he always seems to have something to say at the wrong time.” Indeed he did, when he himself was called before HUAC in Los Angeles in March 1951. The moment Da Silva was sworn in, he began lambasting the committee as “a smoke screen” for “forces seeking to drop the atom bomb,” shouting in his sonorous actor’s voice over the chairman’s pounding gavel. For every question about his affiliations, he offered a retort about the committee’s attack on free thought, its labeling as subversive anyone who declares himself for peace, its general illegality. The first uncooperative witness to plead the Fifth Amendment, he would not answer their questions about his Communist activities. And he refused to say whether he would support the United States if it were invaded by Soviet Russia.
Soon after Da Silva’s appearance, RKO Pictures edited him out of the just completed film Slaughter Trail, in which he’d played the lead role, and spliced in new footage of a different actor (Brian Donlevy). Da Silva took the hint. Along with some comrades from the Actors Lab—a West Coast offshoot of the Group Theater—Da Silva went to New York to look for work. Unlike the Screen Actors Guild, Actors’ Equity, the union of theater performers, had voted to defy any political blacklist and even included a clause in every hiring contract to that effect.
Arnold Perl was never called before HUAC, though the FBI listed him on its “security index” for years and kept tabs on his participation in meetings, rallies, and workshops, most of them focused on labor rights and racial equality. Raised in a middle-class, liberal home, he turned leftward as a student at City College in the 1930s and stayed active as he pursued a career as a writer. His work took off in the army, of all places, where he was assigned to write anti-Fascist scripts. “I have gotten radio detectives in and out of trouble, scared children and fought straw men on so-called adult programs,” he said of the entertainments he’d scripted professionally, “but it took a draft board to give me my first chance to write something for radio I didn’t mind having my name connected with.”
It was also in the army—specifically when he entered Dachau with his unit at the end of the war—that Perl felt a sudden, shocking surge of connection to the Jewish people. He spoke no Yiddish and never practiced any ritual observance growing up. But he was by nature curious about everything, a nondenominational intellectual who read voraciously for several hours late into every night. When he came back to New York, he started soaking up whatever he could find about Jewish culture. His career was flourishing. He was
writing for the new, surprisingly progressive documentary units on the radio networks (his harrowing, detailed account of Nazi crimes in The Empty Noose, broadcast on the eve of the executions at Nuremberg, was heard by more than five million Americans); he also started freelancing for The Eternal Light. He stretched his script consultations with Rabbi Moshe Davis at the Jewish Theological Seminary (which produced the program) into informal tutorials.
Then, in June 1950—the month that saw the arrest of the Rosenbergs and the outbreak of the Korean War—three retired FBI agents calling themselves American Business Consultants published Red Channels, the booklet that listed 151 people working in broadcast and their alleged associations with Communist causes. Little surprise that Perl’s name was among them—and that his commissions dried up. Though he kept banging out scripts on his small manual Royal typewriter and managed to sell them through a front (earning only a fraction of the amount the front took home), he plummeted from a bright career that had enabled him to purchase a home in the swanky Westchester suburb of Mamaroneck and support his wife and three children to a state of economic uncertainty that, within a couple of years, also included alimony and child support payments.
He and Da Silva joined forces to create their own theater company, knowing they could be their own bosses. They had encountered each other years before in Popular Front activities—back in 1946 Da Silva had acted in a one-night presentation of a twenty-minute Perl script by the left-wing troupe Stage for Action. Before banding together, each had adapted Sholem-Aleichem on his own—a double coincidence, since both had chosen one of the same stories. Da Silva recorded several tales from the Butwins’ Old Country on an album for Decca Records of the same name, in 1948. In a slightly nasal, animated voice, he narrates and plays all the roles in “The Fiddle,” “A Yom Kippur Scandal,” and “Dreyfus in Kasrilevka”; intricately scored music by Serge Hovey works almost in dialogue with him. Meanwhile, among his radio dramatizations of Sholem-Aleichem for The Eternal Light, Perl also adapted “The Fiddle,” the story of a boy obsessed with learning to play the violin despite being forbidden by his father. When Perl and Da Silva established Rachel Productions (they both had daughters named Rachel) and began to hatch a repertoire, the Butwin volumes and Maurice Samuel were the obvious place to start. The drawing by their comrade Ben Shahn that became their logo—a man in a cap and thick beard playing a violin—added to the association between Sholem-Aleichem and a fiddling Jew. (Shahn’s association with Sholem-Aleichem continued, too, as he went on to illustrate collections of Yiddish stories, including reissues of the Butwin volumes.)
Perl and Da Silva liked to tell people that they were motivated by the “mutual impulse” to share this culture with audiences who might not have been familiar with it and thereby disprove the snub they were tired of hearing—that if they didn’t know Yiddish they couldn’t understand their heritage. But there was more to it than that. As a reporter who interviewed them at the time understood, they wanted to highlight “Sholom-Aleichem’s gentle but firm plea for tolerance and humanism.”
The casting itself made such a plea. Phoebe Brand, Morris Carnovsky, Sarah Cunningham, Jack Gilford, Gilbert Green, Will Lee, Marjorie Nelson: almost all the actors were blacklisted. More than giving them jobs (which paid barely over minimum wage), the production was displaying the talent America was missing when it shunted good artists aside. (Da Silva was also making an integrationist point by casting Ruby Dee, whom he had met shortly before rehearsals were to begin, at a rally for the Rosenbergs; her husband, Ossie Davis, served as stage manager.)
In putting characters from the Yiddish classics onstage, Perl was “reminding people of where they come from” and also “telling them that people are enormously and richly flexible in the face of difficulties.” He was talking about the resilient residents of the Pale. But he could have been talking about himself and the company presenting The World of Sholom Aleichem.
* * *
The play opened on May Day of 1953 at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In the theatrical climate of the period, everything about it seemed strange. The Barbizon? Sholem-Aleichem? Was it in Yiddish? The press agent, Merle Debuskey, had to insist that ads and announcements note that it was in English. But Perl and Da Silva had good reasons for their choices. The title might strike a friendly chord with people who remembered Maurice Samuel’s book, which was still in print a decade after its publication and, in any case, it would indicate that the production (like the book) intended to bring to life not just a story but an entire milieu. (Some of the material in the play was also drawn from Mendele Mocher-Sforim, I. L. Peretz, and the folk stories of Chelm.) As for the venue, the thirty-eight-story modern classical hotel that dominated Central Park South between Sixth and Seventh Avenues had been originally designed in the 1920s as a residence for artists and musicians, so it included small halls for recitals and dramatic performances. Despite having changed hands and clientele during the Depression, the building retained a small auditorium with about 500 fixed seats and a small proscenium stage (albeit with no wing space). The World of Sholom Aleichem had to play on an irregular schedule, clearing out on nights that conventions were booked. But for the price, Rachel Productions couldn’t do better.
Besides, they wanted an intimate relationship between the actors and the audience and a spareness of style that a small house afforded. Spectacle and razzle-dazzle hardly belonged in the world of Sholem-Aleichem. If not by design, certainly to good effect, the work joined the nascent Off-Broadway challenge to the gimmicky effects of Broadway entertainments (the swimming pool center stage in Wish You Were Here being only one much-mocked example of the moment).
But it meant they’d garner little attention from the press. Weekly magazines covered only Broadway in those years, and the major daily papers, which had at least noticed the excitement over Geraldine Page’s performance in Summer and Smoke at the newly founded Circle in the Square, saw no compelling reason to spend any of the precious real estate in their arts pages on a show by an untested playwright based on quaint ethnic folk stories and performed in a bizarre location. Nonetheless, audiences came—hordes of them. At first, fellow progressives and liberal artists (some of them too fearful of guilt by association to go backstage to greet the company after the show). Then, responding to word of mouth, a wider audience. After forty sold-out performances, The World had to relinquish the Barbizon for events already scheduled there over the summer. When it reopened in September—for what turned out to be nine more months, making it the longest-running play of the season—it was a phenomenon. The producers marked the occasion by selling a fifteen-page souvenir booklet featuring drawings by Ben Shahn inspired by the show: in quick, sputtering lines—a seemingly naive style in keeping with the play’s—some twenty figures populate the pamphlet, among them a wide-eyed fellow cradling a goat, a man with a trim beard reclining on his side, holding his head in his hand, a woman with a handbag staring out from the page.
Now all the mainstream reviewers clamored for seats. The New York Times critic, Brooks Atkinson, threw his support behind the production (after some cajoling by Debuskey), first acclaiming it as “fine theater and splendid humanity” in his review, then piling on more accolades in a Sunday essay: “It is pure art with no shortcomings.” The other dailies followed suit: “Human warmth, generosity and affecting simplicity have carried the day,” “shows how theater-wise imagination with long experience can make so much out of so little.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt weighed in, praising the production in her syndicated newspaper column and assuring readers, “Don’t think because it’s about Jews you won’t like it.”
In large measure, audiences responded to the novelty—and aptness—of the bare-bones, congenial style. Hokey as it may seem today, the opening scene was received in 1953 as a charming innovation: Mendele the Bookseller (played by Da Silva, who also directed the show) entered through the house, maneuvering a battered baby carriage bulging with books as he made his way to the stage. He spoke directly
to the audience, familiarly: “I apologize. I don’t mean to stare. Just looking, trying to figure what in all these treasures would interest you the most.” He rummaged through the carriage and pulled out “The Enchanted Tailor” by Sholem-Aleichem and introduced the first of the three playlets. Presented as a folk tale from Chelm, the fictional town of fools (though Perl also used elements from Sholem-Aleichem’s own treatment of the story), it follows the melamed (it means “teacher”) as he goes to a nearby town to buy a milk goat but is tricked into bringing home a male goat—and tricked again when he takes it back to complain. The drama captivated audiences with its rustic appeal to the imagination: the melamed (Will Lee) danced in skipping steps from town to town, the goat—whether male or female—indicated merely by the stiff rope leash he carried. Music by Serge Hovey and simple lighting established scene and mood: distinct pools delineated the melamed’s home, the goat seller’s, and the inn between them where the goat was switched. A wash of light tinged with green created the forest the melamed scampered through from one locale to another.
In contrast, act 2, “Bontche Schweig” (“Bontche the Silent”) projected a tattered majesty, underscored by the ethereal pomp of music by a composer who went uncredited (because as a visiting Israeli he was not authorized to work in the United States). It was based on the story by I. L. Peretz (featured in Maurice Samuel’s Prince of the Ghetto). Bontche (Jack Gilford) is a humble, life-worn man who arrives in heaven—the stage bathed in pale lavender light. Dressed in rags and burlap assembled from fabric the designer, Aline Bernstein, had torn from a packing crate, he is judged to be worthy of great reward and is invited to name his grandest wish. All he can think to ask for—and that, meekly—is a hot roll with butter. The angels turn away in shame. Da Silva arrayed the actors in formal groupings, and while their performances did not cross over into abstraction, he insisted that they avoid “over-detailed naturalism.”
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 8