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

by Alisa Solomon

  The evening closed with an adaptation of a Sholem-Aleichem work, “The High School” (“Gymnasia”), the piece in the collection Railroad Stories that chronicles a talented boy’s effort to gain admittance to a school closed to Jews—and that coincided with abiding quotas for Jews in some universities and with debates in the press and the courts over racial segregation in America’s public schools. (The Supreme Court had heard a first round of arguments in Brown v. Board of Education some five months earlier, though its ruling was still a year away.) This act presented yet another theatrical style: fourth-wall realism with characters in period dress but, still, minimal scenery—some bare tables and chairs—and no special effects. Robert de Cormier—a highly sought-after arranger who had worked with Paul Robeson and was directing the left-wing Young Jewish Folksingers (the first group to record “We Shall Overcome”)—fashioned the traditionally Ashkenazi score, working from the doleful Yiddish folk song “The Golden Peacock.”

  Perl built a deliberate progression into the move from cute folktale to moral parable to modern predicament, from storybook theater to stately presentation to realism. Creating that trajectory is likely the reason Perl presented the first act as a folktale; in material promoting the show and in the program, he never mentioned the Sholem-Aleichem version of the story, though he name-checks it in the script. That story sits in the center of the Butwins’ Old Country and, running some forty-five pages, is the longest in the volume. Titled “The Enchanted Tailor,” it enters darker territory than the playlet Perl presented. Sholem-Aleichem tells how the tailor (not a melamed, or teacher, in his rendering) is driven mad with confusion over the trick the innkeeper plays on him and hovers on the precipice of death; his neighbors become so incensed they prepare to wage battle against the town the goat came from. In writing the story relatively early in his career and putting it out as if derived from “an obscure chapbook” written some decades earlier, Sholem-Aleichem deliberately aimed to mimic the style of a folk narrative, and to push that form in a tragic direction.

  But that mood fit neither Perl’s thrust nor the already calcifying convictions about those Old Country Jews (and about Sholem-Aleichem): sentimentality can’t abide tragedy. So Perl leaned more heavily on a lighter version published in the 1948 anthology A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, edited by Nathan Ausubel (a comrade who had left the Communist Party by the time Perl’s play was presented). It was Ausubel who placed the story under the Chelm rubric, and Perl used it to open the play with some funny examples of the nincompoops reasoning their way through life’s vexing questions. (Why is the ocean salty? Because of the thousands of herrings who live there.) The Chelm approach to the gender-queer goat tale allowed Perl to begin the show with naiveté, then progress to passive acceptance, and finally to end with Jews who stand up and fight for justice. Da Silva’s “Production Notes” in the script were explicit: “If we have succeeded in moving from fantasy to mild criticism to statement in the three pieces, the audience will move with us.” The statement? The student’s father sums it up in act 3, once the boy has triumphed: “This is the dawn of a new day. No more pogroms, no ghettos, no quotas.… In this fine new world, there will be no Jews, no gentiles, no rich, no poor, no underdogs, no undercats.… You don’t have enough to eat, strike! The draft is taking your sons, strike! You don’t like the ghetto, strike!”

  The company’s political comrades loved this rousing finale, while some Jewish-identified fans who wrote to congratulate Perl and Da Silva singled out the “Bontche” scene as the one that moved them most. Critiques in the left and Jewish press split the same way. Both groups—sometimes overlapping but organizationally distinct—latched onto The World of Sholom Aleichem as their own champion. The show went on from New York to tour the country, traveling on both these tracks. When arranging a San Francisco engagement, for instance, Perl happily reported “very real interest on the part of the left (California Labor School, the Rosenberg Committee, etc.),” which had pledged to buy 2,000 seats, as well as from “a limited group on the right (Hadassah, the Oakland Jewish Community Center),” the latter of which also committed to 2,000 seats.

  While some on the left objected to the “continuous emphasis on the most negative virtues, Bontche’s silence and humility” (as a friend wrote to Perl to say, unwittingly echoing Peretz’s originally intended critique of passivity), the blacklisted screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. was able to appreciate “Bontche,” he told Da Silva, as he became “increasingly aware that simply presenting the culture of an oppressed people in a revealing and stimulating way constituted genuine progressive content.” Then, as the third act unfolded, Lardner realized that the parents in “The High School” are “true heroes of the irrepressible masses, and their development from one level of struggle to another makes for people’s theater at its best.”

  The publishers of Counterattack drew the same conclusion. The weekly four-page compendium of “Facts to Combat Communism,” published by the authors of Red Channels, devoted almost all of its September 25, 1953, issue to denouncing “the people who are cashing in on” The World of Sholom Aleichem. Aghast, the writers listed short bios of the company members such as might appear in a playbill, except that instead of past productions they’d appeared in, Counterattack detailed incriminating associations with “the Communist-controlled” United Electrical Workers Union, International Fur and Leather Workers Union, Jefferson School of Social Science, Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Civil Rights Congress, Committee for the Negro in the Arts, as well as the Party itself. Egregiously, the newsletter charged, the theater troupe had misappropriated Sholem-Aleichem: “He was anti-Communist.” Having thus abducted the Yiddish author, Rachel Productions was mendaciously trying “to give the impression that it is ‘Jewish theater’ and thus win the support of unsuspecting Jewish individuals and groups.” The proof of the ruse? That “not one person in the cast is a member of the Hebrew Actors Union”—never mind that this was a union only for those performing in Yiddish.

  Counterattack obsessively chased the play all over the country as it was presented over the next several years, in newly mounted productions in Chicago and Los Angeles and in a scaled-down version for six cast members who piled into a station wagon in the late fall of 1955 and drove to gigs in some dozens of cities, often performing for only a night or two in Jewish community centers, high school auditoriums, and, occasionally, well-appointed theaters. Perl boasted, with no small measure of amazement, that the touring company played forty-nine engagements in nine weeks. (The show was also mounted in London and in South Africa, where the director expected it to “stir up, however gently, the social consciences, the sensitivity of Jew and Gentile alike, to the cruelty of racial prejudice and persecution in our country.” With a cast led by Jacob Ben-Ami, it also played in Buenos Aires, where performances had to take a hiatus while a coup overthrew Juan Perón.) Counterattack urged readers to alert Jewish leaders in their communities of the subterfuge of the production, dramatized by Perl “in a manner designed to promote Moscow’s line.” Couldn’t audiences see that “Perl has twisted the entire theme of the story … to give it social and political protest preachment, to make it an appeal for strikes”?

  Despite its plodding approach to dramatic criticism, Counterattack was not wrong that Perl had “cooked up a closing speech by the father” that changed Sholem-Aleichem’s original ending to “The High School.” But its dire warnings had no impact on Jewish leaders. For all its liberties with Sholem-Aleichem, the play was no Trojan horse sneaking Communist propaganda into the Jewish community centers of America. First, Perl, a man who took his vodka straight-up and his Pall Malls without filters, was not given to subtlety: the writing was too blunt to be sneaky. And the messages Perl drew from the Yiddish material meshed well enough with the liberal sentiments of the communities eager to see the work. Even the Jewish Welfare Board, which had joined the panicky Cold War effort to dissociate Jews from any link to Communism by urging JCCs around the country not to allow radica
ls to speak in their facilities, helped to arrange a tour.

  If there was any Marxism behind the project, it was in Perl’s and Da Silva’s understanding the relationship among production, distribution, and consumption: they had not only tapped a market of second- and third-generation Jews eager for positive public portrayals of their heritage but also may have helped to invent it by creating a product the community hadn’t yet known it needed.

  Jewish fans and reviewers alike found relief from the tinselly Yinglish trifles holding out on Second Avenue and from the revues that had recently moved onto Broadway. Specifically drawing a contrast with The World of Sholom Aleichem, Jewish critics lashed out at “the lox and bagel rash” whose “humor smelt of dead herring,” at works that “slanted toward the lowest human denominator of vulgarity, banality, slime, and treacle” and gave stage to “Goebbels-like mockery” and “Streicher-like ‘escapades.’” The World portrayed “the finest and best in Jewish culture.” At the Barbizon, where it was “surprising to see European Jewish life so completely and directly understood in so antithetical an environment,” the long-maligned Jews could find “delicate sensitivity” and the achievement of “what had hitherto been termed unachievable—they have reclothed the old world and its culture in English garb without doing violence to its essential being.”

  With such Manichean options, some of these guardians of Jewish culture were even ready to abandon Yiddish: “Let’s have Jewish plays in English, and let us do it with the same artistic integrity as the marvelous troupe at the Barbizon is doing it.” Rabbis endorsed the play in synagogue newsletters and from their pulpits; even the Zionist Organization of America found in it “particular meaning to us as Zionists, deeply concerned with the perpetuation and advancement of positive Jewish cultural values.” When, in a lone plaint, Midge Decter wrote to the New York Times to defend the Yiddish classics against “that frou-frou” that made the original work “comfortable” instead of conveying its “beautiful tension or agony,” she was not the first intellectual—nor the last—trying to snatch Sholem-Aleichem back from the grubby adjustments of showbiz. (She wrote at greater length against the play in Commentary.) In a way, she was right: Perl cutesified “The Enchanted Tailor”; he sapped the tart irony from “The High School.” But high-minded as such defenses may be, they are also too high-handed. Some sixty years after its premiere, the play’s failings as dramatic art glare like floodlights, but in its moment it spoke to an exigent desire. Writing in Chicago’s English-language Jewish weekly the Sentinel, the longtime editor, J. I. Fishbein, summed things up best. “May this herald a new era in American Jewish life,” he exhorted, “wherein Jews will be able to be proud of their contributions rather than being ashamed of them.”

  The JCCs asked for more and Perl set out to oblige. First, he assembled a show he called Holiday, drawing primarily from Sholem-Aleichem’s Kasrilevke stories set on Purim, Hanukkah, Passover, and the Sabbath—some of which he’d adapted for The Eternal Light nearly a decade earlier. Perl had no intention of bringing the work to an Off-Broadway public but wrote only “with the limited Center audiences in mind”—the newly emerging nostalgia market eager to link its current aspirations to its past forbearance. The promotional materials for Holiday appealed brazenly to that sentiment. “These are people of the Old Country and the New World,” the advertising copy promised. “They are stories 5,000 years old and stories of tomorrow; this is a celebration of our parents, for ourselves and for our children. This is our HOLIDAY.” Apart from a little trouble with the time line (Sholem-Aleichem’s Kasrilevke did not exactly go back five millennia), Perl took some liberties in the playlets themselves. “I have violated a lot of so-called orthodox canon,” he admitted at the time, “but I think the performance should be a delight and so the beards can be ripped off the holidays and fun had by all.”

  Perl may have read the eagerness for more Sholem-Aleichem correctly, but the show found few takers. Perhaps the directors who booked such programs, beardless as the men among them may have been, found it a bit too loose with the observances of the Jewish calendar as it offered “all the holidays of the Jewish year—rolled into one great holiday.” But it provided the basis for a professional production in Los Angeles that Perl devised about a year later: Sholom Aleichem’s Old Country, as he called it, combined three stories, this time all of them originally by the eponymous author, and once again Mendele (played by Herschel Bernardi, who also directed) connected them with his narration. Two stories were pieces Perl had already dramatized—“The Purim Scandal” (part of Holiday) and “The Fiddle” (The Eternal Light)—and, most significant, the third was drawn from Tevye the Dairyman, the story of Tsaytl, the eldest daughter, who marries her beloved tailor instead of the rich butcher.

  Reviewers, drawn by the warm memory of The World of Sholom Aleichem, were kind in their dismissal—“Here are the beginnings, but only the beginnings, of something that could be of great value to the theater,” said one. They singled out the Tevye story as “the most substantial,” adding that its “rather rambling structure is almost completely redeemed by professionalism and charm.” That was encouragement enough. Perl adapted several more of the Tevye stories and within a few months announced the New York premiere of Tevya and His Daughters, slated to open in September 1957. Sholem-Aleichem’s dairyman was about to have his major English-language stage debut.

  By then, Da Silva and Perl had brought in two more producing partners for a much more ambitious endeavor, Banner Productions. They leased the 299-seat Carnegie Hall Playhouse with plans to create “a new and vital theatre center with diverse entertainment appealing to the wide variety of tastes.” More than five years into their banishment from broadcast media, they were casting their lot ever more ardently with the stage. The theater would operate every day of the week and nearly around the clock, with programming for children in the afternoon, a midnight cabaret on weekends, a Monday night work-in-progress staged reading series, and, at the center, a full production on a standard eight-shows-a-week schedule. As their premier offering, Banner Productions would proudly present a play whose hero, they announced, had been variously described: “he is Don Quixote (and Sancho Panza); he is Chaplin’s Tramp; he is Job with a sense of humor. He is the Eternal Jew, his shadow as long as the Jewish Exile, his laughter as warm as the sun. He is the obstinate, indestructible, individualist, Tevya the Unextinguishable.”

  Promoted as taking the “same care for music and costuming, for staging and design that made The World of Sholom Aleichem a memorable theater evening,” Tevya and His Daughters broke Off-Broadway records for advance ticket sales. Before the lights went up on Mike Kellin in the title role, appealing to God in an opening monologue, the show had taken in $28,000, well clearing the budgeted production costs of $19,644. Columbia Records had produced an LP version before opening, too—another first for Off-Broadway. Four years after Perl’s and Da Silva’s initial triumph, a Sholem-Aleichem sequel seemed like a sure bet.

  Once again Da Silva directed with a homey style, relying on music by Serge Hovey to underscore the action and simple scenery (a painted backdrop by the artist Jack Levine featured rustic thick-brush images of shtetl houses receding into the distance). Kellin’s partner in the role of Golde was Anna Vita Berger, and the two made a quaint, somewhat low-key pair. Berger was determined to avoid any shred of shrewishness, aiming for the hardscrabble practicality that contrasted with Tevye’s spiritual nature. As for Tevye, New York hadn’t seen him onstage since Maurice Schwartz had played him—in Yiddish—as an older, broken man held together and aloft by the wisdom and unyielding practice of Judaism. Now, for the first time in English, newly encountered by myriad audience members, Tevye was younger and lighter—warm, sweet, almost as easygoing as the all-accepting dad of the Eternal Light radio version a decade before.

  Da Silva coached the actors to avoid exaggeration in their Jewish characterizations: he explicitly wanted the “music” of Jewish inflection without any singsong shtick, that is
, the familiar, warm feeling of Jewishness with any traces of nasty old stereotypes washed away. Perl provided some occasional phrasing to help create the effect: he has Tevye saying, “Rich she’ll be” and “Fed she’ll be.” He gave Golde lines like, “My enemies should have such luck.” Drawing language from both the Butwin volume of Tevye stories and Maurice Samuel’s creative portrayal, Perl fashioned Tevye as a kindhearted naif who could be steered away from his hidebound beliefs by sound reasoning and appeals for justice. In each of the three stories he dramatized—Tevye’s rise from drayman to dairyman and the marriage tales of Tsaytl and Hodl—Perl paints Tevye as eager to make his daughters happy as he is receptive to their newfangled values. Often Perl secularizes Tevye’s constant quotations—sometimes they sound more like a rustic’s trite proverbs than a religious man’s inventive references to Scripture. (“A woman is like a melon. Who knows what’s inside?” “Work is noble, but money is more comfortable.”)

  In the episode focused on Hodel’s romance with the revolutionary Perchik, Perl’s version of the paterfamilias ends up resembling the protagonist of Bertolt Brecht’s early Leninist play The Mother (based on a Gorky story) in which a working-class parent learns to see her personal travails within the larger framework of mass political struggle. Perl doesn’t go nearly as far as Mikhoels did in his Soviet portrayal of Tevye, but he does nudge his Tevye toward revolutionary enlightenment. His guide is Perchik, who challenges Tevye’s fatalism—“this is the way God made the world”—with passionate speeches that need not embellish much on the rhetoric Sholem-Aleichem gave him. (However, Perl does co-opt Theodor Herzl’s famous phrase about the prospect of a Jewish state—“If you will it, it is no dream”—for Perchik’s promise of postczar paradise in Russia.) The difference is his Tevya’s response.