* * *
Except when it came to subject matter. The Pale was entirely foreign to the tall Episcopalian from the Midwest and, like a college thesis adviser, Robbins quickly sent her into a deep review of the literature. She was to read the Sholem-Aleichem stories, look at production shots of his works by the ARTEF, spend time in the archives at YIVO, and contact some experts who could show her historical photos—for starters. Robbins also expected her to watch films with him.
Aronson, too, was summoned to Robbins’s home for screenings of rented 16mm movies. Despite Aronson’s expertise on Chagall and Jewish modernism, the Kiev native knew as much about the shtetl as a New Yorker knows about Appalachia. (Rosenthal, too, knew close to nothing about Eastern European Jewish life at the turn of the twentieth century—her parents, Jews who had come from Romania in the 1880s, were both secular doctors. She, however, was excused from the research assignments, since lighting would not in itself represent the world of the play. And she was too busy with other productions.)
Along with Robbins and his assistant, Tommy Abbott, Aronson and Zipprodt gathered at Robbins’s home on East Seventy-fourth Street to watch obscure films meant to give them historical and, more important, visual information about the Pale in 1905. One, Ghetto Pillow, features a camera panning across Impressionist watercolors of the shtetl Balagoris, “deep in the woodlands and marshes of White Russia,” painted by Samuel Rothbort—scenes of townsfolk traipsing through deep mud in the rainy season, women bringing gifts of sugar to a new mother, men receiving back massages in the bathhouse, boys playing cards, women feather dusting before the Sabbath. The film takes its title from an image toward its end: women ticking and stuffing goose-feather pillows to hand down to daughters embarking on married life, as if Rothbort’s paintings were a new way of passing along an heirloom. (“Ghetto” was a peculiar but common translation of “shtetl” in English-language discourse; usage slowly shifted toward “shtetl” in the post–World War II years. The film itself is a telling example: made in 1961, it was reissued in 1989 under a changed title, Memories of the Shtetl.)
Rothbort had traveled through the shtetls and cities of White Russia as a boy soprano with touring cantors in the 1890s and later as a yeshiva student. (He arrived in the United States in 1904.) In his “memory paintings,” created in the 1930s and 1940s and exhibited beginning in the early 1960s, Rothbort depicts a diverse, if isolated, modernizing community: men both with long beards and with clean-shaven chins, families arranging marriage dowries and young men proposing, scenes of Yom Kippur lashes meted out in synagogue and scenes of American émigrés returning for visits. With dabs of brown, black, and bright color, masterfully highlighted with thick brushstrokes of white, the paintings showed the Tevye designers one wistful way of seeing a world in transition.
Ghetto Pillow’s score of symphonic music, cantorial prayers, and a Yiddish lullaby, along with narration in the detached, bemused voice of an ethnographic filmstrip, also go a long way toward lodging the movie within the post-Holocaust project of fond remembrance advanced by so many of the books on Robbins’s research syllabus. That’s why Robbins especially wanted the designers to see the other reel he rented, Skvoz Slezy (Through Tears—or, as it’s often called in English, Laughter through Tears), a pre-Holocaust feature film that might push them in a harsher direction. As a Soviet production made by the official All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration in 1928, the film joined a handful of works in Yiddish whose primary purpose was to depict the backwardness and impoverishment of Jewish life before the revolution gusted through, bringing, as the film needed only to imply, the light and abundance of emancipation in its wake. Based loosely on pieces of Sholem-Aleichem’s “Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son” and “The Enchanted Tailor” (the story that was tamed and folklorized in Arnold Perl’s World of Sholom Aleichem), it served Robbins’s agenda, too. “Don’t romanticize the characters,” he told Zipprodt. “We are not to see them through the misty nostalgia of a time past, but thru the every day hard struggle to keep alive and keep their beliefs.”
The Soviet film was certainly less generous toward those beliefs—in one scene a toddler makes a doll out of a prayer shawl and phylacteries, in another the local rabbi is depicted as out of touch with reality and dismissive of the local folk. One of the several main characters, the tailor of the original short story, falls sick from the innkeeper’s prank of changing a billy goat for his nanny goat because he remains fixed in a benighted religious mind-set and imagines that some demonic force must be at work. Little surprise that the film blames the innkeeper’s petit bourgeois contempt for the poor tailor and his ilk and emphasizes class conflict more generally, contrasting czarist officers’ lush life of tea service and gramophones with the shoeless, starving Jews they enjoy harassing.
Where Soviets depicted hapless, destitute folk stifled by czarist antisemitism, lack of access to land and livelihood, and their own superstitions, Robbins saw “the guts and toughness of the people” treading onward despite their hostile environment. The film helped him show the designers how the world of Tevye should be “a rural unsophisticated area … it is poverty stricken. Everyone just about ekes out an existence. The honey mists of time do not make life beautiful for them.”
The opening shot reveals a line of crooked houses with crumbling wooden shingles on their sloping, sagging roofs—a look that Aronson would capture with a fanciful overlay on his painted backdrop of a ring of shtetl homes. He knew his set would have to “combine elements of fantasy and reality”—elements, that is, drawn from both Chagall and Through Tears; the Soviet film was deliberately shot to look like a documentary. Robbins hired a professional photographer to take high-quality stills from the film for the designers to scrutinize. Aronson took dozens of them to his studio. He adapted their details—cubbylike shelves built into homes for storing clay pots, lopsided wooden fences, rough-hewn plank benches, zigzagging laundry lines—to ground Anatevka in the gritty reality Robbins demanded, while a swirling moon or somersaulting houses painted along the proscenium lofted it toward the mythic.
The movie offered models for costumes, too: the women’s printed blouses and mismatched skirts, the innkeeper’s rolled-up shirtsleeves under a woven vest, the tailor’s simpler vest buttoned up tight over his tallis katan with its stripes and fringes dangling from his waist and the tape measure draped over his shoulder. Archival research was not enough, however. Robbins also wanted his designers to see—and was eager to see himself—the way such clothing was worn and how customs were lived in the flesh. Lining up fieldwork in Orthodox and Hasidic communities was one of the first efforts he put in motion when he agreed to work on the show.
Since the early 1950s, Hasidic sects had been rebuilding their bases in Brooklyn after their centers had been decimated, and groups from Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were scattered throughout the borough. Non-Hasidic Orthodox communities had been in the area, of course, since the migrations of Sholem-Aleichem’s day. While together they made up less than 10 percent of American Jewry, which was filling the ranks of the Reform denomination as it was suburbanizing, they were consciously claiming themselves as America’s most “authentic” Jews. At its inception in the eighteenth century, Hasidism represented a radical challenge to rabbinic Judaism; now it asserted itself as the most conservative element in Jewish life, the keeper of the flame—whose imagistic torch Fiddler would help to carry. Over the following months, a woman named Dvora Lapson became the Tevye company’s guide into this closed world otherwise beyond their reach.
On Robbins’s instruction, Lapson took Zipprodt to observe people in Hasidic and Orthodox dress. They visited yeshivas, factories, and synagogues in Hasidic neighborhoods of Brooklyn and paid calls to residences of the elderly in Manhattan. Lapson showed the designer her collection of photographs and Eastern European Jewish art. The two watched throngs of Hasidim see off their rebbe as he departed for Israel on the Queen Elizabeth that November.
But most important, Lap
son brokered Robbins’s entrée into community celebrations so he could observe their dancing. A pioneer in Jewish dance, Lapson had studied at the Isadora Duncan School and with Doris Humphrey and Michel Fokine (whose work Robbins performed in his early years at the Ballet Theater) and had begun a career on the stage in 1929. Early on, she decided to dedicate herself to Jewish dance and set about studying, presenting, and teaching both religious and nascent Israeli folk forms. Before the war, she traveled to Poland, where she presented popular recitals and gained permission to study the dancing of the Bluzhever Rebbe and his followers (and she maintained a friendship with him when he emigrated to the United States after the war). In Israel in 1949, she forged connections with the Inbal Yemenite Dance Theater (which Robbins had championed after seeing their work on a trip to Israel in 1952) and with developers of national folk dance and became one of their greatest ambassadors in North America. Like Aronson and Robbins, she passed through the Yiddish Art Theater, with stints staging dances for Maurice Schwartz. Robbins caught up with her in the fall of 1963 through the Jewish Education Committee, where she was promoting the innovative idea of integrating dance into children’s school curriculums. Then in her midfifties and still carrying herself with the long-necked elegance of a woman trained in ballet, Lapson enthusiastically took on the job as “dance research consultant” to the world-renowned choreographer. She promptly supplied copies of her booklets and articles—“Folk Dances for the Jewish Festival,” “Dances of the Jewish People,” and “Jewish Dances of the Year Round”—inscribed to him “with best wishes and with devotion.”
Robbins’s timing in locating her couldn’t have been better. The autumn festival of Simkhes Toyre—commemorating the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah—was coming up in early October and Lapson knew a shtiebl, or small community prayer house, where this typically ecstatic holiday would be celebrated with special abandon. When the night arrived, Robbins headed across town to pick up his guide at her home on West Seventy-third Street. His assistant reminded him to bring yarmulkes. Bock, Harnick, and Stein joined them, and they set out for the wild wards of Hasidic Brooklyn—specifically to the blocks where a Hungarian sect resided in Borough Park. Dozens of men were crammed into the tiny shtiebl, singing, clapping, knocking back schnapps after schnapps after schnapps. Their dancing came as a revelation: the secular showmen expected gentle folk forms of all hold hands and mosey one way round a circle and then the other; instead, they felt the room shake from floor stomping, body twisting, athletic flinging, and writhing. This was a holiday less for noshing than for moshing. The next day, Robbins sent Lapson a big bouquet of flowers.
Weddings, as private affairs, would be harder to crash, but Lapson knew the way in: contact the kosher caterer. A little more than a week after Simkhes Toyre, she met with a Mr. Tennenbaum of Broadway Central Hotel Caterers and explained her interest in attending upcoming events under his supervision. What exactly she told him is lost to history, but she doesn’t seem to have mentioned anything about a Broadway musical. When she followed up with a note, she emphasized her own dance scholarship and knowledge of Hebrew and made sure to drop some venerable names: “I am a friend of the Rabbinical families Halberstam, Unger and Spiro and have attended their family simchas [celebrations] in the past.” Finally, she assured Mr. Tennenbaum that she was familiar with the rules of dress for these occasions and would, “of course, be escorted by a male member of my family because of the lateness of these events.” That escort would be none other than Jerry Robbins.
They scored an invitation for the very next night for a wedding at the Riverside Plaza Hotel, at the time a venue with opulent ballrooms on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Once again, the dancing enthralled Robbins with its “virile ferocity,” as he came to describe it. As the weeks and then the months of research and preproduction meetings wore on, Lapson also drew on her rabbinical connections and began calling Robbins regularly to tell him when weddings would be open to him and which ones would feature a lot of dancing, which would allow men and women to dance together, which would be particularly huge, involving the marriage of children of prominent families, which would have balconies from which people could observe, and when holidays would prevent weddings for a while.
When Robbins planned to attend, as he often did through the fall of 1963, she’d call with reminders: it will begin promptly at 9:00, so pick her up at 8:15; you can bring two people this time; don’t forget change for the beggars. For a fee of $500—plus reimbursement of $37.50 that covered cab fare, tips at weddings, and two dozen yarmulkes—Lapson became Robbins’s regular date for the devout. Time and again, they saw the bride and groom lifted up in chairs by the cavorting guests and, often, a flimsy cord hastily stretched between stanchions instantly acquire the force of a high concrete barrier, separating women from men.
But every time, it was the men’s dancing that amazed Robbins. “My great wonder, watching the dancers, was how people weren’t hurt & bruised as bodies were flung centrifugally from out-of-control circles,” Robbins later marveled in handwritten notes for a letter. “Hats flew off, chairs overturned—but the rough dominant force that was released by all this kinetic energy was overpowering—for in spite of each man improvising as he felt—in spite of primitive variations of the basic rhythm—two things held them together. Their constant hand grip—when if broken by the external momentum of the dance, or by another body flinging itself into the dancer, was always regained, reunited. And secondly, the deep & powerful assertion—a strength I never knew—a dedication to a rite, claiming survival & joy, procreation & celebration. An explosive foot thrust to the floor that shook the room that said Yes I am here, & I celebrate the continuity of my existence.”
It was as if the shame Robbins had long felt about “weak” Jewish (and gay) masculinity was pulverized by the whirling frenzy of these homosocial dances, then kicked up and blown away like old, dry dust. This dancing provided the proof positive, and further inspiration, for his demand that the show express Jewish robustness and resilience—the strength that not only he “never knew” but that had been obscured in popular representations for decades.
He was intrigued, too, by a man with a rusty beard who seemed to be a regular at these weddings, entertaining the guests by weaving among them with a particular trick. Lapson had seen such antics during her research in Europe and mentioned them in an article for the International Folk Music Journal: he was performing a flashen-tantz, a caper in which “the man balances a bottle on his head as he dances, perhaps to prove himself sober.” Robbins referred to him as “Mr. Redbeard,” but it didn’t take long for Lapson to identify him and track him down. And more: this Rabbi Ackerman from Borough Park would be glad to meet with Robbins.
Yet Robbins said little about how he would use dance in the show. All fall, he was meeting daily with, or at least taking calls from, the writers or designers or producer, or all of the above, to discuss the script, the music, the costumes and set, the budget. The only clue that he expected dance to play a significant role in the show was his insistence, when he agreed to take the job, on an atypically long rehearsal period of eight weeks before hitting the road for tryouts—four for his work as choreographer, four for the staging of the book.
But rehearsals were still more than half a year away, and in those months when his “intense research on the Sholem Aleichem musical” was “taking most of my time,” as he told a friend (by way of apologizing for not getting to the scripts she’d sent him), he was putting the authors through their paces. He tasked them, too, with conducting deeper, more personal research. Stein felt his own family background exempted him from such homework, but he did the reading. (An exchange Stein adapted for Perchik and Tevye—“Money is the world’s curse.” “May God smite me with it!”—comes not out of the Butwin translation of the stories but from Maurice Samuel.)
Beyond the booklist, Harnick dove in. He started questioning his own relatives about a background he had never heard about before. “Y
ou want some Jewish customs for your new play?” Harnick’s mother wrote in reply. “Here goes.” His aunt Choni also sent letters detailing what she recalled from her childhood. Between them, they told how their mother (Harnick’s grandmother) spent two hours chopping gefilte fish in a wooden bowl for Shabbos, how she covered her head and circled her hands to light the Friday night candles, how a “Shabbos goy”—a Gentile neighbor—came each Saturday morning to light a fire in the kitchen and parlor stoves so the family would be spared breaking the religious commandment to refrain from all work. The earthenware pot with a philodendron climbing out of it on Harnick’s mother’s patio in 1963 had once been used by his grandmother every week for making the long-simmering Sabbath stew called cholent, which cooked overnight in an oven at the corner bakery; the children fetched it home at lunchtime on Saturdays, when their grandfather returned from shul. Through these revelations and the show’s development, Harnick began to “feel more Jewish.” As the work went on, “as a writer and as a person, my life came together,” he said. “I knew who I was and who Sholem-Aleichem’s people were, and where our lives touched.”
Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof Page 16