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

by Alisa Solomon

  Hisaya Morishige as Tevye in Tokyo: within a decade, Fiddler had played in two dozen countries.

  Nevertheless, the mild outcry in the mail revealed the rising stakes in some quarters of the Jewish community. And soon it wasn’t enough for the show to represent honorable Jews; it had to behave like them, too. To be a Jewish ambassador, Fiddler had to be a Jewish exemplar.

  Never was this expectation more blatant than in a brouhaha over the dismissal of a cast member in the fall of 1966. The actor in question was Ann Marisse, a seasoned though young performer who had replaced Joanna Merlin as Tzeitel in the late spring of 1965. (Merlin left the show when her pregnancy reached the point—four and a half months—where the costume shop couldn’t take out her wedding dress any further.) Prince found Marisse “strong and appealing” in her first performances. Taller than Tanya Everett and Julia Migenes, she commanded the space as the oldest sister and she sang well. She had taken over the part of Consuela in West Side Story and had racked up several other Broadway credits (including a role in the megaflop Cafe Crown). In Fiddler, she played for a year and a half without a glitch.

  Then, in September 1966, she missed a performance on Rosh Hashanah without advance notice—or so management said. The producers typically allowed actors to take a day off for the High Holidays if they made a request in advance. Marisse called in sick the afternoon of the holiday instead but claimed she had already alerted her understudy. When the stage manager balked at the flouting of procedure, she cried discrimination. That incensed Prince. “It makes me especially angry in that she didn’t even ask to miss those couple of performances,” he told Robbins. “I called Joanna Merlin, and she seems anxious to return to the company for a number of months. Goodbye, Ann Marisse.”

  She did not go quietly. “It is true that I am an actress and that you are the producer. I am in your employ and you pay my salary. Does this also imply that you have leased my dignity and my spirit?” she wrote to Prince, reminding him that her father was an Orthodox rabbi and that her husband was ordained, too. (Her husband threw in the tallis, though, for a career in Hollywood; some years later, he directed the slasher flick Graduation Day.) Marisse complained to Actors’ Equity, which affirmed that management acted within its prerogative, and threatened to go to the state’s Human Rights Commission, which has no record of having granted the complaint a hearing. When she took her story to the press, however, journalists couldn’t resist the apparent irony. As the New York Post put it, she was fired “of all things for not coming to work on the Jewish High Holy Days.”

  The issue of Fiddler’s observance of the High Holidays had come up the year before. It’s a ready-made controversy: the contest between shul and showbiz for the soul of an American Jew on Yom Kippur is a sturdy emblematic one, driving the plots of works going as far back as The Jazz Singer and the melodramas of the Yiddish theater. The New York Post walked right into the trope in 1965, when Leonard Lyons ran a brief item in his column noting that the show would go on Yom Kippur eve, despite some misgivings from Luther Adler, who had replaced Mostel as Tevye. Letters to Prince’s office protested that playing on the holiday was “a disgrace,” “an insult to all Jews everywhere,” and made “such a mockery of the traditions the show celebrates.” An executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis sent a series of telegrams with such assertions as: “Sholem Aleichem would turn in his grave were he to know that his beloved Tevya who was so close to God would be violating the holiest day of the year publicly.”

  Prince took care to reply, explaining that canceling the performance wouldn’t be fair to people who had purchased tickets more than six months in advance, particularly to those from out of town. “Next Tuesday evening 1500 people will leave the theatre with a warm and edifying impression of Jewish life,” he wrote to the cable-happy rabbi. Or, as he put it more pointedly in his letter to Lyons, “The Imperial is not a Temple; it’s a theatre, and Fiddler makes more friends for the Jews than Yom Kippur does.” Fiddler’s curtain went up on the evening of October 5, 1965, just as it did at every other Broadway show then on the boards, and at every show on the boards in the past, including those with Jews in their plots.

  A few days after the Lyons column that gave Prince “a potful of trouble,” the New York Times sports pages carried a wire story of scarcely a hundred words. Its headline: “Koufax Out Wednesday.” The superstar southpaw’s refusal to pitch the World Series opener for the Dodgers on Yom Kippur galvanized American Jews across the denominational spectrum. To the pitcher’s own surprise, he was suddenly elevated to a valorous Jewish status he had never intended when he reflexively put into his player’s contract some years earlier that he would never take the mound on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar (“comparable to Good Friday for Christians,” the Times helpfully pointed out).

  That Koufax wasn’t religiously observant—and probably didn’t even attend services on Yom Kippur—made the gesture all the more important in affirming the identities multitudes of midcentury American Jews had been forging. With dispersal from urban centers in the postwar period, affiliation with synagogues skyrocketed, increasing from 30 percent in 1930 to nearly 60 percent in 1960 and rising, even as religious practice declined. By the mid-1960s, a majority of American Jews were living in suburbs, where affiliating with a modern synagogue was the most concrete (and least onerous) way of asserting Jewishness: belonging to and supporting the multipurpose institution—often, as the saying at the time had it, “shuls with pools”—mattered more than ritual observance. Sanctuaries filled up on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur but drew a mere smattering of congregation members on the Sabbath and other holidays. Community leaders derided the growing legions of “twice-a-year Jews” and wrung their hands over the constant crisis of Jewish continuity: yes, all those suburban synagogues operated Hebrew schools where children learned the rudiments of the faith and prepared for bar and bat mitzvah, but without reinforcement in the home, without any lived experience of Judaism’s rites and rhythms, the rabbis and Jewish educators worried, what would being Jewish mean for them?

  Mass culture was providing some of the answer, though likely not the answer those community leaders were looking for. A real-life Jewish hero broadcast into living rooms across the country, Sandy Koufax proclaimed his Jewishness in a once-a-year observance that not only sufficed for much of the Jewish public but ratified them. Koufax’s photo went up on bulletin boards in those Hebrew schools all over America; his name was invoked in High Holiday pulpits. His refusal to play on Yom Kippur was the proudest moment in popular Jewish American culture since, well, the opening of Fiddler on the Roof.

  So a year later, when Ann Marisse’s cry of foul hit the papers and local TV news broadcasts, standing up for the couple of days still held sacred even in the most unobservant precincts was well enshrined as the sine qua non of the pintele yid. Still, the letters that swamped Prince’s office were shocking in how far they surpassed, in volume and vituperativeness, any previous gripes. If some writers couldn’t help betraying their love of the show amid their denunciation—a cantor from a Conservative synagogue in Minnesota threatened that “unless this matter is cleared, we will recommend to this congregation, consisting of 4,500 people, not to patronize your production of this marvelous presentation”—most went for the Jewish jugular. “Is this what tradition means to you?” one demanded. “I believe you have enough money now from Fiddler on the Roof TO BE ABLE TO ‘CONVERT,’” another inscribed, no doubt with caustic intent, on a Rosh Hashanah card. A man from the Bronx chastised: “Your ‘show must go on’ regardless.… Six million of our people also had a ‘show’ of their own when they marched into gas chambers.”

  These letters weren’t merely lodging complaints; they read like writs of excommunication, declaring Hal Prince and, by extension, the show desecrators of everything the community held sacred.

  And yet, much of the community—perhaps some of the complainers among them—also had come to hold Fiddler sacred. No boycotts materialize
d when the show, indeed, went on. There was no dent in ticket sales or enthusiasm. Ken Le Roy, who took over as the fiddler six weeks after the show opened and stayed in the role for seven years, said Fiddler was the only show he’d ever been in that prompted standing ovations eight times a week—and he’d been in the original productions of The Pajama Game, Brigadoon, Carousel, Oklahoma!, and West Side Story. By the time Fiddler broke the record for the longest-running Broadway show with its 3,225th performance on June 17, 1972, no pounding by the kosher police could diminish its power or the fullness with which Jews took possession of it. And no claims on it made by Jews could reduce its availability to Gentiles.

  Not everyone liked it—especially not Yiddishists, somehow fearful that, having “debased” the original Tevye stories, the show might supplant them. (If anything, Fiddler has expanded the audience for Sholem-Aleichem; a spate of his works were published in the mid- and late 1960s, capitalizing on the musical’s popularity.) Scholars also resented its depiction of “the cutest shtetl we never had,” as Irving Howe complained. Musicals always unfold in fake places—the stage itself, of course, but also settings that are mythic by nature. No one looks for documentary realism in the New York City of Guys and Dolls or West Side Story. But in the absence of a real-life reference point, Fiddler’s Anatevka took on a glossy veneer of historical veracity.

  This has been one of the burdens—and one of the gifts—that Fiddler has carried into the world and that has kept it in a state of constant contention. The show remains a platform on which Jews engage, work out, and argue over the significance and substance of their identity. It persists as a mode in which Gentiles and Jews alike encounter an image of Eastern European Jewish life. It endures as a story of generational conflict and cultural attenuation that fits just about everywhere.

  Fiddler on the Roof is an excellent show, and as it continues to be produced on professional, amateur, and school stages all around the world, that is often the perfectly good reason people choose to present it. But from its opening in 1964 until today, sometimes by design and often by accident, Fiddler takes on an inordinate cultural utility that no other musical sustains.

  When plans for foreign productions began, the creators worried all over again—needlessly, it turned out each time—whether audiences without warm ties to Jewish culture would connect with it. They authorized the first overseas version for the one place they figured would welcome it without complication. “I am enormously gratified that the first production of Fiddler on the Roof outside the United States is to take place in Israel,” Joe Stein wrote for the production’s program booklet, adding that it was “most logical that a musical based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem be first presented in Israel.” The logic was more complicated than he knew.

  PART III

  TEVYE’S TRAVELS

  CHAPTER 6

  THE OLD COUNTRY IN THE OLD-NEW LAND

  Dan Almagor had just completed his first year as a Ph.D. student at the University of California in Los Angeles in the summer of 1964 when he received an urgent call from back home in Tel Aviv. Giora Godik, Israel’s “Mr. Broadway,” was on the line. The flamboyant impresario was shaking up the Israeli theater and needed Almagor’s help. Despite being only sixteen years old, the state had a solid theater tradition that had begun with the earliest Zionist settlement, when Hebrew plays served as a tool for advancing the language, and it had quickly evolved into a professional artistic culture. By the 1960s, the country supported several full-scale repertory companies and a growing fringe movement. But not until Godik came along had it seen the outsize glamour and glitz of a high-budget musical. His first, My Fair Lady, had opened in early 1964 and had sent a charge through the country’s cultural scene, as Israel seemed to prove overnight that it was as capable as mighty New York of presenting top-notch, up-to-date shows with lavish production values. The country seemed to take as big and quick a leap in finesse and fashionableness as Eliza Doolittle herself. With My Fair Lady still running strong, Godik went looking for more. And he wanted Almagor to find it.

  At twenty-eight, Almagor was already an accomplished writer of songs, sketches, and plays—skills he’d refined in an entertainment troupe during his years of obligatory military service—and he had superb command of English. Godik had hired him and a colleague to translate My Fair Lady into Hebrew. In a language that was still so new in its modern form that it did not yet have a ripe slang and in a country too small for regional accents, they figured out how to create the quirks in Eliza’s speech that signal her status and drive the plot. (Following the recommendation of a linguistics scholar Almagor consulted, they relied on the grammatical errors and playful inventions of children.) Now that he was in the United States, Godik had a new job for him. “Go to New York and look for another show,” the producer told Almagor on the overseas call, promising to finance the trip. Almagor caught a flight as soon as he could and landed in a city with no hotel rooms: the 1964 World’s Fair was drawing tourists from all over the United States as well as from abroad.

  But apart from forcing him to sleep in a dingy men’s rooming house, the World’s Fair hardly registered on Almagor’s radar. Had he followed the tourists to the fairgrounds in Queens, he’d have been able to catch an extravaganza that would have astonished even Godik: the spectacle To Broadway with Love in the Texas Pavilion, featuring a cast of seventy-five in a panoramic history of America’s commercial stage—and with the songs by Bock and Harnick that had so incensed Jerry Robbins. And he might have caught wind of the months-long dispute about his country’s representation that had been raging in the press and in the courts. A mural and poem depicting the plight of a Palestinian refugee adorned a wall in the Jordanian Pavilion. Backers of the American-Israel Pavilion (Jewish philanthropies and communal organizations in the United States) sought to have it removed.

  The mural would not have shocked Almagor. He was a leftist with some sympathy for Palestinians—and also (not considered a contradiction, not yet anyway) the writer of some of Israel’s most popular patriotic songs. But none of that concerned him when he arrived in New York that August: his attention was trained on midtown. With Godik footing the bill, he went to a show every night and in the afternoons, too, on the days with matinees. Nothing seemed right for Israel. Entertaining as they were, How to Succeed in Business and Funny Girl exuded such American sensibilities that Almagor couldn’t recommend them. Oliver! was worse: it had a perceived (if not actual) Fagin problem (as the venerable Habima Theater learned when, in an effort to compete with Godik, they presented it in 1966, drawing more controversy than customers). Almagor decided to try A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He had heard about a “funny fat guy” in a major role whom everyone was calling a genius, so he bought a Wednesday matinee ticket. Even if he couldn’t deliver it to Godik as a great discovery, at least he’d have a good laugh. What luck, he thought, to score a seat in the third row.

  But when he took that seat at the Majestic Theater, Almagor saw that he could have bought the entire row. Where was everybody? An usher explained that Forum had been running more than two years and had been barely hanging on since Zero Mostel had left the cast several months earlier. And word was out that the producers had posted a closing notice. The Israeli slumped and waited, regretting that the afternoon would yield neither a prize for Godik nor the thrill of seeing a comic master at work. As he leafed through his program, a flyer advertising a show trying out in Washington and due in New York in a few weeks fell to the floor. “That’s where your fat man is now,” the usher told him, leaning over to pick it up. It was not the star’s name, though, but a line of smaller type that made Almagor do a double take: “Based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem.” The moment Forum’s curtain came down, Almagor made his way to Penn Station and boarded the next train for Washington. He went right to the National Theater and bought a ticket for the next performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

  The impulse—and the excitement that fired it—didn’t make any sense
to Almagor. By his own admission, he was part of the generation that “grew up to despise the sound of Yiddish and anything associated with it.” During the early years of nation building, the Old-New Land (as Herzl had dubbed the project of his Zionist dream) had little use for the Old Country, other than as a foil. In place of passivity, the rhetoric went, the new “muscle Jews” would take action. Instead of poring, crooked and bent, over ancient holy books in airless rooms, men—and women, too—would till the earth, standing tall and squinting into the sunlight. The imagery contrasting anemic Europe with Zionism’s virile ideal was as selective and spurious as the deployment of Vishniac photos had been in America. In Israel, rather than arouse sympathy, the Old World tropes triggered rejection. Diaspora—galut, in Hebrew’s emphatic iamb—was weak, docile, defenseless. “We shall not be like them,” Almagor remembers learning as a boy. “We will raise our heads and be tough and strong.” Even Holocaust survivors speaking Yiddish in public were aggressively shushed. “Speak Hebrew!” their new countrymen shouted, disgusted by the language they associated with Jewish victimhood. Like many in his generation, Almagor changed his name at age twenty-one to proclaim that he belonged to a new breed. Born Elblinger to parents who had immigrated in the 1920s from Lublin and Warsaw, he chose a moniker that may have followed the original patronymic’s cadence but that signified its opposite: in Hebrew, almagor means “fearless.” (He also dropped his “shameful” middle name, Shmuel.)